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Game Distribution and the 'Idiocy' of DRM
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sun Sep 28, 2008 12:01 PM
from the completely-neutral-titles dept.
from the completely-neutral-titles dept.
In light of the increased focus on the DRM controversy in recent days, Ars Technica did an interview with execs from CD Projekt's Good Old Games about where the problems are with current DRM implementation. "For me, the idiocy of those protection solutions shows how far from reality and from customers a lot of executives at big companies can be. You don't have to be a genius to check the internet and see all the pros and cons of those actions." Penny Arcade is also running a three-part series on DRM from game journalists Brian Crecente and Chris Remo. Crecente talks about how some companies are making progress in developing acceptable DRM, and some aren't. Remo recommends against a trend of overreaction to minor gripes.
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DRM-Free Classic Games Store Opens To Public 122 comments
arcticstoat writes "With all the controversy surrounding DRM in games at the moment, one games store has decided to buck the trend, proudly proclaiming that all its games are DRM-free. First announced back in July, Good Old Games is now in the public beta stage, which means that anyone can now access the site's archive of classic PC games, and you can do what you want with your game when you've bought it, too. 'You won't find any intrusive copy protection in our games; we hate draconian DRM schemes just as much as you do,' says the site. 'Once you download a game, you can install it on any PC and re-download it whenever you want, as many times as you need, and you can play it without an internet connection.'"
In related news, Stardock, the company responsible for the Gamer's Bill of Rights, is apparently working on a new copy-protection solution that will be friendlier to consumers than current schemes.
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First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:5, Interesting)
I usually do as well, unless it doesn't require any interaction on my part after it's installed. I especially hate when the CD/DVD has to be in the drive... it's www.gamecopyworld.com immediately after install if that's the case.
The only games I currently play that I haven't cracked are Steam games... their DRM is barely acceptable, so I haven't felt the need to do away with it.
I've been playing Spore recently, I would love to go out and buy it, but I refuse due to the DRM involved. It's a pretty good game and I'm happy to pay for it, but I won't pay for DRM.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I understand correctly, you're playing a version of Spore you didn't pay for then?
I guess the problem with that is you lose all moral authority when you actually decide the game is worth playing but don't wish to pay. In other words, if you had told us "I'd love to buy Spore, but the DRM made that impossible for me, so I'll just play and support games from companies like StarDock", it would then be a principled decision.
A boycott only means something when the consumer is willing to *go without*. No one
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Where did the guy say he owns it?
"I've been playing Spore recently"
doesn't say he has a copy. Maybe this guy has friends who own it and let him have a go.
But don't let that get in the way of you making your moral speech mate.
Parent
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:4, Funny)
Then obviously his friend is raping EA and should be given prison time.
Sharing with your friends is clearly violating the spirit of the implied DRM agreement which you seal with your blood when you get a paper cut from opening the box.
It's practically wife swapping here, these people have NO MORALS!
Parent
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:5, Funny)
Just a novel idea here but uh. Ever heard of socialising where you actually get off your butt and visit in person. I mean actually leave the house and see him... for real?
And then with a total disregard for your germs he allows you to play his copy of Spore?
I mean, I know visiting other people is quite an outrageous thing to do but... It could happen..right?
Parent
Re:Imaginary cash for imaginary property (Score:4, Insightful)
Any spore installation (or any other program for that matter) is copied millions of times in the course of normal use on a single computer (regardless of whether money was given to some 3rd party). It is loaded from the hard disk to RAM, occasionally swapped back to disk and vice versa. What makes this copying "OK" and other copying not "OK"?
It's because of stupid semantics arguments like this that barely-readable legalese EULAs crop up. If you know that things get copied back and forth from HDD to RAM, you should also know the difference between copying back and forth to RAM for the purpose of execution or backup and making a separate copy on (semi-)permanent storage to hand the data over to somebody else. Pretending it's all the same is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Idiot.
If you like spore, buy it! You already have a cracked version running, so the hassles of its DRM are no excuse. Just buy it, put it on your shelf still sealed and continue playing your cracked version.
