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.
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: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.
DRM itself is idiotic (Score:2, Interesting)
"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.
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:Pick one: DRM or logging&prosecution for pi (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
I think the answer that you are insinuating is rape your spouse as that is most equivalent to the situation here. Now instead of falling into your false dichotomy, I think the correct answer is divorce and find a new wife...the equivalent of buying a game that doesn't force drm down your throat. There are a lot of good games that go ignored.
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.
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?
Re:DRM: the precious (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 when EA puts out their next big game, I may well not buy it. There are three possible solutions to this:
1) build an MMOG, and charge per month. That's worked out fairly well for Blizzard, for some others, not so much.
2) build short games with no lasting allure or replayability. Unfortunately, a popular option.
3) turn off the activation servers. If your game activates every time it's run, then gamers have two options: stop playing it, which frees up some spare time, or download a crack. In the first case, they may well buy something new, and unfortunately, human nature being what it is, if they had a yearning to play your old game, they'll probably think that your new game might scratch that itch and buy it. In the second case, the game company hasn't actually lost anything...
Interestingly, some companies have made the statement (I wouldn't quite call it a promise...) that if they go out of business or turn off their activation servers, they'll release a patch that allows the game to play without activation. That puts people like me in a strange position: I'll be more than happy to buy their game once they release that patch, which is likely after they have either gone out of business or stopped selling the game. Either way, chances are I *can't* buy the game at that point.
The Dilemma (Score:3, Interesting)
Most reasons why someone doesn't purchase a particular game can be boiled down to one of the above. If I simply don't purchase a game, there's no guarantee which of the five basic reasons was the reason why I didn't purchase it. In the case of Bioshock, it was the DRM itself, but I haven't told 2K games why I haven't gotten it. From their perspective, it could be any of the above reasons, when in fact it is because of the DRM.
If I don't buy Bioshock, I have sent the same message to 2K games as has the guy with a five year old Dell POS with a Celeron and Intel Integrated graphics, the MMORPG-or-bust gamer, the broke college student paying for school by himself, the living-under-a-rock gamer whose last purchase was DOOM, and the "gamer" whose entire software collection comes from Limewire, when the reality is that my reasoning isn't any of those. The problem is that I've got their statisticians and marketing folks grabbing their magic 8-balls trying to figure out why my software shelf doesn't have a copy of Bioshock on it; odds are that I probably have been categorized in their pirate category.
In the case of Spore, EA games is being told that they've gone so far with the solution with reason #5 that DRM has become their reason #6, and it's a reason that they can very easily overcome. This backlash that TFA advises against is actually working because if every one of the 1-star comments on Amazon is a single lost sale, that's 2,578 lost sales as of this writing. That's something that EA's bean counters can't otherwise explain away. The fact that EA has changed a policy at all is a step in the right direction (they're not going to abolish DRM overnight - SecuROM is on the other side of the fence convincing them that DRM does indeed work).
Re:DRM encourages customer to download cracks. (Score:2, Interesting)
Do you think movie theaters are abusing when they don't allow you to resell your ticket or share it with your bother once you saw the movie?
Personally I think the solution would be to do exactly like movies. The first six months, games should be "sold" like movie theater tickets. As a "one play only" policy is not enforceable, I guess the best model would be, let's say a three month renting through digital distribution. After that, they should be sold like movie DVD. As for the price, what about $15 for renting and $45 for buying the media and a transferable right to use. Would you find this acceptable?
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:4, Interesting)
Once Joe-Sixpack graduates from the baseline "I put CD in drive and click copy, if it doesn't work, I can't copy it," to the "I go online and download this crack," or "I go online and download this torrent," Joe-Sixpack is already far, far beyond the effects of DRM.
Joe Sixpack has long known where to download cracks and torrents (and that shoudln't surprise anyone here anymore). DRM has been since it's inception been an annoyance only to customers. I can understand that companies try to curtail piracy, but its measures have been ineffective and have delayed cracks for a week or two at most. Joe Sixpack gets his cracks from the same torrents that non-Joe Sixpacks do.
