Alienating potential paying customers by using a system that will present no deterent to non-paying pirates is, to put it bluntly, stupid.

Why am I not simply livid at pirates? Who said I wasn't? Do you think it doesn't frustrate me that each and every one of those smug bastards are enjoying games that I cannot justify purchasing due to the DRM?

But what does that paragraph tell you? It tells you that DRM DOESN'T WORK. It also tells you that companies have not gotten my money due to DRM I cannot accept.

So, not only have they wasted money on DRM that DOESN'T WORK, but they have also demonstrably lost money.

DRM is effective at only two things:
1) Screwing over legitimate paying customers, right up until they pirate the game because they are sick of the DRM
2) Damaging the second hand games market.

Exactly. Krypsyn is missing the fact that piracy is the EXCUSE, not the REASON for DRM.

Publishers arent as stupid as they would have you believe. Publishers know that DRM cannot EVER stop pirates. So why do they keep using DRM?
Control.

DRM allows publishers to:
1) Destroy the second-hand market by using a legal loophole to disallow a customers rights to resale.
2) Limit the number of installs. This is very popular with euro-publishers and consoles (example: buy Wii-ware, and you can ONLY install it on a single console ever.)
3) Data-mine and report home. Some DRM gathers info on how the game is used, how long it is installed, and how many times a user installs it on how many computers.

That was hilarious in a tragic sort of way, but only because I didn't own the CD myself.

I really liked BCR1, so I would have considered buying BCR2 if it a) didn't suck compared to the first, b) didn't have retarded DRM when my PS3's internet is broken and c) didn't cost far too much.

granny pretty much made all the points needed here. You can condone or oppose piracy, acknowledge or deny it, in the end it all doesn't matter. For the simple fact that piracy is not a phenomenon that you can accept or combat, but a simple matter-of-fact that is in the nature of things and never going to go away. The whole DRM discussion is only even taking place because these companies are run by 70-year-old shareholders with not the slightest clue of how today's world works, not understanding in the least the fundamental differences between physical goods and digital information. They try to apply their Victorian age reasoning, but it doesn't make sense. Find a Microsoft Research paper on something called "the Undernet". Digital information, copyrighted or not, will always be copied and shared, no matter what, nothing to do about it. Take P2P from the people, they will share on the Usenet. Take all of the Internet away from them, they will create their own networks. Take all digital communication from them, they will fall back to the "Sneakernet" of physically swapping discs. Assuming that copying of certain digital information can be controlled or subdued is not just an illusion, it is a completely nonsensical notion. When the current stock market grandpas finally die out, maybe we will have more people in charge who get that.

In you final sentence you make the same point I made, but you draw the wrong conclusion. Yes, pirates do nothing to support the developers and publishers of the game. They freeload off their work, without repaying what they owe them, and that's not right, no one is arguing about that. So why are the publishers so intent on spending all their time and money on the pirates, instead of the customers who actually pay them for their games? Let me illustrate:

I purchased GTA IV when it came out. It was a buggy mess that failed to even start up on 50% of systems in the German-speaking region. You had to run some memory burn-in test in the background to mitigate some kind of race condition during the game's booting procedure. That's after I was forced to install a load of crap and endure one of the most annoying copy-protection and activation schemes I have ever witnessed. At the same time, the pirates freeloaded their copy off the Internet; of course they got the same buggy game I did, but theirs is still the higher-quality copy because they did not have the hassle with the copy protection and activation, and their copy is guaranteed to work even if a company or server disappears. Then I read how proudly Rockstar proclaimed that they spend $200,000 on an "unbreakable" copy protection system, that was broken in less than 72 hours. That makes me mad as hell, because obviously Rockstar spent that money on that ineffective protection, the illusion of combatting piracy which is impossible in and of itself, instead of spending it on Q.A. to make sure the game I paid for works on my bloody machine. They spent my money on the pirates that paid nothing for the game, so in the end I paid my money for a broken product geared for the pirates, instead of the good product that I thought I paid for. I'm bloody furious that Rockstar is so disrespectful as to value a 2-day minor hindrance for piracy, which probably has no effects on their bottom line anyway, higher than my satisfaction as a customer that just shelled out $60 for their product. And it's every one's duty to be appalled by that.

