Correct, in my opinion, 100%!

Quit buying the drm protected games, and it will force company assessment on whether to invest, not invest, or to develop a new investment model in the area.

DRM costs money, and if a company can see that profits rise without it, they will gladly kill it, unless drm provider is a subsidiary (or company investment.)

On what sort of evidence do you base such a conclusion???

Pirates will pirate with or without DRM, in fact, as far as I know, when you pirate you are freeing yourself of all the hassles of such crap like background programs running alongside the game, always online requirements, signing up and then signing in to windows live or such crap. And this is assuming it all went smoothly, because when it doesn't the DRM headache gets unbearable. If games lacked DRM, piracy would remain equal. It's not like piracy would somehow become easier, it's already as easy as it can get. I mean they are already "free" as you say, they wouldn't become "more free".

The other thing that some commented and I agree fully is the prices of games, 90% of the AAA titles trying get 60 bucks out of you are not deserving of such cash, specially when all you are getting is a digital version.

The only DRM that would work is that which was uncrackable, that's impossible, they all get cracked at release day (or sooner!), so...

I would like to believe when publishers release games for the price they are really worth, without arbitrary regional restrictions or "lag", without arbitrary regional price dissonance, without headache-inducing DRM and all of that sales will go up. Pirates will still pirate no matter what, but some pirates will stop pirating and people who didn't buy because of any of the above reasons will start buying.

Pretty much agree with most of what was said there.

Most people consider hobbies expensive, but often they have no idea how the items they use in their hobby are produced. For hobbies like computer games or miniature model games this can be somewhat worse on the perceived value because what the user gets in a physical object is very small and also pretty darned cheap to reproduce (or in the case of miniatures is made of cheap materials).

It's only when they learn of the development costs of the product and are also educated in the fact that companies need profit that they start to understand that its not "big greedy corporations" taking all the money for profit and living the rich life.

I suspect the kickstarter and indy projects might actually help a lot here in the gaming world because they tend to be far more open with their production cycle - whereas most big developers don't let out much facts on their method of development or development costs in general.

Add to that the fact that PC games have moved totally online - to places like Steam where big sales (70- 80- 90% off!) are pretty common through the year and the product itself is quickly devalued. Games haven't changed much in price over the last 15 or so years £30 to around £35 for a new game - £40-£45 for a collectors edition. However the perception of what is purchased (which in a PC game is now nothing more than digital data) has shifted a lot and now people are much more demanding on a lower release price and also a little more willing to wait for the "steam sales" to hit to get some titles.



Education and understanding of how pirate activities would help lower general piracy and also start to at least stem the flow of the "casual pirate" user. Mix that with an increase in the perceived value of the product and you've more people willing to pay for the content.


The battle then becomes one of control - with many developers eager to push toward MMO and online based games or games that require such to try and retain control over the product. Sadly that is a harder battle to play against and I'm honestly not sure how to win that one. Fighting with the wallet is one tactic, but its also one of those things where if enough of the big developers get together to push through (or even simple follow after each other) it might become the default with little playerbase sayso.

Take a look at the attitudes of those who do pirate. They love GOG and CDPR and consider their games to be the ones you DO buy.

DRM doesn't defeat the impression that games can be obtained for free. It's absence doesn't create the impression that that a game is a freebie.

The only constant when it comes to DRM is that it's a negative.

so sure? comments on a forum or a download site are not representative of the "downloaderbase"

Piracy would increase so much developers will become unable to make money and they will then stop developing games, children will start taking drugs and demons will rise up from the earth and destroy man kind.

Honestly I don't think it would have much of an impact both negative and positive.

I watched an episode of the Outer Limits called Zig Zag, it aired in July 2000, and it was basically a story of a hacker group, and there goal was to stop a world where everybody was under this massive DRM system in which they had a microchip implanted into the palm of there hand, and it was essentially their identity. You needed this DRM to enter your home, to use your computer, to get money from your account. If that chip got ripped from your hand your identity was lost. You could not do any of the things mentioned above if your chip was gone or altered even if people knew perfectly well who you were, it didn't matter. I think the moral of the story is that freedoms were lost from a DRM system of the future, so to me I think of DRM and that episode and how it was foreseeing a future I hope never goes that far.

