How would you implement DRM?

[Plurralbles]

We don't need DRM. In fact what we should actually get rid of is capitalism not pirates.That's our real problem. Share the wealth. The world is for everyone to enjoy. We need socialism.

Then say goodbye to innovation...

oh, and bug fxes.


Or good games at all.


Without the chance for profits a lot of things go to hell.

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

Short answer: I wouldn't implement DRM at all, and neither should you.

Spoiler: EXTREMELY long answer wherein I go into a great deal more detail explaining why (seriously, all ye of short attention spans should look elsewhere, maybe at a bright shiny object in your immediate vicinity - all you'll find here is LOTS of words).

The argument that ease of piracy decreases sales is disingenuous. Sure, if you ran a store with no security of any kind, the odds are good your theft rate will go up, and you'll lose more money than a store that had decent inventory protection (assuming all else is a constant - specialized shops in extremely small towns might enjoy very low shrinkage even without security).

So it's only natural to want to apply that logic to the software industry - but therein lies the problem: Piracy is not like theft from a retail store. Developers and publishers do not lose money when you download a pirated copy of their software, because you are stealing data - they only do not gain any money from you, unlike a retail shop where any theft of the inventory reduces profit because it costs money and now they have one less unit to sell. With software, you have potentially infinite copies, you are only limited to how many you want to sell and what the market might actually buy.

So they don't actually lose money when somebody pirates a copy, but they don't get paid for it either, so wouldn't combating piracy be a logical choice to increase sales? People will be far more readily inclined to steal things if they think they can get away with it.

Well, to be quite blunt, no. Oh it's certainly true that not protecting your stuff means "people will probably steal it then", but as it stands now every DRM scheme that has ever been implemented has failed to stop shit. You already are leaving all your doors and windows unlocked, and a big neon sign on the front lawn saying "Steal things from me!" - removing DRM would be every bit as effective an anti-piracy method.

Would sales go down as a result of doing that? No they would not - in the retail shop example, while certain ethically suspect folks only don't steal from you now for fear of getting caught but would totally rip you off if they thought they could get away with it, there will always be people who never even contemplate stealing. They are happy to give you their money in exchange for your goods and services. Who are those people? Your Paying Customers.

You know, those people you've been driving off by devising draconian DRM schemes that greatly inconvenience or outright disenfranchise only the set of people currently giving you money, the ones you should be trying to keep because only they are your customers. Pirates are scumbags who use ridiculous justifications to rationalize away the bit where they are scumbags, but your attempts to stop them have created a scenario where they are receiving a superior product for FREE. This is obviously not a good idea - pirated versions of your products should be less appealing, not more, but the stubborn inclusion of DRM in the face of all evidence clearly showing all it does is aggravate your actual customers has done precisely that.

I get it publishers/developers, I really do. You see these HUGE percentages of pirated copies downloaded compared to copies sold, and it's really easy to conclude that piracy is negatively impacting sales, especially when sales trend down on average. Pirates are jerks, it's so simple to blame underwhelming sales on all those jerks pirating it instead of paying for it. But pirates aren't the problem you think they are, because they are not your customers - a copy pirated is not a sale lost, except when you drive people who are your customers to piracy out of spite for the horrible DRM you present them with.


Your solution to this 'problem' of piracy actually creates the problem - by tacking on inherently anti-consumer software like DRM to your products, you give some fleeting moral justification to the jackasses that crack it, and the people who download their work, because now they're not just jerks who don't pay for stuff, they're sticking it to the man trying to put them down. People who would never otherwise pirate things will do so out of spite for DRM, such is the hatred we have towards it. People who have no interest in piracy and despise pirates will actively cheer those people they despise on when they break your latest DRM implementation, because they hate DRM even more than they hate pirates.

So get rid of it already!

Will piracy go down? Probably not, not at first anyways. But will pirates have a better version of your software than paying customers? Nope. Will pirates have even a tenuous moral leg to stand on for their actions? Nope, they're clearly and unambiguously just jackasses depriving hard-working creative teams of their rightful rewards, not "revolutionaries fighting the anti-consumer bullcrap of the big publishers man!". Will you stop driving off people who would have otherwise bought your games except for the DRM you were insisting they swallow as well? Abso-frigging-lutely.