No one is forcing the publishers to dump money into DRM. That's in fact the main point I was trying to make: when publishers have started to worry about piracy and DRM, trying to fight an unwinnable war that doesn't even make sense, the have stopped about satisfaction of the customers who actually pay for their games. They pour their time and money into DRM instead of a product that makes me feel like I get something in return for my money. The DRM thing: it doesn't work, and no one will ever be able to prove that if it did work it would even have an impact or not. The relation between satisfied paying customers, company's image, and return business? Pretty indebateable, proveable, and clear-cut. That's the whole problem: the publisher focuses on the pirates when it should focus on me.

All you need are the simple irrefutable facts:
- Piracy is not a trend or a phenomenon; it is an unchangeable reality.
- DRM can never work.
- DRM only affects legitimate customers who don't (want to) circumvent it.

The problem is the shareholders not understanding these facts, and hence making the wrong decisions. It is all equally clear from an alternative standpoint, with equally irrefutable facts:

As a paying customer, I get:
- to pay a lot of money for a game
- hassled during installation/activation of the game
- technical trouble if I have to be online for single-player gameplay
- the certainty that at some point in the future I won't be able to play the game anymore without an illegal crack.

As a freeloading pirate, I get:
- the same game for free
- higher quality of product due to easier installation, no activation
- all possible problems like having to be online taken care of
- the guarantee that the game will always work

From that, you can deduce customer decisions, and from that, you can deduce what you should do to get your product sold. You can't subdue piracy, so that is out of the question. What you can do is create an incentive to buy for those people who are actually willing to spend money: make a nice box, a nice printed manual, put in some extras. Reward the customer with a product that they will be gladly adding to their collection, something that goes beyond a mere digital copy of your code. Give them a game that they will want to own a copy of simply for the fact that it is so great and doesn't get boring too quickly. In short, make a game people will think about: "that was money well spent", instead of "those dirty bastards cheated me again."

Right on, even for a cheap DRM scheme you're having to sell an extra several thousand units to break even on that. Money which could either come off the price of the game or be used to actually do some QA and bug fixing prior to release. Not to mention that DRM introduces bugs that have to be fixed if you want everybody to be able to use their software.

Guess I should log in more often. Seems I rankled some folks. I'll reply to some of the points mentioned in a previous post, then leave it at that, since most of you are saying the same things anyway.

Right, and because home invasions are also pretty much a fact of life I shouldn't bother installing a security system on my house or owning a handgun for personal defense? Yeah, this argument doesn't hold water for me. Everyone should have the right to protect themselves against crime.

It doesn't have to be perfect, however stopping pirates from stealing the game for a few months will either raise the revenues of the publisher or make them realize that their game sucks (and it wasn't the pirates reducing their bottom line after all). Either way, I win; I get more and better games.

And piracy effects everyone. I hear a lot of folks whine about how nothing good is made for the PC anymore, and that most block-buster games are tailored to consoles and PC is merely an after-thought. So, by being more effective, all piracy accomplishes is making publisher change their focus. Pirates say they like the hobby, but they have done more than anyone else to destroy the PC gaming market, imho.

Ooh, now you are talking about my kind of people! I own shares in EA and Activision; not much, just a few hundred bucks of each, iirc. Unless my money manager sold them when I wasn't looking anyway. :P

EDIT:
I own, as of Friday's close:
Activision Blizzard Inc. (ATVI) 193.00 shares $2,080.54

No EA though, so either that was sold off, or I misremembered. However, I also own Best Buy and Wal-Mart stock (around $10,000 combined), and they make some profit from game retail :P.

