Grey Carter said:
DRM is a pretty wide reaching term but usually when users condemn it they're talking about specific products, like SecuROM, Starforce or Ubisoft's DRM scheme. Quite often people's opinions on DRM doesn't extend to things like Steam or Battlenet, purely because they don't recognise them as such.
Quite frankly, that's absolutely not true.
Yes, Steam and BattleNet function as a kind of DRM. But they also
give customers something. Steam means that I can play most of the same library of games on my desktop computer while I'm at home and my laptop computer on the road without having to swap disks out of the drive every time I change gears, and that many of those games automatically have the latest patches put into place in the background while I'm typing messages into forums on the Escapist. While I haven't delved into BattleNet in ages, I'm aware that it functions as a thriving competitive community, not just a place that keeps its players streaming data to Blizzard's servers.
What Starforce gave me, back in the bad old days, was a game I legitimately purchased that hard crashed my computer until I updated its drivers.
My @#$%ing copy protection's drivers. They didn't even have the grace offer up that information freely; I had to go trawling deep into the murky backwaters of the Internet to figure it out for myself.
And Ubisoft's DRM means that I'm probably never going to play
Assassin's Creed 2. Because even with relatively reliable broadband Internet, I still occasionally get "hiccups" that prevent me from remaining online. And while I'm willing to forgive the occasional bug or hang that was an honest mistake and the company is trying to correct, Ubisoft's "always on" DRM, at least at the outset, was perfectly capable of squandering its customer's time by shutting down their game without saving simply because they had the misfortune to have one of those "hiccups". That was not a bug; that was how it worked
by design.
So- and forgive me if I'm harping on what is simply an ill choice of words- if gamers don't tend to think of Steam or BattleNet in the same light as StarForce or Ubisoft's "always on" DRM, it is most certainly
not "purely" because they don't think of the latter as DRM. It's because Valve and Blizzard had the sense and seemingly the
respect for their customers to meet them half-way and go into the process thinking of what they could offer them of value to go with what they
needed to work their business model.
Whereas Ubisoft's tactic, from a customer's point of view, was to start with a functional working product and then add something to it that made it varyingly less functional for reasons that only benefited Ubisoft. And to add insult to injury (again, from the customer's possibly narrow-minded view), this lack of functionality was limited to those who had gone to Ubisoft fair and square, expecting an exchange of money for a functional game like they always had, while those who "stole" the same game hurdled those same hindrances.
I "get" it. Piracy is a real problem, especially in nations where people
can afford legitimate merchandise but choose to go with piracy because it's easy, free, and/or convenient. But whatever data Ubisoft has to base the tenuous claims of "success" of their DRM upon, I really can't help but wonder if they've entirely grasped the PR battle they may be losing in the process.
)
