Building a Better Kind of DRM

[Scrythe]

No matter what, pirates will always find a way to crack anyone's "uncrackable" DRM.

Spoiler: Take a lesson from Sony:

When they built the PSP 1000, they didn't expect people to reverse-engineer it to play emulators and roms. Those who discovered it enjoyed the irony of playing Nintendo/Sega/etc titles on a Sony handheld. Sony, however, did not find this amusing, and released a patch that removed the ability to use homebrew programs on it. That's right, instead of a patch adding features, they created a patch that took a feature away. Now there were only two options for you if you wanted to continue enjoying your homebrew games: 1) Refuse to upgrade your system past patch 1.5 or 2) Find yourself a system on eBay or whatever that isn't patched past 1.5.

Right around this time, they released the PSP 2000 (preinstalled with 1.5) and Sony thought the problem was gone forever. The pirate community, not being ones to give up, discovered a way to downgrade the PSP firmware back to 1.5, thus re enabling the ability to play homebrew games. This was roughly within a month or two of the release of the PSP 2000. Not only that, but they also found a way around the DRM used on games downloaded from PlayStation Store. Oh, and let's not forget about custom firmware...

Remember all the things that Sony boasted about it's shiny new PSP 3000? In case anyone forgot, they advertised it having a brighter screen with more colors, low battery consumption, blah blah blah. Those weren't the only hardware changes that were made to it. They also redid the hardware to make it "pirate proof". Now what are our villians to do? Don't worry kids, the pirate community got past that too.

A week after launch.

Skipping ahead to the PSP Go, a completely redesigned system. This time Sony took all the necessary steps to make this one pirate proof as well. The pirate community had a hard time trying to break this one, but they finally did it...

Within 24 hours of the North American launch date.

 

[Slicks]

The sneaky DRM sounds cool.
I dont think bad post on tech support will lower sells.
I mean how many people actually go to the support forum before they buy a game to check.
Most people read reviews by known reviewers.

But i think the tactic of suing torrent sites to be a effective one.
And if they manage to screw over torrent sites completely it will be a big blow to piracy.

They know they will never be able to stop piracy. But if they can just make it hard enough.

Its not like all pirates are working together to try and hack something.
Its mostly small groups. But if you can smoke those out...

 

[RufusMcLaser]

My only objection is that Shamus failed to consider the best DRM compromise I've ever seen that actually involved any DRM- Company of Heroes does an online check, and if it can't reach the server defaults to a CD (er, DVD) check. CoH was the first game I didn't bother to noCD-crack in a long, long time. Other than that? Good article, well thought out.

 

[taltamir]

This is an utterly terrible idea.

1. DRM is problematic because it often fails on a legit copy (especially on older games). So those legit users are gonna end up with a game that doesn't work right.
2. The game will get a name for being buggy, having bad controls, etc. and thus nobody will buy it.
3. Many people pirate as a form of demo (especially when a demo is not available), those people will not buy it after seeing how much the game "sucks".
4. Pirates will still get around it. Take mass effect, it delayed pirates a whopping 2 weeks by doing exactly that (the map required to progress to "act 2" so to speak did not work on pirated versions).

if you want to make people buy your game instead of pirating it, guilt trip them into it. (and disassociate yourself from the abusive DRMs).

You know what this type of DRM means? it means legit customers are gonna have to overcome those issues by getting a crack
PS and the whole "crackers don't care and don't notice" angle is BS... crackers LOVE to show up each other by making "PROPER" releases that fix something another cracker missed

 

[Kirosilence]

I really do like the Batman Arkham Asylum DRM, You can play the game sure, but remove key abilities that make it impossible to progress past the first ten minutes. If more game companies did this kind of thing, I would be very pleased.

 

[taltamir]

I really do like the Batman Arkham Asylum DRM, You can play the game sure, but remove key abilities that make it impossible to progress past the first ten minutes. If more game companies did this kind of thing, I would be very pleased.

just wait until you get the next version of windows and you can't progress past the first 10 minutes of the game on your legit disk because the DRM isn't compatible with your current OS.

 

[Dys]

Btw. the X360 versions of both Modern Warfare 2 (11 days earlier) and Dragon Age (3, respective 6 days earlier) also just leaked... it's funny that the PC gets all the FLAK on this matter...

Pathetic is more what it is. Handheld devices (PSP and DS) are so heavily pirated compared to PCs it's unbeleivable. Xbox 360 games are not difficult to torrent and to modify an xbox so that it plays pirated games all you need to do is have it play a cd that changes the DVD drives firmware. Of course, it's far easier to make PC piracly look like it's running rampant, especially when a significant portion of PC gamers have to download illegal cracks (or whatever) to negate the DRM and actually play the game they've paid for.

