DRM Drives Gamers To Piracy, Says Good Old Games

arcticstoat writes "Independent retro games retailer Good Old Games has spoken out about digital rights management, saying that it can actually drive gamers to piracy, rather than acting as a deterrent. In an interview, a spokesperson for Good Old Games said that the effectiveness of DRM as a piracy-deterrent was 'None, or close to none.' 'What I will say isn't popular in the gaming industry,' says Kukawski, 'but in my opinion DRM drives people to pirate games rather than prevent them from doing that. Would you rather spend $50 on a game that requires installing malware on your system, or to stay online all the time and crashes every time the connection goes down, or would you rather download a cracked version without all that hassle?'"

I started pirating because of DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

Then I kept doing it because I'm cheap. Guess they got to me in my formative years.

I'm an example

[dbIII]

Dungeon Keeper II - loved the game and bought the game. The problem is it won't actually succeed in doing the stupid copy protection CD check anymore or run properly on XP without two cracks to get it to run - so that's what I do. I'd even considered buying it again at one point but gave up after a fruitless attempt to track it down.

Re:DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL at "pirate games are safe". Malware ridden keygens and cracks on usenet say otherwise. Of course, there's plenty of little nubbins infecting their system by saying it's AV false positives...

Re:Yup

[Zemran]

I will not consider buying a game that I cannot get a nocd crack for. Why would I want to have to put a DVD in every time I play? As for having to play while online, there is no way I would pay for something that I cannot play when I want, and I do not always have an internet connection. It is all stupid, so yes, I know that I 'AM' driven to look at p2p games because I cannot get a playable version that I can buy.

too late...

[dhaines]

DRM didn't drive me to pirate games, it drove me to give up gaming entirely.

Even on a console, the hassles were just too much.

Game publishers think they're in the game business. They're in the fun business. If they figure out how to sell hassle-free fun on any of my several mainstream computing platforms, I will give them money. But the longer they fail, the less likely they are to ever interest me again.

Not just games- any software

[Tooke]

In high school I used rosetta stone to learn Russian. incidentally, it was around the same time I started trying out linux. Due to teaching myself drive partitioning and my own inexperience, I really screwed up my hard drive a couple times. So I would have to re-install everything, including rosetta stone. I didn't know it at the time, but it came with exactly two licences, so the internet activation only worked twice. After the third time when I found that out, I ended up calling their technical support. After spending 30 minutes on the phone with a hard-to-understand foreign person, I still wasn't getting anywhere. He said I'd have to provide proof of purchase (which I didn't have, because the school bought the software) and maybe he'd be able to get me another licence.

I was pretty fed up at that point, so I decided for the first time to give piracy a try. It was perfectly ethical; I was just trying to be able to use the software that had already been paid for. I couldn't believe how simple it was, just download a small crack from the pirate bay, and everything worked perfectly. DRM was the very thing that introduced me to piracy. I personally still wouldn't take anything without paying for it, but I can easily see how someone might start pirating their media solely because of DRM.

Re:Yup

[mwvdlee]

A few years ago I had a collegue who would buy the big-name games, keep them in their plastic wrap and download and install the pirated version instead simply because the pirated version didn't require him to jump through hoops. These days with more obnoxious authentication and online accounts the hoops have gotten smaller and are arranged in a snake like pattern in the mud. I'm guessing this is what a lot of people do with their legally purchased games nowadays; the pirated versions are simply better.

Re:Not just games, either...

[0111 1110]

I actually remember when Slashdot was about nerdy things. You know, things like actually doing cool stuff with computers, networks, etc.,and then talking about them here, and not about pissing and moaning about how "The Man" was preventing us from being entertained by things that that others had created to which we felt we were entitled to, simply because we couldn't entertain ourselves, nor create anything nerdy.

Actually I think piracy is pretty nerdy. I have in fact cracked one piece of commercial software all by myself and I didn't feel bad at all. In fact it felt great. I was proud of myself. I can't think of anything more nerdy than cracking DRM. And it's great fun involving computers. Unpacking, decompiling, reading assembly language, all those lovely opcodes... All the raw beauty of information technology spread right out before you. Every computer science major should be required to crack a major piece of commercial software before graduating.

As far as blurays, the hackers at Slysoft have got our backs. They are clever and very skilled and have saved the bluray format for me. Instead of just sticking the disc in a standalone player (which I don't even own) I rip the disc to my drive and start the geeky command line process of demuxing it into its components, messing with the audio in Soundforge and remuxing the result with mkvmerge. Another command line utility. That isn't geeky? Not as geeky as actually writing utilites for the process like the ubergeek madshi did, but more geeky than just placing the disc in a standalone player and watching it on your TV, which is what hollywood wants you to do.