Why Bother With DRM?

Brad Wardell of Stardock and Ron Carmel of 2D Boy recently spoke with Gamasutra about their efforts to move the games industry away from restrictive DRM. Despite the fact that both have had their own troubles with piracy, they contend that overall piracy rates aren't significantly affected by DRM — and that most companies know it. Instead, the two suggest that most DRM solutions are still around to hamper a few more specific situations. Quoting: "'Publishers aren't stupid. They know that DRM doesn't work against piracy,' Carmel explains. 'What they're trying to do is stop people from going to GameStop to buy $50 games for $35, none of which goes into the publishers' pockets. If DRM permits only a few installs, that minimizes the number of times a game can be resold.' ... 'I believe their argument is that while DRM doesn't work perfectly,' says Wardell, 'it does make it more difficult for someone to get the game for free in the first five or six days of its release. That's when a lot of the sales take place and that's when the royalties from the retailers are determined. Publishers would be very happy for a first week without "warez" copies circulating on the Web.'"

Play at your friend's house? Sell a game? Nope.

[Gizzmonic]

DRM doesn't bother me nearly as much as stuff like Steam and the death of the second hand market. Can you imagine how difficult it will be to bring a game to your friends' house to play?

"Hey, Ron, it's Steve. Since we're going to hang out tomorrow, I suggest you start downloading Butt Zappers 2 now. It should take up about 20 GB of your hard drive space."

"OK, what's your Live username and password?"

"It's XXXXXX and XXXXX. My credit card's on that account, don't use it to download a bunch of games like you did last time, okay bro?"

"Sure dude, but what if this puts me up over my bandwidth cap, you'll pay me back, right?"

"I guess."

"Wait a minute, I don't have any room on my hard drive left."

"So, just delete some of your old stuff. You can always download it later."

"Are you gonna pay for me to download all that stuff too?"

"Dude, I knew we should have gotten Playstation, Sony made a deal with Comcast and PSN downloads don't count against the cap."

"Yeah, and maybe we'd actually be able to download it. Looks like the Butt Zappers server is slammed right now."

Honestly, if they try to foist that stuff on us, I'll just stick with the old, disc-based systems.

(Tangentially...)

[bughunter]

(...I'd like to know more about this Butt Zappers game.)

Re:Sophistry To Kill First Sale Doctrine

[Mister Whirly]

Really, if we distill this sentence one more time, it becomes clear that the universe will explode.

Re:Sophistry To Kill First Sale Doctrine

[prockcore]

Really, if we distill this sentence just a little more, we'll have 190 proof comments!

Re:Hmmm

[Dog-Cow]

Non-sequiturs much?

Re:Hmmm

[Thinboy00]

Read the EULA.

Re:Sophistry To Kill First Sale Doctrine

[dword]

Oh. My. God. You completely missed the point!

Re:Sophistry To Kill First Sale Doctrine

[GMFTatsujin]

I have found 190 truly marvelous proof comments of this sentence, which this comment is too narrow to contain.