Then use that money saved from not having to develop useless DRM and make a good game.
I was at a company that had produced some software and decided to implement a form of copyprotection about a year and a half ago. Their number of customers was very limited and they were selling it for a very high price. They decided to go with an existing solution (a commercial off the shelf copyprotection requiring an authentication server, mac addresses (lol) of the client PCs and a USB key on each client).
They sold their software for 100K$ 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.
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (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.
DRM Bill of Rights (Score:2, Interesting)
Saw this on USENET (yes it still there)
Maybe if company agree to this sort of thing then worries about DRM wouldn't be such a problem.
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1) Right of Free Use: If you limit number of installations, the publisher MUST provide a "revoke" tool.
What it entails for the publisher:
The Publisher is allowed to limit the software's installation to one or more computers based on their hardware configuration and registered online ("Activation"). They must provide a free stand-alone tool, preferably on the same distribution medium, that the User can use to de-authorize previously activated computers. The total number of Activations and De-activations must be unlimited in number, but can be limited as to number of uses in a particular time period.
How It Would Work:
When you install a game, the software must be activated online as is the standard practice today. However, what this Right provides is a method for the User to de-activate an installation so the software can be transferred to another computer, either due to hardware failure, upgrade or resale. This tool needs to be provided free to the user, preferably on the CD/DVD with the game (or downloaded if the game is purchased through digital distribution) and must be stand-alone. De-activation would require proof of ownership (the CD in the drive and the CD-key should be enough), and would display a list of all computers authorized to run that software. The User could then select the computers to be de-activated. Note that this tool does NOT have to be run on the Authorized computer, or require the Authorized software to be installed. In order to prevent misuse of this tool, the Publisher can allow only a certain amount of Authorizations/ DeAuthorizations per day/week/month, but cannot limit the TOTAL amount of de-Authorizations.
2) Right of Activation: If the publisher requires Activation, they must provide some assurance of method to bypass this should the method of Activation no longer be available.
What it entails for the Publisher:
The Publisher is allowed to require the User to Activate their software through the method of their choice. But if that method should no longer be available (be it due to technical or financial reasons), they must ensure that the user can continue to use the software they paid for even though the Activation service is no longer running. This assurance can take many forms; a legal promise to release a patch should the Activation Servers be taken down and a waiving of rights to take legal action of any third-party who rights software to allow the same, or a universal "key" that is held in escrow, to be released only should the Activation servers go down, that allows installation and use of the Software without Activation.
How It Would Work:
Basically, the Publisher needs to provide the User with a "back-door" that can bypass the Activation requirement should they chose to no longer allow Activations, either because it is costing them too much money or they are no longer in business. The best way for the User is if the Publisher has a patch or some sort of universal serial number that allows the User to bypass Activation; this patch/key is held in escrow until the Activation Servers go down and is then released to the general public. Of course, this may dramatically compromise the usefulness of the DRM, so other methods can be used, for example: providing source-code and funds that can be released to pay a programming team to successfully develop a patch after the fact. Alternately (but least palatable to the User) the Publisher can simply promise to release code and not prosecute should a third-party (e.g., a "cracker") want to develop some method to bypass the Activation (but, note, they must provide enough code to make this a possibility)
3) Right to Privacy: Any data-collection from these activation services will be opt-out (except as what is required for activation), will not be matched to any personally identifiable information
Re:First thing I do with every game I buy. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
I consider it pretty easy.
"Oh it has DRM? I guess I won't buy it."
I've done it with music, and anything else that needed outside intervention to use it. My opinion is that everyone and everything else is superficial and will disappear in time. Most of the time I've been right. It's best not to bet against those odds.
What if the game was tied to hardware? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why don't publishers give up a little profit and put games on SD Cards? Look how cheap an SD Card reader is. With a little code judo, you can tie a game to the SD Card it's placed on. (The SD Cards have secure areas, and mfg registers and stuff.) Every copy of a game would be different. In essence, watermarked. What do you get?
Using an SD Card could make PC Games more like console games.
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.