The Impossible DRM

[KDR_11k]

The very fact that some people still buy games instead of tapping into this supposedly mainstream piracy pool rather clearly tells you that the protections do have a deterent effect, although limited.
An industry with no protection at all would likely be an industry with no game sales.
Even the last die hard buyers would know soon or later that "everybody" gets their game for free and it's just as easy as saying hello.
This is not the reality though.

The data does not support that claim. (PC) Games that were sold without any copy protection still had the same piracy rates as those sold with it (and yes, they sold). While I'm sure the hassle of modifying a console is a major deterrent it's not the only reason people buy games and removing it does not instantly zero your sales. There's another deterrent, namely the law that tends to affect most people's behaviour.

 

[raankh]

" ... an effort to punish people who aren't your customers ..."

This is really on the mark. Pirates aren't customers, although distributors seem to consider them non-paying customers, but customers all the same. They even go so far as to count pirated copies as lost revenue, as I'm sure you all know. Just ridiculous. They should focus on increasing their real customer-base instead, since that's where the money is, and anyone saying "but, but, but as long as you can get it for free nobody's gonna pay for it" needs to take a power tool to their skull to release the pressure. There's been some such remarks in this thread already. Get real people, look at the available evidence to the contrary.

 

[Anton P. Nym]

anyone saying "but, but, but as long as you can get it for free nobody's gonna pay for it" needs to take a power tool to their skull to release the pressure. There's been some such remarks in this thread already. Get real people, look at the available evidence to the contrary.

And yet how do you account for the evidence, as presented in this thread, that day-one piracy measurably reduces sales?

I do think that current DRM schemes are vastly more troublesome than they're worth, but publishers aren't idiots reacting to phantoms. And I do think that the threat of piracy and the success of Steam/XBLA/PSN/WiiWare is going to drive publishers to direct digital release more and more... which'll gimp the used game market even further, come to think of it.

-- Steve

 

[Arbre]

The very fact that some people still buy games instead of tapping into this supposedly mainstream piracy pool rather clearly tells you that the protections do have a deterent effect, although limited.
An industry with no protection at all would likely be an industry with no game sales.
Even the last die hard buyers would know soon or later that "everybody" gets their game for free and it's just as easy as saying hello.
This is not the reality though.

The data does not support that claim. (PC) Games that were sold without any copy protection still had the same piracy rates as those sold with it (and yes, they sold). While I'm sure the hassle of modifying a console is a major deterrent it's not the only reason people buy games and removing it does not instantly zero your sales. There's another deterrent, namely the law that tends to affect most people's behaviour.

I spoke of consoles. PC are not proprietary machines, and generally, even if numbers could be inflated, the piracy on PC is considered greater.
But the fact that games have to be installed already makes your PC customer a person more inclined to be aware of the technical side of gaming, compared to a random console owner of late.
Last time, I had to explain to a man how to pirate games on PC. What would appear to be fairly simple to you and me was just too complicated for him, yet he's certainly not an idiot, but the process of get the pirated game and installing it with the crack and else clearly put him off.
Which, perhaps unfortunately, makes me think this is the kind of people who'll gladly go for systems like OnLive, or more to a console which can mix PC gaming.

 

[Arbre]

Reminds me of the Spyro article at GamaSutra. In it, the people at Insomniac learned from the Spyro 2 issues (it being pirated the day it came out, rendering the sales figures of the game to plummet severely). For Spyro 3, they made it in such a way that the copy-protection is very hard to crack. It took hackers two months to fully crack the game (according to them, these two months after game's release is the most important. The hackers ended up thanking them for putting up such a challenge.

The full article can be read here [http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011017/dodd_01.htm].

Moral of the story, you can't stop pirates, so it would be better to be able to delay them just a bit.

Exactly, that's the point of the DRM. Delay the piracy as far as possible to "force" sales.

 

[brewbeard]

Publishers know DRM doesn't stop pirates from pirating stuff. They keep using it because it gets non-pirates to buy the same thing multiple times.

 

[4RT1LL3RY]

DRM has gotten ridiculous. It is so bad that after buying a game legally, it is less painful to then download a cracked version that is less painful then what I paid for. Take for instance the game FEAR. I own the game legally, my computer has two REAL disc drives, it complains about this and thinks I'm running a drive emulator. I have to download cracked exe's so it hurts less. I do not condone piracy, I buy games. After I own a game I should be able to play it without a rootkit or performace draining piece of software.