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Which sends EA the message: "sheeple are accepting DRM, we can keep doing it."
Parent
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:5, Informative)
I bought Far Cry, I had to crack it to play it. I bought Doom 3, I had to crack it to play it. I've also had problems with overzealous measures such as the one used in Operation Flashpoint activating and making the game unplayable. Guess who didn't have any problems? That's right, the people who pirated them! Great job retards.
Nowadays I don't even bother trying to run a game without cracking it first. There's no point - the cracked version is almost always superior.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, I've simply stopped buying anything at release in favor of letting someone ELSE determine whether I'll need a crack to run it successfully. If that's the case, I won't buy it. I'm sick of dealing with companies at any level that feel the need to go crazy with copy protection, whether it's genuinely a flawed attempt at anti-piracy, an attempt to kill second-hand sales, or they're just a bunch of douche bags.
Games are supposed to be fun. Cracking stuff, to me, isn't fun, nor is fighting
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
>>>Remo recommends against a trend of overreaction - "-look how many people buy music through iTunes, whose DRM mechanics are hardly lenient."
Over-react? I still play games that are nearly 25 years old (Pirates, Silent Service, and Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising). Any system that effectively makes the game unusable after just 5 years is not acceptable in any way, shape, or form.
Itunes? How about Google or Walmart? When they deactivate their services, and make my rather-expensive music suddenly stop working, I think I have a right to act peeved about it.
Parent
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
look how many people buy music through iTunes, whose DRM mechanics are hardly lenient
Remo saying "iTunes is popular, so maybe you should get over DRM" is a bizarre argument. I would bet that most people who buy 128kbps tracks from iTunes wouldn't even know what filetype they were receiving and, if pushed, would probably guess mp3 because they don't know better.
I'm not having a go at non-geeks, but if iTunes had a massive warning on every page about how you'll have difficulty playing your music on anything but iTunes and an iPod, I'm sure sales would plummet.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Funny that you mention that... Wal*Mart is going to deactivate their DRM servers. [boingboing.net] People who bought music from them have about a month now to jump through some hoops, or lose it all.
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:5, Informative)
I'm confused as to what the hell you're talking about because the quote is correct. Spore now gives you 5 activations. If you activate once on your laptop and reinstall it still counts as one activation because it's the same PC. Essentially it lets you install it on 5 unique PCs.
Parent
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Essentially it lets you install it on 5 unique PCs.
There's no standard for defining what makes a "unique PC". Anything from a HD/GFX card upgrade to an OS reinstall or BIOS update could make one of these ad-hoc systems decide it's no longer on the machine it was installed on.
And guess what gamers tend to do quite a bit?
Parent
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
It might be optical drive.
Assuming it can tell what your optical drive is?
It probably does something similar to Windows activation; it makes a hash of a bunch of your hardware (using similarity hashing, not cryptographic hashing), and has some arbitrary cut-off whereby if your system's existing hash is too different from the stored hash, it considers it to be a new machine.
I won't be buying spore until EA gives us an apology for being dicks
Having played quite a few hours into space stage, I'd suggest not buying it in either case; it's certainly not without it's clever touches, but ultimately it's a bunch of largely pointless model editors (the main one you can buy seperately) with some tedious, repetitive and shallow minigames bolted on the side. I love RTS's, I love Sim City, I love Civilization, I love 4X. Spore takes all these genres and removes everything about them which makes them fun.
Wright likes to wibble on about how the game's misunderstood; that he made it so you could use it to tell your own stories. I like that, I really do, but the game world really doesn't seem made to assist you with that. Sure, you can sink hours into making a "Federation" and "Klingons" in two different saves, and then play having them meet each other and declare war (so you can fight them with your *one* ship) or make friends, but story wise the game's far more likely to get in your way with half a dozen more awful "Save planet $foo from ecological collapse" missions because you needed to sink another few hours into it to get enough ecological stabilizers.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well then perhaps you should go back to the forums because that is where I get my information from. It's just that mine isn't three weeks old.
