Andy Chalk, that was a great article. Thank you for saying everything I've felt about this entire DRM business for years.
DRM may not stop pirates, but the developers and publishers will use it anyway, even if only to say that they are trying to increase sales. They don't care if it pisses off their customers, as long as their customers keep paying. That's where we have to take a stand and say, "We won't pay for broken games."
I'll be the first to admit that I'm guilty of this. I bought Age of Conan, knowing full well that I could never resell it. Sure enough, three days in, I hated it, and I had no recourse: I had just wasted $60 of my hard earned money. I've done the same with Bad Company 2, which I've barely been able to play for more than an hour at a time without servers crashing. It's hard to say no to a game when you are honestly looking forward to it. I even tried Spore, despite the DRM fiasco, because I just had to know what it was like. The desire to experience something new, and the social aspect of having played the popular games can be overwhelming. It's hard not to buy a game that you are interested in, despite the DRM.
But we have to say no. As long as we pay for these games, we are sending the message that we will pay no matter how obtrusive the DRM is. Maybe we haven't crossed the threshold yet where people start to realize how detrimental this trend is, but we're certainly starting to see now. Until we put our money where our mouth is, the developers and publishers have no reason to stop.
What can we do? We can make our point clear. Every time a game comes out with obtrusive DRM, send a letter to the developer and the publisher. State explicitly that you would have purchased the game, but refuse to if it comes with DRM. And stay true to your word: do not purchase it. This is what makes a difference to them: they want to believe DRM leads to more sales, not fewer. If they receive 100,000 letters and their sales are poor, they will hear the message loud and clear, and everybody from the lowest level to the shareholders at the top will be clamoring to remove the DRM. It just makes good business sense.
We may not be able to stop everybody from buying these games, but we can certainly make our point clear. Spore was a hugely anticipated game, but from Amazon to the bottom line, the message was clear, and we already saw results: DRM schemes since then were generally more lenient. But that's not enough: 10, 20, 30 installs -- the number doesn't matter. What matters is that we don't own our games. Call it a license if you must, but we should be able to install and play it when and where we want, without having to ask permission from the publishers. We should be able to resell it or give it away without it losing functionality. If this were a physical item, even a video or an album, there would be no question, but somehow the software industry has come up with EULAs and DRM that impose restrictions beyond our rights as consumers.
I don't deny that the studios lose a lot of money due to piracy, but punishing their paying customers isn't the answer. The only way we can stop it is if it hurts the studios themselves, and that means the bottom line. Unless we stop buying things with DRM -- no matter how much we want the game itself -- they'll just keep making worse and worse DRM. We have to make our point clear: do not purchase anything with DRM.