As much as I hate to admit it, steam is probably the most perfect form of DRM we're likely to see. As terrible as it is, as stupid as the system is (please don't partially install updates before they've downloaded? Let me install disks in offline mode as well, while we're at it), it works more often than it doesn't, and because of the more reasonable price tag of many steam games piracy is relatively low.

 

[Enizer]

This is an utterly terrible idea.

1. DRM is problematic because it often fails on a legit copy (especially on older games). So those legit users are gonna end up with a game that doesn't work right.
2. The game will get a name for being buggy, having bad controls, etc. and thus nobody will buy it.
3. Many people pirate as a form of demo (especially when a demo is not available), those people will not buy it after seeing how much the game "sucks".
4. Pirates will still get around it. Take mass effect, it delayed pirates a whopping 2 weeks by doing exactly that (the map required to progress to "act 2" so to speak did not work on pirated versions).

if you want to make people buy your game instead of pirating it, guilt trip them into it. (and disassociate yourself from the abusive DRMs).

You know what this type of DRM means? it means legit customers are gonna have to overcome those issues by getting a crack
PS and the whole "crackers don't care and don't notice" angle is BS... crackers LOVE to show up each other by making "PROPER" releases that fix something another cracker missed

i have a prime excample of #1, two games on my shelf, "the suffering" and the expansion for it, i played the suffering back when it was new, and loved it, when the expansion came, guess what, it didnt work on my computer, i then tried running the old one, it dosnt work either.. tried everything, even downgrading my damn OS back to the one i used for the first one

nope
now i have two games on my shelf, that i cant play, one of which, i could never run at all go drm eh?
i bet however that if i had pirated it, it would have worked to begin with...

these days, because of this, i specifically check of the game has draconic DRM, and i compleatly stop buying ANYTHING from any company that does that, not just the game they shipped with that DRM, i will never pay them for anything ever again

2. Be Sneaky
While probably more effective at deceiving crackers (although if Arkham Asylum really was cracked before it was released, it may not be), it is absolutely imperative that everyone knows that the bad gameplay is due to DRM. Otherwise, you'll get pirates complaining about the game to potential customers.

Or not, delete the related posts that spring up and ban the user stating you had "Moral obligations to protect our paying customers." But then there's the risk of someone suffering the inevitably hiccup that causes the game to behave that way anyway.

You do not want to make pirated versions of the game broken! If someone who has pirated the game enjoys it, he'll not buy it later because he already owns a copy.

I fixed the logical folly in your statement.

Shamus: I'm surprised you haven't retouched on your previous idea about releasing printed versions of the game for reviewers and anyone else who gets an early copy.

guess what, when i was in school, i couldnt really afford to pay for games, when i left school, and got a job, i made an effort to buy every single game that i pirated

oh wait, no, pirates dont do that, i guess that i dont exist.

 

[DeadlyYellow]

Guess what? When I was in school, I couldn't really afford to pay for games. When I left school and got a job, I made an effort to buy every single game that I pirated.

Oh wait, no, pirates don't do that, I guess that I don't exist.

I should feel so honored that I could inspire an existential crisis.

That seems to be the case when people misread 'logical' as 'factual.' My logic being thus: A person who downloads a game, technically has possession of it. Since they then own a copy, they do not have need to own another.

But take heart, Enizer, for your actions have shown that you are of a firmer belief in morality than others.

 

[phoenix352]

umm great ideas an all but ....

a cracker group can easily rent or buy an original copy of the game and simply ripping it apart and adapting the crack over that effectively escaping that drm thingy that you suggested o.o

 

[James Raynor]

Being sneaky is probably the worst option, because then you are essentially putting a bug/glitch into your game on purpose that can make the game unplayable past a certain point. Which can lead to the tech forums being swarmed with people complaining about it not working properly, and with the quirky nature of the DRM you cannot tell who is legit and who is a pirate.

 

[laman132]

ummm.. i have a question.

its all fine and dandy to make a games controls unresponsive and its plot maddening for pirates, but how exactly does one do that? won't the bit of code that corrupts the control scheme also need a way to check if the game is genuine? as will all the other bugs. i admitedly know nothing of coding, but i assume making each one check the authenticity in a different way would be cost/time/effort prohibitive. so they would all have a common 'authenticity check'. so why can't the pirates simply spoof that? instad of removing the check, like in nocds, recode it to always mark the copy as genuine. the only way i can see around that is if it checked with the servers, but then wouldn't that be online copy protection and authentication all over again?

though even that could be overcome with shadow pirate servers set up for this very purpose.

 

[b1gr1ck]

You're forgetting about the one important thing.

Activision doesn't care about their customers, as long as they buy the game. It's money they care about. And guess what pirates do: They keep Activision from making money!

 

[Myoukochou]

Anyone who remembers ?Captain Blood??s hand shaking knows that this same exact idea was tried back in the 80s too.

It didn?t work then, either.

 

[gnomebard]

I am all for #2 and #4. sign me up!