DRM should be all about stopping the initial cracking of a game. The longer it takes the better it will sell if the DRM is not ridiculous. What happened to the generic insert serial key for the game, and the CD good to go? DRM is what is killing the PC gaming market, high speed internet is allowing piracy to flourish. Now that everything is easily available there is no stopping it. I really don't want to have to use a special USB dongle with there special cypher on it like I have to do with other types of software. As long as the game runs on hardware its not possible to stop.

This article is completely correct, as long as you have to run a game to play it, it can be cracked. No amount of DRM can ever prevent that. You control your computer, programs get the contents of your memory easily. Instead of trying to just stop pirates give people more for their purchase. My computer is mine, no company has the right to install software I don't approve of on it regardless of end user licence agreements, even the FTC [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/ftc-well-come-calling-about-deceptive-drm.ars] agrees with this.

 

[loud_g]

I really don't see the closed systems of x-box, playstation, etc as being the great bastion of piracy free gaming.

If it so happens that these corporate execs kill off PC gaming, there will just be a lot of pirates with free time on their hands. So what will they do? They'll set about to tackle the console games. Right now PC games are easier because the PC is an "open" system.

However, I do not think for an instant that a "closed" system like a console will keep people out if they REALLY want to. Reverse engineering the hardware, creating emulators, etc. These things have all happened before, and in the absence of PC games they would just happen MORE often.

There have beet bootleg copies of media ever since there has been media. Fake paintings, bootleg tapes and CDs, Pirated games, etc. With digital media it is just easier.

Pirating is not going to go away. I have chosen not to pirate stuff, even though it would be really cheep and I could listen to, watch, or play whatever I wanted. There is no way to force everyone to make that decision though...unfortunately.

 

[SirCannonFodder]

I seem to recall reading an article (possibly on this site) about how one or more of Stardock's games (or another game that had no DRM) were proportionately pirated less than some big-budget title that had DRM and copy protection up the wazoo, but I'm having trouble finding it. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

On a side note, I think the most effective anti-piracy technique I can think of is from the old games where you had to look up words in the manual. Yeah, you could download the manual (if you could find one with page numbers), or a list of codes, but you couldn't remove it without taking the game code apart. If the game is never dismantled, it's just as frustrating (or more if you don't have the codes printed out) for pirates as it is for the customer.

Why would anyone bother removing it from the game when it's so easily bypassed that you might as well not have bothered with it?

You lot all whinge about DRM, but I bet many of you have pirated games.

It is hypocritical of you, and just reinforces the fact that new ways to stop pirates need to be found. It is illegal, you are hurting peoples livelihoods, and you should be prosecuted.

Stop bitching about DRM, and stop being part of the problem.

Actually, the only games I ever download are ones that have been out of print for years, since any money I spent on getting a second-hand copy wouldn't go to the developers anyway. Besides that, I only ever buy my games.

Anyway, I don't have that much to add to the discussion, pretty much all my points have been made already.

 

[Jursa]

This article was brilliant and ooo-soo-true. Kudos to you.

 

[Syntax Error]

Reminds me of the Spyro article at GamaSutra. In it, the people at Insomniac learned from the Spyro 2 issues (it being pirated the day it came out, rendering the sales figures of the game to plummet severely). For Spyro 3, they made it in such a way that the copy-protection is very hard to crack. It took hackers two months to fully crack the game (according to them, these two months after game's release is the most important. The hackers ended up thanking them for putting up such a challenge.

The full article can be read here [http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011017/dodd_01.htm].

Moral of the story, you can't stop pirates, so it would be better to be able to delay them just a bit.

Exactly, that's the point of the DRM. Delay the piracy as far as possible to "force" sales.

And, if you read the article, you'll see that the thing they used was very non-intrusive. They just made the game like a multi-layered, lock puzzle. Fail one lock, the game can no longer be copied. And it fiendishly removed items necessary for progress so as to give some people the impression that they have cracked the game.

 

[DaveMc]

I think it's safe to suppose that game publishers, like most business people, measure success or failure in terms of dollars. They don't care what your reasoning is, or your stance on intellectual property, they care how many of you pay money for their game. So the way to convince them to drop DRM is simple: show them that actual dollars will flow, in equal or greater amounts, to DRM-free games as to DRM-laden games. This is already happening with the Stardock games (mod their recent odd announcement about some sort of in-house DRM thingy called GOO), so that's a useful example people can point to when arguing with the bottom-line types who view games solely as generators of dollars: "Look, those guys didn't use SecuROM, and they sold plenty of copies."