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Who said anything about returning it?
I buy games I play to support them. If the CD in the drive thing is easily fixable and I still retain full functionality then it's something I'm willing to deal with *most* of the time. If it's something as hostile as to how many machines i can install it on and it phones home every time I fire it up for no reason other than to verify it's authorized, then it can piss off.
Although, as time wears on, I'm getting tired of having to play a cracked (and thus having to jump through hoops to patch) version - it's becoming not worth the money to buy even those games. Stardock seems to do rather well without copy protection - I bought their games, so did many others.
The problem is not pirates, as Stardock clearly demonstrates. There are many other factors that are far larger problems than pirates. DRM inconveniences the legitimate users far, FAR more than it causes a problem for the pirates. That being an indisputable fact, why have it?
The only copy protection that is really needed is of the physical media. Make it so Joe-Sixpack can't burn off a quick copy for their buddy and you've done all you can possibly do to prevent piracy. Anything beyond that is completely, utterly meaningless. This is an absolute, it is not an opinion or a theory. Once Joe-Sixpack graduates from the baseline "I put CD in drive and click copy, if it doesn't work, I can't copy it," to the "I go online and download this crack," or "I go online and download this torrent," Joe-Sixpack is already far, far beyond the effects of DRM.
It's a small step, but once that step is made, you can't stop that person. You can appeal to their sense of morality, but you can't physically stop them. Game developers need to put no, or bare minimum copy protection on their games. Then use that money saved from not having to develop useless DRM and make a good game. Works for Stardock!
Parent
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a funny and interesting trade-off when you mention making it so Joe-Six pack can't copy the media. In order to make that possible, company X has to distribute their product on hardware that isn't typically available. Nintendo is particularly good at this in that they stuck with cartridges for the longest time, put out their GameCube games on CDs that weren't regular sized, distribute Wii games on dvd (I believe). I think most companies don't go this route because either they eliminate a certain portion of their customer base or building the infrastructure (like distributing consoles and regulating physical media) can be daunting. Ironically, it's not entirely the user's fault but the developer's for choosing the largest customer base by using the easiest to distribute methods. By maximizing profits without considering the other issues, they kinda shoot themselves in the foot. I think the people at Stardock have it right though: figure out who will pay for your game, make them as satisfied with their purchase as possible, and ignore the rest. Ultimately, people who pay will get what they want and people who don't pay will live with what's available (like DRM encrusted software).
I think you might be missing the point of what I said. Joe-Sixpack wants to put his game in the drive, hit a button and out comes a copy. If it's anything more complicated than that, he won't do it. Once he does take on the task of a more complicated method (such as GameDrive, Alcohol, etc...), you've crossed the threshold and no amount of copy protection is going to stop him from getting a copy of the game. Either he'll get it from a program that can copy the CD, he'll download the crack or he'll download the torrent. It's the casual copier that you have to protect against (if any protection is going to be used) anything beyond the casual copier is *impossible* (and still remain usable) to protect against. Thus it is a complete waste of money and a complete waste of the users/customers time.
Parent
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:4, Interesting)
Once Joe-Sixpack graduates from the baseline "I put CD in drive and click copy, if it doesn't work, I can't copy it," to the "I go online and download this crack," or "I go online and download this torrent," Joe-Sixpack is already far, far beyond the effects of DRM.
Joe Sixpack has long known where to download cracks and torrents (and that shoudln't surprise anyone here anymore). DRM has been since it's inception been an annoyance only to customers. I can understand that companies try to curtail piracy, but its measures have been ineffective and have delayed cracks for a week or two at most. Joe Sixpack gets his cracks from the same torrents that non-Joe Sixpacks do.
Then use that money saved from not having to develop useless DRM and make a good game.
I was at a company that had produced some software and decided to implement a form of copyprotection about a year and a half ago. Their number of customers was very limited and they were selling it for a very high price. They decided to go with an existing solution (a commercial off the shelf copyprotection requiring an authentication server, mac addresses (lol) of the client PCs and a USB key on each client).