The only way to win against piracy is to realize you shouldn't try to stop it - shame them for the horrible people they are, and stop punishing your real customers in the process. You want the image of software pirates to be people stealing candy from babies-level heinous. It won't make people who pirate things now stop necessarily, but the current arrangement is actively giving people reasons to become pirates and not feel bad at all about it. So deprive them of that feeling of justification, reward the people who pay you for your efforts with software that functions every bit as well as the copy the pirates get, and stop worrying about the piracy rates compared to sales - spend all the time and money you waste now on DRM towards driving sales up, and you'll find your money is actually being well spent for a change.

 

[Kagim]

Short answer: I wouldn't. The argument that ease of piracy decreases sales is disingenuous. Sure, if you ran a store with no security of any kind, the odds are good your theft rate will go up, and you'll lose more money than a store that had decent inventory protection (assuming all else is a constant - specialized shops in extremely small towns might enjoy very low shrinkage even without security).

So it's only natural to want to apply that logic to the software industry - but therein lies the problem: Piracy is not like theft from a retail store. Developers and publishers do not lose money when you download a pirated copy of their software, because you are stealing data - they only do not gain any money from you, unlike a retail shop where any theft of the inventory reduces profit because it costs money and now they have one less unit to sell. With software, you have potentially infinite copies, you are only limited to how many you want to sell and what the market might actually buy.

So they don't actually lose money when somebody pirates a copy, but they don't get paid for it either, so wouldn't combating piracy be a logical choice to increase sales? People will be far more readily inclined to steal things if they think they can get away with it.

I don't have much of a beef with the majority of what you said except for what i quoted.

Where do you think games come from? Do you think publishers just have a magical tree in there back yard that sprouts Game discs? When you steal a game the company still loses money.

An average game this generation costs 15 fucking million dollars.
Read that again.
15 MILLION dollars.
$15,000,000.00

A publisher needs to make that money back before they are even considered to make a profit. Every time you steal you are essentially taking money directly out of there mouths. There is no difference between stealing something off a shelf or stealing something digitally other then WHO YOU ARE STEALING FROM.

When you steal off a shelf you are stealing from the owner of the establishment. When you steal the game from a torrent you are stealing from the company directly. They LOSE money because if LESS people buy there video games it means LESS stores stock there game which means they sell LESS games. Its not as direct as ripping off a gamestop but you are still effectively stealing from them.

If you need an example that's closer to home ask yourself. If you went to pick up your cheque from work and your boss decided, naw and told you you were not getting paid would you consider that stealing? He OWES you for the service provided. By not giving you your cheque did he not STEAL your time? By stealing a games data off the internet you have effectively stolen that companies time and money put into making that game. Just like your boss has just stolen 80 hours of your life. With labor you have potentially INFINITE hours, you are only limited by how many people you want to employ.

So if you walked into work tomorrow and found out you were not going to be paid for the past 80 hours of work you put in I swear that you would be muttering, "Dirty fucking thieves" under your breathe while looking up the help wanted ads.

Edit: Don't get me wrong. I do agree DRM in general has gotten to the point where i honestly have stopped buying pc games(I only play on my PS3 now. Outside of SC2 when it comes out my computer is pretty much a glorified web browser) I just can't stand it when people saying stealing data doesn't count as stealing. It steals both time and money from these companies.

 

[teisjm]

Steam is as far as I'm willing to go. They sweeten the deal with stupid cheap game sales and I've never had a single problem playing a game I bought off steam, online or off. I used to put all my game shortcuts into a folder on the desktop but steam pretty well does that for me in it's interface.

It works, but boy did it have growing pains. I believe it was Counterstrike 1.6 it launched with. Massive hassle.

edit

Also, it should really go without saying that the best DRM is treating your customers well. Give them little incentives, it doesn't need to be much, to buy legally and they will. Cool packaging, maps, books, little things. When you treat them like criminals before they've even bought your product don't expect the relationship to end well.

Excactly how i ssteam effective in this case? It works fine for costumers sure, but how many games on steam has gone un-pirated?