My point is, this line of argument will only work if people actually *do* buy games. If you work yourself into a righteous frenzy and refuse to *ever* buy a game, you're guaranteeing the death of your hobby on the PC. Publishers aren't going to accept a deal where they spend millions of dollars to develop a game, and nobody pays them for it. So vote with your dollars: if you like a particular kind of game, *buy* it. I'm not saying that you should go to jail if you don't, I'm just saying that if this doesn't happen, big-budget games will exist only for consoles. (Indie and open-source projects will continue to exist on the PC, their natural home, but honestly, you're not going to get the same type of games out of that sort of environment: it's currently just too hard for non-professionals to develop big, graphics-intensive games. Some people are fine with that. If you're not, you should really consider voting with your dollars.)

 

[Bete_noir]

I really think people should practice better moral fiber and not pirate, but hell I'm an optimist.

On the other hand, I'm wondering how my people here actually knows what obfuscation means without looking it up.

 

[JHaakma]

We used to have a gaming system where copying was nearly impossible- cartridge gaming. Then of course emulators came around and every cartridge using console can be played on the computer.

 

[bkd69]

My point is, this line of argument will only work if people actually *do* buy games. If you work yourself into a righteous frenzy and refuse to *ever* buy a game, you're guaranteeing the death of your hobby on the PC.

That's just it, though. In the entire thirty year history of the computer gaming industry, nobody has ever *had* to pay money for a game (except for titles that were too obscure or too crappy to crack and share). In spite of that, people have paid money for games, even though, strictly speaking, it was most likely optional on their part. Those who did pay money for their games were either too technically inept to copy from their friends, were too antisocial to have friends adept enough to make copies for them, or were honest, upstanding citizens, doing the right thing just because.

And this is how publishers reward their paying customers?

The first answer is the Bard Wardell answer. You can't base your development budget on Imaginary Pirate Revenue, you can only base it on honest and realistic sales projections. Don't spend more to develop than you're going to earn back in actual sales.

The second answer, and something I hadn't realized until I read this interview ( http://www.offworld.com/2009/04/ragdoll-metaphysics-introversi.html ) with Chris Delay of Introversion Software, is that discouraging piracy for massively multiplayer games is counterproductive. The (100-x)% of your players who are honest upstanding citizens who have paid for your game, will have a far better experience with a bigger player base to draw from than a smaller player base (though this obviously doesn't apply to non-massive online games...more on this in another thread), so you prerelease your own game, in a disadvantaged form, ie, artificial lag, crippled items, etc, so that everybody can still play, but paying customers are at an advantage (see also: free to play).

 

[Taerdin]

A disclaimer: I'm talking about single-player PC games here. In an MMO, what you're really paying for is the data streaming off the server, and it's easy to protect that with a login.

So just do the same thing with single player games as well. I feel like this is what Steam is moving towards as a matter of fact, and if it became widespread it could solve things maybe.

Impossible? I don't know if I buy that (pun not intended)

 

[Miral]

And yet how do you account for the evidence, as presented in this thread, that day-one piracy measurably reduces sales?

Can you please point to this supposed evidence? All I can see is hearsay without any real proof.

I do think that current DRM schemes are vastly more troublesome than they're worth, but publishers aren't idiots reacting to phantoms.

Yes. Yes they are.

 

[Banaticus]

Some people make the response that, since if a company doesn't take judicious steps to protect itself, if it doesn't put in some kind of DRM, maybe it "wanted" its game pirated and won't be able to sue for damages? A load of crock, in my humble opinion, but but some people believe it.

 

[Natefil]

Loved this article. First time I've read anything by you...will read more.

 

[starstriker1]

If I recall correctly, the intent of DRM is NOT to stop piracy. As you point out, that's an impossibility, and most sane people recognize that. The intent is instead to DELAY pirated copies from becoming available, because nothing hurts a game more than day 0 (or earlier!) piracy. In that respect, DRM would appear to at least have a fair shake of doing the job: eventually, yes, someone will crack it, but if you can delay that even a week that will make a huge impact on your bottom line. I'm not saying I'm a fan of it, I'd much rather developers focused on making their products "better than free" by adding intangible value to it (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html is a good article on that subject), but it's not necessarily an act of futility.

Now, I don't have any numbers with me, so it could still well be cost-ineffective, but it does change the nature of the numbers game somewhat.