I've been gaming a long time; I remember copying floppy disks of games, and then 3.5 diskettes, as I'm sure many people did. Gaming just kept going.

What kills anything is the companies that create the stuff; everybody thinks they have to move on to the next newest better thing, and forget what's come before.

Nobody (that I'm aware of) complains that libraries decrease book sales (though somebody out there probably has) or that libraries are killing music and dvd's.

DRM or no, some people will always look for ways to skirt the system. Others won't. It's just that simple. To me, DRM is "We can't control the behavior of certain individuals; therefore the only thing left is to control the behavior of everybody." And in the long run, that just doesn't work.

They removed DRM from digital music. So what happened there, did the digital music market implode?

Even though DRM was removed, there could be some other measures on the side to fight piracy, like:

- Going after those who share pirated stuff, and aid with it (like Piratebay; now the site is being blocked by more and more countries, and I'm sure other torrent sites will follow. A casual user has no idea about the workarounds to bypass the blockages)

- Watermarking DRM-free files, which, if successful, would most probably decrease casual piracy. Most people don't want to spread around games or media they have bought, if those items could somehow be tracked back to them.

Comparing DRM to the London riots is a bit of a flame-bait.
Fiduciary responsibility is something different.

Personally I don't blame any publisher for using DRM, people who say non-sense like "if there was no DRM there'd be no piracy" are complete idiots. Piracy was there first, then came DRM that occasionally even forced a lot of people to buy the original, then came crackers who bypassed the DRM and then the publishers had to get better DRM that may even harm their own product as a whole - now it's a copy protection arms race. It's quite obivous who started this shit, it's quite obvious who will continue screwing publishers and developers over no matter what they do - as far as I remember Ubisoft had tried that, releasing a few games without any notable copy protection and actually the sales went down - maybe those games just didn't attract many customers but maybe that's how the majority of gamers has shown that they're a bunch of assholes.

Of course that doesn't mean that I don't respect GOG's ideology of providing games without any DRM, as a matter of fact I consider it very noble, but I believe that no other distributor or publisher can depend as much on DRM free releases as GOG can. After all, who is looking for games that are two decades old? Passionate gamers, most of them at least in their 20's maybe even 30's. I think such people are more likely to pay, even if a free download is just a few clicks away.

My dream world is also a world without DRM - but that's because in my dream world there'd be no piracy. But as our world is a world inhabited by assholes there's always gonna be a lot of DRM. Deal with it.

First of all, I have to say that the only thing which occasionally tempts me to pirate is DRM. I have content I bought and lost to DRM, and the only way to get it without paying again would be to pirate it.

We're already moving in the less DRM direction. Music was mentioned already, and on the book front Tor just recently announced that it will move to DRM free e-books. Kickstarters allow game developers to publish games themselves without a publisher adding DRM.

I agree with others than losing DRM shouldn't cause a major piracy increase. I also agree with timppu that measures to discourage casual piracy aren't bad, and are the most that needs to be done at the consumer level.

They would say:

"Well we listened to you customer. You don't like DRM. We are always on your side. But you have to understand - we can only make games if we get paid for. So here are two games of similar content. We will publish them at the same time, one with DRM and one without. Now it's up to you to decide how much DRM free is really worth to you. We will carefully check the revenues on both (both having the same price) and will tell you how it went afterwards. For statistical reasons we might repeat the experiment one or two times. If DRM free proves better for you and us, we will jump the DRM free forever wagon instantly. If not, we have not much lost, but we will have to discuss the situation then. And never forget - if we, the mighty EA, is not going to make it then probably noone will make it because not only are we mighty, but we also listen to you - what else could somebody possibly do. We are already the best company for you."

That's not EA, but that could be EA.

And the hilarious thing about that is the people who don't actually have to worry about being screwed over by DRM are the assholes. But the idiots who gave the pubs/devs money for the game? They're the ones who get screwed over.

DRM doesn't stop piracy. Pirates gonna pirate.

A lack of DRM won't stop piracy, either. But it would likely encourage people like me to buy games we'd otherwise avoid like the plague.

I a world without DRM I'd probably spend even more money on games than I do now, so it's probably for the better the way it is. :P