They sold their software for 100K$ to three companies. The copyprotection had cost them a flat fee of 10K$. It was after they had released their software they realized that the authentication server (which was to be locally or remotely installed as a service) had some strange bugs if a computer had more than one network card, and would stop legitimate users from authenticating. This of course affected 2 out of their 3 customers who had opted to install the authentication server on a server.
This was of course a bug in the copyprotection software, and was fixed in an update. A few months after the whole fiasco I had heard from one of their customers that they had installed the software on terminal server. Now everyone used the software on the terminal server, thus circumventing the mac address and USB key issue and violating the EULA without any real technical knowledge.
The worst part of it all was that it was a company with a headcount of 5 that developed the software, but they had an internal procedure regarding the copy protection that was overly paranoid and bureaucratic at best. It took them 3 weeks to hand me a key for porting the software to linux, and after 2 days of waiting I had #ifdef'd all of the copyprotection stuff so I could at least do my job. This of course led to internal debate about if this violated procedure or not (fyi: it did, and I was sternly asked to wait for a key next time and remove the #ifdef COPYPROTECTION wherever it occurred).
The company went out of business a couple of months ago, effectively leaving customers stranded if they buy new hardware, which they eventually will. As to why the company went out of business? Poor management, enormously small market, bureaucracy in a small company, bad ideas, in-house developers knew where the company was going and were actively looking for another job two or three months after they were hired.
Parent
well yes (Score:5, Interesting)
There are now two games I *really* wanted that I can't get because I don't want their DRM infesting my machine. Nor do I want to use pirated games (being a programmer myself I don't like to download illegally, I really would prefer to pay), so I don't get to play at all.
I've been a computer gamer since 1983, and this not being able to buy things because of stuff put there to stop piracy is a new experience for me.
I hope its short lived, or the number of new games I buy is going to plummet.
Re:well yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Because if you do that you send the signal you accept DRM. Do that, and we'll never be rid of it.
Parent
Re:well yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:well yes (Score:4, Interesting)
"I don't like to download illegally, I really would prefer to pay"
Then why not buy the box and download and play the pirated version of the game? That puts the money in the correct pockets, but you still get the version of the game you want.
I've downloaded cracks for games that require the dvd in the drive, but I have always purchased the game concerned. Its more for my own convenience than anything else.
Even then I wouldn't touch a game that used an invasive system like SecureROM or Starforce, or those that limit the number of installs, simply because I don't want to have anything to do with a company that does that. If I buy the game, then that indicates I agree that their behaviour is acceptable, which I don't. If I don't buy it and don't pirate it, they and their crippled game are something I don't even have to consider.
Of course this means I'm less likely to consider future titles from the company concerned as well.
Parent
They're starting to get it... (Score:5, Insightful)
"DRM can encourage the best customers to behave slightly better. It will never address the masses of non-customers downloading your product."
Why the others haven't understood this I don't know. And note the 'DRM can encourage...'. I'd say I'm a good customer (I spend a bunch anyway), but I'm increasingly drawn to warez, because they - and I can't believe I'm writing this - are less likely to screw my gaming PC. What is the world coming to?
DRM encourages customer to download cracks. (Score:5, Insightful)
"DRM can encourage the best customers to behave slightly better. It will never address the masses of non-customers downloading your product."
Seriously, WTH is that supposed to mean? By better it means, not loaning it to your brother, it means not being able to sell it. All perfectly reasonable things.
DRM definitely does encourage customers to visit the pirate sites to get proper usability back by downloading cracks (AKA no cd cracks). Eventually you are going to lose a number of customers who get fed up and cut out the middle man (the producer) and start with the cracked version. After all you trained them for years this is where you get the full value product.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"What are your basis for saying that loaning the game to your brother or selling it are perfectly reasonable things to do? Not that I necessarily disagree, but I'd like to know how you justify it."
Much like I can loan/sell Books/CDs/Movies. I think first someone has to justify why games are some special type of copyright material that can't be loaned/sold.