I would tell them not to bother, cause no matter what it will get pirated.
The only games i know that hasn't been (proberbly) pirated are MMO's cause they sortof require a massiv eplayer base to work, they're consatntly updated, and big parts of the game aren't on the disc or DL the buyers recieve. But then again, if enough peopel wanted to it could happen... i've played on a free WoW server once.

Otherwise they could put awesome stuff in the game-box, non-digital stuff, which can't be pirated.

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

Short answer: I wouldn't. The argument that ease of piracy decreases sales is disingenuous. Sure, if you ran a store with no security of any kind, the odds are good your theft rate will go up, and you'll lose more money than a store that had decent inventory protection (assuming all else is a constant - specialized shops in extremely small towns might enjoy very low shrinkage even without security).

So it's only natural to want to apply that logic to the software industry - but therein lies the problem: Piracy is not like theft from a retail store. Developers and publishers do not lose money when you download a pirated copy of their software, because you are stealing data - they only do not gain any money from you, unlike a retail shop where any theft of the inventory reduces profit because it costs money and now they have one less unit to sell. With software, you have potentially infinite copies, you are only limited to how many you want to sell and what the market might actually buy.

So they don't actually lose money when somebody pirates a copy, but they don't get paid for it either, so wouldn't combating piracy be a logical choice to increase sales? People will be far more readily inclined to steal things if they think they can get away with it.

Spoiler: Long winded rant in which Kagim completely misses the point of the portion of my post that's quoted.

I don't have much of a beef with the majority of what you said except for what i quoted.

Where do you think games come from? Do you think publishers just have a magical tree in there back yard that sprouts Game discs? When you steal a game the company still loses money.

An average game this generation costs 15 fucking million dollars.
Read that again.
15 MILLION dollars.
$15,000,000.00

A publisher needs to make that money back before they are even considered to make a profit. Every time you steal you are essentially taking money directly out of there mouths. There is no difference between stealing something off a shelf or stealing something digitally other then WHO YOU ARE STEALING FROM.

When you steal off a shelf you are stealing from the owner of the establishment. When you steal the game from a torrent you are stealing from the company directly. They LOSE money because if LESS people buy there video games it means LESS stores stock there game which means they sell LESS games. Its not as direct as ripping off a gamestop but you are still effectively stealing from them.

If you need an example that's closer to home ask yourself. If you went to pick up your cheque from work and your boss decided, naw and told you you were not getting paid would you consider that stealing? He OWES you for the service provided. By not giving you your cheque did he not STEAL your time? By stealing a games data off the internet you have effectively stolen that companies time and money put into making that game. Just like your boss has just stolen 80 hours of your life. With labor you have potentially INFINITE hours, you are only limited by how many people you want to employ.

So if you walked into work tomorrow and found out you were not going to be paid for the past 80 hours of work you put in I swear that you would be muttering, "Dirty fucking thieves" under your breathe while looking up the help wanted ads.

Edit: Don't get me wrong. I do agree DRM in general has gotten to the point where i honestly have stopped buying pc games(I only play on my PS3 now. Outside of SC2 when it comes out my computer is pretty much a glorified web browser) I just can't stand it when people saying stealing data doesn't count as stealing. It steals both time and money from these companies.

You really need to work on your reading comprehension and/or sense of moral outrage, because that was not my point at all - pirates are jackasses ripping off the creative work of talented individuals who have put a lot of time, effort, and money into their creations. But when Person A downloads Game X from a torrent site, Publisher Y's bank account does not go down by the listed retail price of Game X.

That is what differentiates downloading a copy of something from theft of a physical unit - the act of piracy itself does not incur a loss for the publisher/developers/musicians/etc. In terms of financial impact to the flow of revenue, downloading pirated games/music/movies has the same effect as walking through a game/music/video store, looking at a bunch of titles, and then putting everything back on the shelf and leaving without making a purchase - the pirate did not give you money that they SHOULD have, but neither did they remove works of value such that you now have less money than before.

You have exactly as much revenue if you sell 1,000 copies of a game and it gets pirated 100 times as you would if you sold 1,000 copies and it got pirated 1,000,000,000,000,000 times. If your development costs were less than what you made from sales, then you have made a profit in both scenarios.