Regardless, I think I qualify as one of those shareholders you malign. ;)
/EDIT

Games are not cheap to make. If inflation is taken into account, games haven't really gone up in price for 25 years. I paid around $40 for games in the 90s, and I was happy to do so. I like to support the publishers of games I play, so they will continue to support the developers of those same games. Compared to going out to a movie, which is around $5/hour in the States, computers games are a huge value.

Most, if not all, of these are a response to pirates. It is a nuclear arms race of sorts; the more pirates crack games, the harsher and more invasive the pirating schemes become. Neither party is doing fans of the hobby a service.

And thus you help to potentially deprive the developers of said game more work in the future. Of course, the devs have already been paid for the game you just pirated, however if the publisher didn't make enough money, it is less likely games like the one pirated will be forthcoming from that publisher.

In theory, you are correct. However, many cracks have errors (or fail to successfully crack everything). A good example of this was Titan Quest, where a lot of folks were claiming a buggy product. In the end, it was only the cracked programs that were evidencing this 'bug'.

Similarly, if a game needs to be patched, it can actually be much more tedious to upgrade a cracked version. Whether this is compensating by the lower hassle of no DRM is up to the individual in question to decide.

Well, this I somewhat agree with. Having to be logged in at all times is a pain in the ass. Especially if you like to play games on a laptop while traveling, like I do. However, 90% of the time, this isn't a huge issue for most folks.

The 100% log in model, however, does need to go. However, I don't mind online check in every week or so, since this allows for interruptions in service (whether self imposed or not).

I touched on this in a previous response. The pirate will know his current game will always work. However, the pirate has also reduced the chances of that type of game being released.

***

My main point with my responses to the thread was not to say that I think all DRM is wonderful or that publishers are innocently of all culpability. I actually don't believe this at all. However, I read several of pages of people bashing publishers, but NO post bashing pirates. So, that is why I felt I needed to post; to balance it out a little.

My main questions to everyone would be these:
1) Do you believe that stealing is wrong?
2) Do you believe that owners of property should be able to legally defend said property?

This is where I was coming from. There are of course many other issues when it comes to DRM (the used game market is a big one), but I was more interested in making sure that EVERYONE accountable was blamed. I get tired of publisher bashing, while ignoring the thieves that are at LEAST as culpable, if not responsible causing the mess in the first place.

Anyway, have fun ripping this one to shreds. I might even come back a few days to reply. No promises. :P

You are missing the point completely. We are not arguing that piracy is a right or fine or whatever, but that DRM harms the consumer and that it's not actually there to stop piracy but to stop second hand sales and to control the product. Why should I support a developer if they are going to treat me like a criminal? I'm not gonna pirate but I will take my money elsewhere where I am not treated like a criminal, if the pirates can get a better experience than the legitimate customers then there is something wrong.

You make the claim that piracy harms everyone, yet I would say that DRM does more harm. You make the claim that piracy is the reason that companies do not sell on PCs, I say that they use the excuse of piracy to justify their poor sales on the PC. The poor sales mysteriously started when they started using DRM, and companies such as Frictional Games have noted that the PC market isn't dead, it's different and that the real reason that the companies don't want to sell on PC is because they like to have ultimate control over their product. They can drip-feed dlc, control where it's used, add and remove servers, not have to worry about different configurations, whereas PC you have modders who may end up doing a better job with the dlc than the developers for free, people running their own servers for the game, etc. Why do you think Bioware are being so quiet on whether DA2 will have the toolset released?

DRM is there to control the product, and is circumvented by pirates within a week, if they don't already have it out before the game is released. It has been shown that if you prevent a pirate from pirating a game he will not buy it, he just won't bother with it. So this DRM is doing nothing to make people buy the game, it's actually doing the opposite. If the PC market is indeed in trouble (which it isn't, just hot air being blown by the big publishers) then it's because of DRM.

And you make the point that you are one of those shareholders. And?

James Billington was supposed to have ruled in 2006 that games for machines/special hardware which are longer available get an exemption from the 1998 Digital Millenium Copyright Act in terms of being able to bypass their copy-protection controls.