Just because publishers would like it to be so, doesn't make it so. They are attempting to end first sale doctrine exception of copyright by build walls t
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You own a physical copy of a game. You can do what you want with that copy so long as it falls within the bounds of what copyright allows. Copyright only covers, well, copying. Selling the game or loaning it to somebody isn't covered by the law, and is therefore allowed.
There's a popular misconception that you do not own media, but merely license it. This simply isn't true. When you buy a game in a box you own that box and its contents. The only thing you don't own is the right to make a copy of the content
Re:DRM encourages customer to download cracks. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't particularly agree with loaning it to someone,
"Loaning a game" implies that while the game is loaned out, the original owner can't play it. It's your game - you should be able to damn well decide who to loan it to. If you substitute "book" for "game", it sounds pretty ridiculous.
It's only when "loaning a game" translates to "burn a copy of the game" that you run into trouble. But that's not really "loaning", is it?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
For me, if I lent someone my copy of StarCraft, it meant I was no longer able to play the game while my copy was loaned out. And naturally, loaning a console game is truly "loaning" for most people. That's what I was thinking of.
But you're correct, of course. If you're talking about pure digital content that can be completely installed on and run from the hard drive, then there's no such concept as "loaning" the software to someone. It's always a copy. And then the problem gets a bit more nebulous.
Ulti
There is no acceptable DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
Peeny Arcade (Score:4, Informative)
"Penny Arcade is also running a two-part series on DRM from game journalists Brian Crecente and Chris Remo."
It's a three part series, only two parts are up. The third will be up on Monday.
"Type in the last word on page 15" (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember that approach to DRM?
Even that can be screwed up. Knowledge Revolution, makers of Working Model, a kind of CAD system with a physics engine, once shipped me a program with that kind of DRM. Unfortunately, the manual was just slightly out of sync with the program; if the program wanted a page number more than halfway through the manual, it wouldn't work. It often took a few tries to get the program to run, retrying until the page number that came up was in the first half of the manual.
Actually, I'm surprised that Microsoft doesn't support some standard Windows DRM system based on their Trusted Computing Platform technology.
For game developers, the realistic solution is to either develop for consoles, or develop multiplayer versions that require a server account.
Re:"Type in the last word on page 15" (Score:4, Insightful)
No, YOU missed the fact. Those millions of illegally acquired pieces of software AREN'T customers. They will NEVER be your customer.
Instead of focusing on consumers that aren't paying you focus on the ones THAT ARE!!
By implementing stronger and stronger DRM you're wasting resources on nothing, but that's not the real reason DRM is put on disks. It's to stop customers from taking back a shitty game.
Lets look at Spore. You buy Spore, install it and link it to your email address. That copy of spore is now permanently linked to you.
After doing this you realise that Spore is a piece of shit with frequent crashes every 5 minutes, but oh look! You CAN'T refund it because you linked it to yourself. So even though EA have released Spore in the horrible state it is they still make a ton of profit with angry customers not being able to refund.
If you buy a toaster and it doesn't work, you take it back. What makes the gaming industry so fucking special?
Parent
DRM: the precious (Score:5, Interesting)
"Remo recommends against a trend of overreaction to minor gripes"
That, in a nutshell, is why the industry isn't taking all the bleating about DRM seriously. DRM is a business decision. It's not there because they hate your freedom, it's there because they think it will help stop or at least slow piracy. If the world wasn't full of thieves, there would be no DRM.
Acting like DRM will go away if you cry about it is childish. It will only go away by becoming invisible. Nobody seems to know that iPhone apps are protected with DRM, nor that it helps bring prices down (although it certainly doesn't have to; PSP DRM hasn't had any effect on software prices).
The real issue is that DRM doesn't work well in the hands of software producers (audio/video/apps), because their monetary conflict of interest pushes them to wield the power of DRM to extort hight prices.
The only successful DRM comes from hardware makers (read: Apple) who balance the power to govern sales without extortion prices and without runaway piracy, because their interests are aligned with both consumers and intellectual property content producers.
