Game Distribution and the 'Idiocy' of DRM 271
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.
First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
There is no acceptable DRM. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:well yes (Score:0, Insightful)
"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.
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.
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.
Re:well yes (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:There is no acceptable DRM. (Score:2, Insightful)
Much as I don't necessarily like all this DRM crap, it isn't taking control away from you -- it's just never granting that control. You didn't have the power to play media in HD on any monitor before, and now, you have the power to play it on an HDCP-compliant monitor. They refuse, however, to sell you the power to play it in HD on a non-HDCP-compliant monitor, although there is no technical barrier to them doing so.
There's also the fact that piracy is a pain in the ass with these schemes in place. It's just not trivial, at least not to the majority. I'm not convinced that DRM has been a net benefit, but I'm also not convinced that it hasn't ever been a net benefit in any scenario, because people who wouldn't bother in general are daunted, more than anything else, by not wanting to deal with a bittorrent download plus install plus shady keygen plus whatever other magic invocations are needed (eg replace jgio.dll in the XXX/YYY/ZZZ directory and never connect to the built-in online site and disable the autopatcher, instead visiting some IP address which redirects to a site (with a different, rotating IP) in Sanskrit and guessing which link is the latest patch).
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: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."
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!
Hate to say it... (Score:2, Insightful)
As much as I hate to say it, Spore is still hitting record sales figures.
The DRM has obviously enraged a lot of us here, and I have no doubt that has cost them some sales. But I don't think "we" (meaning those who understand how much DRM can cripple a game) are the demographic that is going to make or break the game. This is a mass market game, and practically all the reviews I've seen (even here on slashdot!) ignore the DRM issue. Practically all the people I've talked to about the game have no idea what I'm talking about when I tell them about the DRM, and are in for a very nasty time the third time they need to reformat their system, or reinstall the game for whatever reason.
EA made a calculated decision here, knowing that they would lose some of our support, but if the casual gamer (let's face it, the target Spore demographic) gives up on trying to install his friend's game and buys his own copy, that's a win for EA. If a few years down the track he hits hit three install limit, what's he going to do? Buy another copy, probably. Even if he doesn't, EA has the original sale and has lost nothing. The fact that the pirates have a far superior product is amusing and ironic, but irrelevant to EA's bottom line.
Until the reviewers take their jobs seriously and start actually pointing out serious fundamental flaws in the game, companies like EA can be confident that they have made the right decision.
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.
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
I think the truth of your statement will drive more and more games to be online only with no physical media. I'm not a game dev, but probably they would try to cache textures, and images locally but anything playable ("code") would be on the servers only. Because we all know that there are way too many people who will take anything for free that they can get - and just won't pay if they can get away with it.
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.
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]
Re:Crossed a line (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 copyright that limit the holder's exclusive rights and protect the customer.
There's nothing wrong with protecting against piracy and non-paid copies floating around. What is wrong is tying the functionality of the product to "activation" schemes that could be turned off at any future time, or at any point deny a legitimate licensee from using the product.
There has to be a way to protect both sides' interests. Perhaps any product that requires any sort of activation or remote key must carry an obligation on the publisher to escrow a fully-functional set of keys and/or an unencumbered version of the program with a responsible third party would be effective, along with a hard requirement to release to each and every licensee a copy of the unencumbered version upon withdrawl of the product from the market. In other words, the DRM must be a temporary measure to prevent lost sales to piracy, and it may not be used to prevent the customer from exercising their rights.
The Wal-Mart shutdown of the DRM servers is the type of practice that must be absolutely forbidden, possibly under penalty of massive fines and/or prison time for the individuals responsible for such a decision.
Re:DRM encourages customer to download cracks. (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 to stop it, that doesn't mean they have the right to stop it.
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (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 listens to someone "boycotting" a product while they're still enjoying that product's use.
Re:DRM encourages customer to download cracks. (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 contents in a way that is covered by copyright law.
And that is why loaning and selling a game are perfectly reasonable.
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?
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?
Re:DRM encourages customer to download cracks. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
You can't "pay" for Spore. You pay for a license to play Spore. So technically they aren't selling Spore, just a license to play it. So technically not paying for it is boycotting it, since it was never for sale to begin with. Either way they're not getting your money. People are going to pirate the game regardless of whether or not you "boycott". And the people who are willing to pay $50+ for a 3-shot license outnumber those who actually "boycott" anyway, so it's all futile anyway.
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?
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
I figured the point was to induce users into making false bug reports so you could flame them but usually the plans backfire as false positives lead to alienated customers (I refer to it as an iron pigs debacle since that was an effect in one prominent game using it, the iron smelter in Settlers 3 produced pigs instead of iron).
Re:DRM encourages customer to download cracks. (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.
Ultimately, though, PC game developers are going to have to face up to a hard truth: they're relying on the good will of their customers to pay for a product that they could, without too much technical difficulty, get for free. This means that developers need to focus two aspects of game development:
a) They must forge a relationship with their customers, so that their customers are enthusiastic about supporting their development efforts with their money. Blizzard and StarDock operate on completely different scales, but both companies have very loyal customers who are willing to part with their money, with the understanding that it will likely go to fund further development of products they enjoy.
b) They can provide online services to enhance the game, and thus provide an incentive for legitimate purchases. Obviously, an MMO is the most extreme example of this, where the entire game takes place online. But matchmaking for online play, quick and easy patches, online bonus content... these are all ways of enhancing the player's experience as well.
The sad thing is, Spore has integrated online content. EA could have simply used the same method Blizzard and Stardock have used successfully - you must have a legitimate CD-Key to connect to online services. Now, they're simply alienating potential customers, and those who were determined to obtain the game without paying would have done so anyway.
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."
You have no such right! (Score:2, Insightful)
I've said this a few times before, but Steams' subscriber agreement [steampowered.com] says no such thing. Games on Steam are sold as single payment subscriptions. I don't own the orange box, I subscribe to it!
I'm not really worried about it though, Steam is such a valuable asset that even in the very unlikely event that Valve goes under whoever bought it would keep it running. It is a bit annoying how this'll kill off the second-hand market but I guess in future all the decent old games that today you'd get in second-hand will be available at GOG [gog.com]!
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (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 with games in order to get them to play. So companies that employ technologies that take away fun from my gaming experience no longer get my money.
I have no problem with a serial key (even though I own plenty of older games that are STILL fun which just installed with no key to speak of) but I'm not messing around with activation, low-level driver installations that screw up my system as a whole (securom, etc), etc. Saves me a lot of headache and stops me from supporting developers that I don't want to support.
Seems a little crazy to me fighting with a game for three hours to get it playing (and THEN try to find graphics settings that work fine) when it'll only deliver 6-8 hours of gameplay, which seems to be about all we can expect from single-player campaigns these days.
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.
Re:Put the warning on there, no one cares (Score:3, Insightful)
Your friends don't equal 99%.
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.
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.
MOST People... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd have the same problem if we had something like, say, armed guards checking your destination whenever you left your home to make sure you're not about to go commit a crime. I wouldn't care if they were expedient in their work and it barely caused a five-minute delay in my trip, or even if they 'gladly' let me know I was allowed to go from home to Walmart to Pizza Planet and back. I'd still object to that level of surveillance.
I have not purchased Spore and, if SecureRom is in Sims 3, despite being a near daily player of Sims 2 since it's opening and Sims 1 before that, I will not purchase Sims 3 either.