So the answer to that question is pretty much if the OEM of a closed system doesn't provide backwards compatibility, you're free to make legal ROMs/backups and go wild with emulation while being completely above board.

[/\]

DRM doesn't work? I've seen plenty of people buy more then a single copy for their own usage because of it so it seems to be working perfectly from here.

Pirates are an excuse that allows the developer to sideline customer wrath. If they simply wanted to combat pirates there are much simpler and more effective approaches. DRM is about making more money off a licensee by a licenser. The developers are even on public record saying as much.

And if you want to talk about a continuation this is a continuation of the nonsense that led to the development of the GNU community, the GPL, and eventually Linux of usage licenses from proprietary vendors instead of true licenses to the software and underlying code. Hence, in modern terms, when you bought Windows you got a license to use it on that particular machine registered by motherboard serial number. You did no get the right to the source code, to recompile, or otherwise do anything the developer doesn't specifically decide to enable you to do. And if years later you want to VM that era of Windows, which will have ceased to be on sale to the average consumer, to handle a game that won't play on the current version then it sucks to be you.

Granted Microsoft has actually been rather good about not screwing with the 9x modder community and keeping up the services for older Windows to operate, but that doesn't change it's technically a breech of license and thus is fine for illustrating the nature of the issues with that approach.

Granted the average post internet expansion of user base end user doesn't know a compiler from a compilation of books and probably doesn't see the value of being able tweak/fix/modify code. On the other hand said average user doesn't see why police state type controls are an issue either.

Whether they're getting ready to recreate the video game crash of 1983 from overmilking the system remains to be seen.

What new games have been pushed off PC to console? Note multiplatform release so as to milk licensees more in true DRM fashion doesn't count, and there are solid new games in genre X, Y, and Z that have continued to be made PC only, as if that really matters.

Consoles didn't get Crysis, Crysis Warhead, or any of the three STALKERs. I'm pretty sure they didn't get the benefit of the start up Carpe Fulgar's Recettear. Or the highly successful Team Fortress series. Or a lot of other things involved in the over 13 billion USD/year PC gaming industry. Again why exclusivity matters, I'm not sure. EA failing to recompile source code properly for PC is a legitimate issue, but has nothing to do with pirates. Nor does Activion-Blizzard's pricing schemes that see Diablo priced as if it was still new, or their resistance to participating in sales.

And you're ignoring FOSS/freeware developers, and if you don't think that matters the reason you won't find the first UFO game here is because it is and was a FOSS/freeware project that went commercial. And I imagine the big name publishers are increasingly annoyed little start up companies like Carpe Fulgar can just go to Steam or other digital download services to publish. Consoles on the other hand, not so much.

Krypsyn, I don't think you missed the point completely, but you are having some arguments that don't take all the facts into account.

There's a fundamental difference between physical goods and digital information, which means that many, if not most, of the laws that have been applied to the former for centuries, make no sense for the latter. No matter what the industry might make you want to believe, software piracy isn't stealing, never was and never will be, and is a completely uncompareable act. Do both stealing and software piracy have the potential to create a monetary loss? Sure. But there are substantial differences to the crimes you compared it to; software piracy is copyright infringement, and you can much rather compare it to threatening or stalking. These are factually impreventable without severely cutting into the civil rights and freedoms of the population. As long as people have freedom of speech and the liberty to make phone calls, you cannot prevent threatening phone calls. As long as every person has the right to personal freedom, you cannot prevent stalking. That doesn't mean that they should not be prosecuted and penalised, but the matter is completely different. Likewise, the only way to effectively combat piracy would be one that severly restricts the freedom of speech and information for everyone - not just those who want to abuse it.

Which game (that anyone was bothered enough to crack, anyway) do you know that was not cracked within a few days after release? The longest I remember is GTA IV which was somewhere around 60 hours I think. Many titles are even cracked before release. I know that the games business is one where the majority of sales is extremely concentrated near the release date, and levels out soon, but I doubt that those couple of hours have a real impact.