That's why Microsoft's DRM didn't work; the company only cared about producers because it wasn't selling its DRM products directly to consumers, and subsequently stacked the deck against end users.
Apple carries DRM like the Ring.
The Japanese iPhone Failure Myth [roughlydrafted.com]
Re:DRM: the precious (Score:5, Insightful)
"Modern DRM isn't about stopping piracy. It's about stopping the game from being resold at used games stores so EA doesn't have to compete against their own games with the average customer."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It's also not just about resale at used game stores... Gamers do have a limited monetary budget, and secondhand games at a game store *do* have a lower price, but the other important factor is the time budget that gamers have. Our salaries and expenses may ebb and flow, but when it comes to time, we receive a fixed income of 24 hours each day, never more, and our only choice lays in how we spend those hours. If Spore is so incredibly awesome that I'm still spending all my free time playing it next year w
Re:DRM: the precious (Score:4, Insightful)
iTunes songs are 99 cents. That is 200% more than what "market competitor selling downloads of the same content?
iTunes movies are 2.99 to 4.99. That is 200% more than what "market competitor selling downloads of the same content?
iTunes mobile software is mostly $1-10. Most mobile software for other platforms is $15-$50.
Apple's DRM isn't designed to reform thieves. It's designed to create a market. You can't stop thieves, but you can create a functional market that leaves the thieves to steal elsewhere. Or are you suggesting that because there is shoplifting, we can't have retail stores?
The iPhone Store Impending Disaster Myth [roughlydrafted.com]
Parent
There is no such thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no such thing as "acceptable DRM". By it's very existence, a non-DRM'd game will always be more acceptable than one which has added bloatware in the form of DRM attached to it.
I've always bought my games. I often download pirated games to try out, but if I like them, I almost always buy them. There are a few exceptions where I've never gotten around to buying a copy, but they are far outweighed by the number of games that I've paid for and never played, still sitting on my shelf in their shrinkwrapping.
However, a few years ago, I was so furious with the music industry selling me a useless CD that I couldn't play that I vowed never to buy another music item again. I have a whole basement full of CDs, but none of them are dated after 2005!
With the bad experience I had with Bioshock, I'm very tempted to do the same thing with games. I certainly won't buy Spore even though I'm a fan of Will Wright's games, solely because of the awful DRM. I've tolerated having to use No-CD crack up until now but if things keep getting worse, I'll stop buying games altogether and I'd encourage others to do the same.
The notion of "moderate" DRM is a curious one. (Score:5, Insightful)
A DRM system consists of a locked box and a key. In order to be effective, the system must simultaneously know the key, while preventing the user from knowing it. This means that the DRM system must deny the user access to some or all of his own system. There is absolutely nothing "moderate" about being locked out of parts of your own memory space. In this sense, all effective DRM systems are absolute. If DRM is working, it isn't your computer, period. Some DRM systems are more indulgent than others about what and how they restrict; but that isn't the same thing as moderation.
Note: there are some DRM systems that don't control the user in this way, and might be said to be genuinely moderate; but none of them are effective. Further note: my opposition to DRM is no more an endorsement of piracy than my opposition to mass surveillance is an endorsement of murder.
Crossed a line (Score:3, Insightful)
I unfortunately bought one game with this crap DRM on it(spore) and regret it. I cannot shake the feeling that they will shut down the activation servers like walmart is going to do and the game(s) that people have bought with this DRM will be screwed over. Some people have said that they(EA) will release a patch that will fix the DRM if they did that. I say, why would they? If they are bought out, go out of business, or just decide to shut them off, what incentive will they have to release a patch for this? None, that's how much.
This has nothing to do with stopping pirates, this is about stopping resales(which is illegal). They are starting with PC users because they are a smaller test group, but their goal is to get similar DRM set up in consoles so you cannot resale your console games.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
All of the DRM approaches that I've seen appear to be very much designed without regard to the collateral damage that they do to the end-user. What's needed is a way to ensure that the purchaser or successors in interest are protected.