Should the pirates have paid for your work instead of illegally downloading it and not paying you? Absolutely. Would games with mediocre sales but high piracy rates have been blockbuster success stories if all the pirates had paid for it? Sure they would! If piracy was impossible, would all the people who pirated it and drove those figures so high turn around and buy a copy instead?

Good freaking question - publishers will tell bold-faced LIES and say "Of course!", and wave about the absolutely staggering figures of piracy rates as "Losses from piracy!", but the truth is nobody knows whether or not anyone who pirated a copy would have purchased it if they could not have pirated it. Pirates after all are not your paying customers - their defining attribute is that they steal your shit without paying.

Are you a jerk for downloading the hard work of creative individuals without paying them for it? Of course you are. But depriving someone of payment for their work is still not directly analogous to stealing merchandise from the shelves of a convenience store - no costs are incurred when a copy is made and therefore no losses are incurred when a copy is swiped, and your examples are therefore incorrect.

A much better one would be not leaving a tip when you dine at a restaurant, which is essentially the direct equivalent of software piracy, in that you receive the same service that other patrons did but they actually paid for it. But the act of not leaving the tip itself does not make the server lose money - for that, you would have to not only deprive them of a tip but also take some of the tips they have already accrued. Making less money than you rightfully should and incurring a lose due to direct theft are not the same thing at all: sure, both cost you money, but the one is potential money you could have made, and the second is money you actually have right now that you just lost (you know, a "loss").

This is a simple fact of accounting and not a judgment on the morality of piracy - I've already established I think pirates are douchebags. It's a natural response to want to spite the freeloading jackasses not paying you for your hard work yet enjoying it anyways, but it's the wrong response [small](for reasons the rest of my original post in this thread already covered)[/small].

Go get mad at somebody else if you have to be angry, you certainly shouldn't be mad at me.

 

[x0ny]

Hire the population of a small city in China, pay them a dollar an hour to manually type a bunch of CD Keys. Only games with CD keys will be allowed. Only one instance of a certain CD key may be active at one time, something similar to Windows activation will be required to enforce this.

 

[Del-Toro]

I would do exactly what Arkham Asylum did. Feel free to pirate, too bad your character is a cripple! Of course I would then add in guns that shot your character even when he's the one using them, the same camera they've been using in the recent Sonic games, and cars that exploded only when you were in them and completely at random. I'd essentially make the game unplayable. I'd then throw in a piece of paper with a code to get the real game, making over a hundred different keygens and distributing them over the internet completely at random but designing them to corrupt the game data. I would also design them to freeze up when someone tried to open them in any otherwise compatible programming language, like VB for example. The legit gamers would not have to worrry about it at all, the pirates would never be able to touch it. Probably not realistic, but I think it would be a good way of messing with pirates, if even just for a day.

 

[Kagim]

A much better one would be not leaving a tip when you dine at a restaurant, which is essentially the direct equivalent of software piracy, in that you receive the same service that other patrons did but they actually paid for it. But the act of not leaving the tip itself does not make the server lose money - for that, you would have to not only deprive them of a tip but also take some of the tips they have already accrued. Making less money than you rightfully should and incurring a lose due to direct theft are not the same thing at all: sure, both cost you money, but the one is potential money you could have made, and the second is money you actually have right now that you just lost (you know, a "loss").

And here is where the misunderstanding becomes obvious. I felt you were saying that taking the data doesn't constitute as stealing. While i still feel that they suffer a financial and time loss from stealing the data we are arguing over semantics.

Calm down though. It was a misunderstanding around minor beliefs. I'm willing to apologize for any offense.

Edit: I consider losing money you should have gotten a loss. Even if it isn't taken from you i feel its a loss if you supposed to get it for your work. Sorta as if that server was docked the time she spent working with you. Her bank balance didn't go down, just the money she should have gotten for her hard work. To me that counts as a loss.

 

[Zannah]

I don't have much of a beef with the majority of what you said except for what i quoted.

Where do you think games come from? Do you think publishers just have a magical tree in there back yard that sprouts Game discs? When you steal a game the company still loses money.

An average game this generation costs 15 fucking million dollars.
Read that again.
15 MILLION dollars.
$15,000,000.00

A publisher needs to make that money back before they are even considered to make a profit. Every time you steal you are essentially taking money directly out of there mouths. There is no difference between stealing something off a shelf or stealing something digitally other then WHO YOU ARE STEALING FROM.

