So DRM doesn't stop piracy... what do you think developers should do instead?

[Baby Tea]

Charge a reasonable price for a reasonable product.

£40 for a 4 hour game seriously ? Fuck that noise.

Well, consider that you play 4 hours on the single player (Less then that for me, really, unless we count Spec-OPS).
Then another 60 or more on the multiplayer.
So, really, you've got a 65+ hour game for £40.

Not everyone is into multiplayer, that's true, but I would say those are in the minority.The majority of people buying a game like MW2 are going to play it online, and that greatly increases the game's length of play.

 

[Xaryn Mar]

They should drop DRM altogether. All it does is hurt the customer AND the company (it is expensive to make and doesn't work).

Perhaps even lower the prices a bit.

 

[DominicxD]

Make good quality products that make people want to contribute to the cause.

I pirated Mass Effect and then bought Mass Effect 2, so it got to work on someone else too.

 

[ThreeKneeNick]

Developers or publishers need to invest a little into figuring out WHY people pirate, do some research about it, and then when they know the reasons, they can act on that. So instead of dumping money into the bottomless pits known as SecuROM and the like, they should use it to better understand the problem.

If you figure out what portion of pirates do so because they can't afford to pay full price, maybe you could figure out an alternative way for them to pay. And if you figure out what portion of pirates do so out of sheer spite, and what is the cause of this spite, maybe you can react to that too. If you conclude it's worth it.

Or just go the evil way and do what Shamus Young wrote about: clicky [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/experienced-points/7467-Experienced-Points-Impossible-to-beat-DRM]. Sure, players would be outraged, but the dust would eventually settle and we will accept it and move on. Surely, if Blizzard did such a thing, no one would even mind. I've already read that they plan on making Starcraft 2 use a similar approach to Ubi's 'must be online' thing. I'm positive no one would dare say a thing about it.

 

[Maxman3002]

Snip

Actually...

While I also think Project $10 is a neat idea, the fact of the matter is that DLC for P$10 can also be pirated. Case in point, I was unsure if I wanted to get Return to Ostagar for Dragon Age, so I looked it up, and lo and behold it was available for download. I did buy it later on, but the DLC is still there to be pirated.

Project $10 is more a shot at the Used Games Market, just like DRM. Neither does much to reduce Piracy.

But if they made the Downloadable content harder to pirate by using account systems like steam it will put off a lot of the pirates simply due to ease. A lot of people pirate games and dont have a massive idea about how to do more than download and run off a virtual cd-rom drive. Putting DRM onto it will hurt consumers less as their actual game will work and will encorage even 1% of the pirates to at least buy the registration code, this way they can still get a little money from it.

To do this they really need to bring back the 2nd hand market to PC gaming. It might not make them any money but it will at least turn some pirates into 2nd hand gamers

 

[Orcus The Ultimate]

Nothing, nobody can stop piracy it's like if you wanted to eliminate Lobby's that corrupt the Government systems around the world... it's just not very liable.

 

[Weaver]

Maybe make games that are longer than 5 hours, that helps.
Like Demon's Souls, I could have payed $150 for that and I'd still have gotten my moneys worth and then some.

 

[Petromir]

Just not bother with the DRM.

If it doesn't work, it should be discarded. With the money saved from not pirate-proofing, the publishers can give it to the devs to make the game better or longer.

Plus Joe Public won't have to put up with all this DRM gubbins which slows down their PCs.

They can't be seen to do nothing. Most DRM is a token effort to keep bakers happy. THey have to keep producing new systems (backer arent completely stupid) to show that they are continuing to fight back.

Be that as it may, DRM is getting more and more intrusive to the paying majority of gamers and it's getting to the point where the pirates will be seen as the lesser evil in comparison to the publishers and stop buying legitimate games.

The pirates can NEVER be defeated no matter what measure are taken. It's just something that the publishers are going to have to live with.

DRM goes in cycles, for every new one that annoys people, another one has a similar effect on the bakers confidence, without pissing people off.

People only tend to remember the systems that annoy them (hence the common but false belief that game DRM only exists on the PC).

Publishers and developers know they are unlikely to ever beat the pirates, they arent really trying to (no matter what they say, as admitting this would lose their finantial backers). They do have a tendancy to miss judge how much people will put up with, and how much something may affct someones experience.

That said I've yet to find a DRM system thats caused me half as much faf and effort per game as alot of DOS games did, or the tranistions to win 95, or to XP ever did.