First off, the notion of "licensed not sold" is what appears to be at the heart of the problem. There is a fundamentally evil component to the model itself that is based on a "screw the customer" attitude. It really seems to be a concerted effort to ignore the parts of copy
The only effective DRM is... (Score:4, Interesting)
...the social contract that says "it's really not nice to do that". Some people use the "would you say you did that if the programmer/artist was in the room with you?" test. This test can fail. It can fail if the programmer/artist isn't really the person taking home the pay. Back in the day, it often was; but now many of them are just employees, so they might not care if you pirated the game and if they got paid barely living wages and worked 70 hour weeks, they might even applaud you. Same deal with music. This will depend somewhat on how the artists feel about their relationship with the recording industry. Any number of one-song phenoms, and even current artists with bad deals won't care, because they don't get the money anyway. Some artists who've already got their mansions won't care, and may even regard giving it away as philanthropy. Others still want their beans and aren't ready to set up "The Foundation", so they'd be pissed off.
Oh, and there is one other effective DRM and sensible, but it's only valid if the product relies on the network. Sell a userid, and prohibit multiple-logons. At that point, your enforcement mechanism is similar to an ISP abuse department. Legitimate buyers will call to find out why the service turned off, and get reminded to keep their password secure. Everybody else will shut up, or they might try but then the operator will say "you're not the registered user, piss off". Too many games are fun without network access for this technique to really impact the market.
DRM = Total Failure.Support consumer friendly only (Score:3, Interesting)
Lets face. DRM has been a total and utter failure. It doesn't even slow down piracy, much less eliminate.
It has trained a generation of PC gamers to download cracks to get around annoyance, it has trained a generation of cracker to provide that service. Annoy people long enough and they will eventually skip over the buying phase and go straight to the trusted download scene. After all the publishers have forced to go here for fully functional copies of their own software for years.
Consumers don't need producers, they need us. Withhold our dollars from those who push "Defective by Design" products will eventually have an impact.
In the meantime buy games that are fully usable out of the box and don't require a visit to bit Torrent to correct the deficiencies.
Stardock Boxed products and www.gog.com downloads are fully consumer friendly. Anything else?
The Dilemma (Score:3, Interesting)
DRM vs. Piracy (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem is DRM and other protection mechanisms are unpopular, but in many areas it is clear that piracy is allowed to run rampant that there will be no sales. This is especially true for "popular" software.
There are some people that claim not to pirate - but it is certain they have some software they didn't pay for. Maybe someone just gave it to them or maybe their morality is a little more flexible when it comes to certain things. The problem is that for the last 20 years or so piracy has become pretty mainstream. Why would anyone pay for something when the same thing (sometimes better) is available for free? I'm not talking about free open-source here, I am talking about pirated software. Literally everything you could ever ask for is available for free by anonymously downloading it. So why would anyone pay? It is just a little too easy today and really there is no putting the genii back in the bottle. Piracy is here to stay.
The goal of a lot of pirate web sites and such is to make it impossible to obtain revenue from music, movies, books, software and anything else that can be put in digital form. While I believe these evangelists are few in number, the Internet provides them with a strong presence. Often, the pirate sites will come up first in Google before the publisher's web site. What does that say about popular software? There are some people that will pay - shareware has run at about 5% of users paying for over 20 years. But that is as far as it goes. Name one business that can exist with 5% of the revenue they had last year.
Face it, in the near future every piece of software will be available for free. The only question will be if anyone finds it profitable to publish software. Offhand, I would say the number of players will be very limited. Most software will be a web service where the user never gets to hold anything on their computer. Open source will have a role, but probably not much larger than it is today.
Re:Pick one: DRM or logging&prosecution for pi (Score:5, Insightful)
Talk about false dichotomy.
It'd be like "Either I can rape my kids, or have no children". Guess what? There's a third, and very palatable answer. We'll let YOU figure that out, if you are mentally able.
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Re:Pick one: DRM or logging&prosecution for pi (Score:5, Funny)
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