I completely agree with you on this. But what I wanted to point out is that DRM does at least as much damage, and for what reason? The weakness of the PC platform, compared with consoles, especially regarding the growing audience of videogames, was always that it was so darn hard to get your games to work. That got a lot better over the years, from hacking your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to more modern Windows games where you could mostly get by with a simple software installation. This was the direction it should have taken, make it so that regular folks without much computer experience don't need help to play the game they bought. Today? Forget it! With all the additional shit you have to install, the online activations and such? Regardless of the state and trend for the PC platform, DRM is one of the main factors of how the industry makes things even worse, by restricting their target audience further.

Sure, that happens, but consider this: if I pirated the game, my net loss is maybe an hour of my time for unsuccessfully trying to get the game to run. If I bought it in the store, I threw out $50 because I can't play the game and I can't return it because the box is open. And good luck getting customer support for DRM-related problems. I have friends who tried that. Ran out of limited activations for a $60 game due to reinstalls and exchanged hardware, and had to call the hotline for a renewal. In the end, via his phone bill he practically paid for the game a second time, so in fact they just could have sold him a new copy. Way to treat your customers. It's exactly the same thing again. Harassing the people who actually paid for your product, while the pirates are care-free, or at least haven't lost any money.

I take a different standpoint there. Whether it's a one-time or session-wise connection, doesn't really matter to me. The line is where an Internet connection is required for single-player in the first place. The reason being that I rarely play games when they are really new, and even if I do I like to come back to them after several years. Internet requirements make that impossible.

To sum up, I don't disagree with that. I don't know if you just chose my post for the quotes and replied more generally, or whether you have misunderstood my standpoint. I never wanted to defend piracy. I am just annoyed at the fact that the way publishers handle it, they clearly make things even worse. The reasons for which I can only speculate about. But it's pretty much a fact.

I said the question of the functionality of DRM is moot because games will be copied anyway. That wasn't trying to justify piracy, it was trying to state a simple fact: all it takes for DRM to be broken is one person to do it, then it is cracked for everyone else, and no pirate will usually have problems with the game again. $200,000 seems to me to be an awful lot of money to spend on delaying some teenager's crack for 2 days. Second thing that I am pretty sure about: people pirate games because it means they get them for free. Sounds pretty obvious, but what I mean is that the focus is on the "free" part. Meaning that, even if a DRM would work and prevent the game from being illegally copied, do you really think these pirates would then go out to buy the game? Or would they just download another game that they can get for free. Take these two thoughts together and I ask myself: why do publishers spend so much money on a futile task and get frustrated, rather than spend it on trying to make a game that people simply MUST have in their collection? That they will want their own, real copy of, and not sell it to Gamestop after 2 weeks, simply because it is a great game to have? Or else they could just pocket the extra money, which I think would still be the better choice.

I remember an interview with Infocom in the 80s, where they said that they found their special packaging, with all the feelies and extras inside, was a much more effective copy protection system than technical, disk-based ones - because everyone wanted to have that cool stuff for themselves, not just a floppy! It might seem that this is a bad example since Infocom went out of business, but this was in their heydays when their games sold like crazy, and Infocom titles used to constantly make up at least half of the Top 10 sales charts every month. Quoting Wikipedia: "Whereas most computer games of the era would achieve initial success and then suffer a significant drop-off in sales, Infocom titles continued to sell for years and years. Employee Tim Anderson said of their situation, 'It was phenomenal—we had a basement that just printed money.'". That's because their games and products were so good, they continued to intrigue customers, while those that relied on technical features and lacked replayability, were replaced by the next batch of titles within months.