Most games these days pratically install themselves comapred to Dos days, set themselves up, and even tell you your current drivers are out of date and may not work. In the DOS days half the games required you to make a disk to boot your PC into a state where you could even begin to do any of that, pre universal internet unless you had a mate to do it for you, or with an almost identical set up to you yo had to do that yourslef.

 

[Onyx Oblivion]

I am so depressed that when I google a game name, like Morrowind, one of the search suggestions is "Morrowind torrent". Right up there with mods, cheats, wiki, walkthrough, and the other major suggestions.

 

[Peta Michalek]

Making demos would certainly go a long way.

I mean if I cannot try out your product in any way without stealing it first, you're doing it wrong.

 

[Caliostro]

NOTHING.

Instead of focusing on trying to fuck over the pirates, and inevitably hitting your legitimate customers with the fallout, give your legit customers incentives to hold on to the legit game. Things like including the soundtrack, appealing box art and booklets, bonuses for registered games, free DLC... etc. It's all good.

At the end of the day, no matter how horrible and complex your DRM is, it's a matter of time until it is reverse engineered and broken, and when that happens it usually turns out that the legit customers are paying money to have "additional malaware" and inconveniences that the people downloading it for free don't have to put up with. Then why pay?

 

[erbkaiser]

The Stardock/Valve method: more benefits for legit customers.
Accept the fact that many people will steal it, but make the experience for people who buy it better by giving them multiplayer, extra content, etc.. Do this by checking the 'CD key' or by tying it to an Impulse/Steam account. Just do not tie it to a physical medium since this pisses people off, or add a SecuROM or Ubisoft DRM that makes the game impossible to play.

Won't be 100% proof, but no pirate will ever become a customer anyway. So you can either pull a Ubisoft and harshly punish those people that actually paid for it, or reward the people who actually earn you money.

 

[Kouen]

How about invest the money that would have gone to DRM into the Creativity Department so we can stop rolling out like Final Fantasy 21, Mario party 10, Street Fighter 5 EX + Alpha MC Squared Turbo ect ect. (Yea I think some lines of games have gotten way outta hand!)

Something new and fresh and of such a quality that maybe people feel compelled to buy it

 

[Peta Michalek]

The Stardock/Valve method: more benefits for legit customers.

How is having to run third-party software in the background(which requires internet connection no less) a benefit for the legit customer?

At least SecuROM and StarForce have enough decency to run "hidden".

 

[Srdjan]

They should lower prices few times, remove all protection, and respect the gamers. And they should make decent games not some half-finished crap. They would earn respect by showing it and many people would buy their games instead or after pirating it.

 

[Petromir]

The Stardock/Valve method: more benefits for legit customers.

How is having to run third-party software in the background(which requires internet connection no less) a benefit for the legit customer?

At least SecuROM and StarForce have enough decency to run "hidden".

Um steam doesnt require a net connection for you to play. And if you're losing performance to steam running, then your running damn close to the requirements.

Many games have 3rd part parts in them.

 

[erbkaiser]

The Stardock/Valve method: more benefits for legit customers.

How is having to run third-party software in the background(which requires internet connection no less) a benefit for the legit customer?

At least SecuROM and StarForce have enough decency to run "hidden".

Neither Steam nor Impulse need a net connection to play offline games.
Impulse doesn't even need to be running to play any game on it, it is only needed to update and install in the first place.

 

[Loves2spooge]

They should stop adding DRM, and trust that if they make a good game, people will be willing to pay for it in order to support them and the industry.

 

[brenflood]

Even Ubisoft's DRM for Assassin's Creed 2 has been bypassed.
While it may be possible to create some heinous DRM that prevent piracy, that often also prevents people from pirating the game, or with AC2 encourages legit owners to crack the game if their internet connection is intermittent.

Instead of making it worse for people to buy the game, give the buyers something to make it worthwhile to own the game. Perhaps the best example would be great multiplayer support through dedicated servers. Left 4 Dead and Call of Duty 4 have great online support. While anyone can pirate the single player game and possibly play it in a VPN or other sort of private server, but they miss the full experience. Another incentive to buy a game like L4D is all the impressive user created content that you can get through the Steam community.

A highly annoying example of DRM was EA's Spore. The game had it's own network of user created content that made having a legit version of the game well worth having, but they still included DRM that limited your installs. This was completely unnecessary. As far as I know, the Spore network was never cracked, but the game itself was cracked and leaked before release.

 

[8-Bit Grin]

Don't stop the thieves. I like to pirate *some* games, usually old.
If I wanna play some Duke Nukem 3D, I will goddammit!
-F