I want to repeat an example I have brought up a million times, because it illustrates my point so well (copied from another board, sorry for laziness): there is this professional mathematics software toolkit that is used everywhere in education, science, and research. It's ridiculously expensive. Luckily, as a student, you can get it for free becasue they offer licenses in cooperation with universities. But: you have to be permanently connected to the license server in order for it to work. I tried that once, and once only. I was working a while, until the program notified me that it lost contact to the license server, and that I should finish and save my work immediately because it was going to quit automatically in 15 minutes. Goddamn it, I had exams where I had to use that program! How cool would it have been for it to happen then? The result is: most every student I know opts to ignore the legal copy they are offered, and downloads a DVD image and serial number of the retail copy from a warez site. So the effect of the DRM is that potential customers, even if they could get the legal copy for free, prefer the pirated one because it is of higher quality. It doesn't take a lot to figure out that something's seriously messed up in the publisher's business concept there. That's what I was referring to all along. I don't know if publishers actually believe that DRM helps them in their fight against piracy. But they have to realise that the more annoying these schemes get, the more reason they give people to turn to piracy even if they didn't plan to.

You're wrong, because if there was never another pirated game as long as we lived DRM would still exist now that they know they can kill the second hand market that way.

Nothing new under the sun...

this is capcom at fault here, not sony

so stop this nonsense with the "sony hates it's customers"

For what I heard, Nintendo will also make possible to play the DSiWare games on the 3DS.

I actually haven't heard of any, but I do heard about EA shutting servers down and making their games unplayable online anymore. Also, speaking of which, I recently look for some articles on companies removing online activations and the only thing I found were companies like EA and 2K giving activation revoke tools, not DRM remove tools. This means that you still need to validate online games from 07 and 08. And let's not start with Steam. Do you know that there is no legal binding for them in their Subscriber Agreement to release patches for their games to be playable without Steam? But, seriously, let's not start with Steam, every time I check their Subscriber Agreement I cannot help but thinking that you have to be crazy to buy games there.

I understand both sides. Think of what such a clause would mean to you if you ran Steam. If you get into deep financial trouble and have to close shop, you don't want to have to fulfil that contract. Steam has over 1000 games in their catalogue. Patching all of them would be an enormously expensive task and a huge additional liability for them. Plus, many publishers on Steam chose to add their own, separate copy protection schemes to their games, over which Valve have no control. In those cases they couldn't even develop a patch if they wanted to.

And you don't have to be crazy to buy games on Steam, you just have to make sure that you know what you are getting. I am perfectly happy in buying a game for $3-$5 from them if I know it isn't one that I would want to keep playing forever and ever. I know that any day, my Steam account could disappear with all of its games, but I made my purchase decisions in a way that it wouldn't hurt too much if it actually happened. The problem is that most people seemingly are unaware of the facts, otherwise full-price games wouldn't sell for the prices they do. The problem isn't Steam being evil, but people being uninformed.

For the discussion in general, I was just being made aware of a very interesting article. A great read for anyone interested in the topics of this thread:
Game Developers Should Love Their Pirates (Gamasutra)

Edit: And one particular user's comment on that article: I.e. what I said in my last post, the big names in the games industry are in trouble, not because of piracy, but because their business models are not viable.

You how shares of Activision and EA!? One of the two most destructive publishers out there?

Activision:

- Has exploited game franchises until there was nothing more to get out of them.
- Has laid off 500 people working on Guitar Hero series because, as everybody in the world knew two years ago, the series has become exhausted. Those people were practically forced to dig their own graves.
- Has made the major asshole of the industry a millionaire.
- Spends by far more money on advertisement than in producing the actual games.

EA:
- Is forcing Online on every game to block it from second hand users.
- Blocks extra content of special edition of the games behind single use codes, once again, to block second hand users.
- Forces its customers to use their servers for multiplayer and then bitches about the cost of maintaining them.
- Forces its customers to use their servers for multiplayer and then shuts them down when not enough people were using them blocking the online component of their games forever.
- Don't contribute to gog.com. This one is the worst by far.

How can you sleep at night? No, it's not a joke, it's a real question.

1) Piracy is not stealing.
2) I think intellectual property should disappear and I don't believe on "owning ideas".