No, just NO.

If you steal something from a shelf in a store, it's gone, because you have it now. Digital data can be copied infinite amounts of time. If your going into a store, taking a copy of something on display, that's not stealing. It may, if that shop is selling pictures, or books, still not be legal, but it's not stealing. Now people, just like yourself, are trying to come up with some bs-logic, along the lines of "but now you don't have to buy it, because you pirated it". A logic, which has the slight flaw of thinking, that I would have bought the game, could I not have pirated it. And that's quite a flaw.
Due to not having all the insight I'd like to have into that business, I won't go on about your numbers, but I'm pretty sure, that publishers would still gain money by selling the same products for half the price, but never midn that; Let's take a look at what kind of people pirate games;

a) The Pirates themselves
Those are mainly in for the challenge of handing it's ass to the next unbreakable Drm. Unprotected games, they don't bother with.

b) People on Lan / In for Coop.
If you want to play something with a couple of friends via Lan, or let's say if I want to play a game coop with my boyfriend, in the earlier days, we'd buy a copy, and share the cd around to install. But nobody is going to buy two copies of the same game in a household, or buy ten copies of a game, for the off chance they might want to play it on lan. Sure they pirate it, but they'd never bought it, and would have just cotinued playing the same games for the fifteenth time, hadn't they pirated.

c) Poor People
I have no Idea about the situation you live in, but there's those among us, who have to finance themselves, and struggle affording their breakfast and broadband-connection the other day, because mom and dad stopped caring, years ago. Those people like new games too, from time to time. But they can't buy them, so if they couldn't pirate, they wouldn't buy either.

d) People who want to test a game, before buying blindly
Those increase piracy numbers, but given the game is worthwile, their going to buy it anyway.

The Kind of person, that would buy all the games, but with the determination of an arch-villain pirates every programme out their, out of genuine evilness, so all the poor bobby kotick's of the world will lose their job and have to sleep under a bridge, might exist somewhere (in france), but I haven't seen any, up to now.

On the other hand, b) and c) might well find a game that is so good, they buy it to play online or support the publishers, or buy the sequel, or tell their friends who might get interested. So basically, lots of free publicity, that makes lots of people happy, and doesn't cost a single cent.

 

[MasTerHacK]

We don't need DRM. In fact what we should actually get rid of is capitalism not pirates.That's our real problem. Share the wealth. The world is for everyone to enjoy. We need socialism.

Then say goodbye to innovation...

oh, and bug fxes.


Or good games at all.


Without the chance for profits a lot of things go to hell.

Actually, by socialism I meant a complete re-write of the current thinking.
e.g.
You don't do it for profit but for fun.
The best games are made for fun, and the idea of socialism, and communism too, is a classless society. Everyone has their job, and everyone has the same treatment. Firms don't have CEOs and similar stuff, they're controlled by the workers. Workers decide what to do, not men in suits.
Classes are what's wrong with society, so is money.

 

[joshuaayt]

Ah- for the sweet days of cartridges. Did I complain about having to go and pay thirty dollars for Starshot, without testing it first? Even though Starshot was terrible? NEVER.
Ah, when it comes down to it, the whole process is pointless. It is as OP mentioned- Pirates can crack it as fast as you can make it. You couldn't even employ, like, a super pirate to make the DRM for you, because a whole group of side pirates would come about and, inevitably, prevail.
The best way would, in short, be destroying the internet. You just have to shoot it in the central server.

 

[Chipperz]

I'd basically use Project Ten Dollar, because it's fucking genius. My first free DLC would be putting music in the game. If you don't download it, you get...

Spoiler: This!

If you don't get the relevance of this, you need to get out and watch some more Kubrick

 

[Bloodstain]

Pretty easy things -

-Make buying the game worthwile (Remember the time, where games came in boxes, rather dan dvd-cases and had goodies, and maps, and artbooks, sometimes even actual books and posters and all that stuff with them? You can't pirate those, and they will definately be a selling point. When what you get by buying is nothing but a Dvd with even the handbook on pdf - why bother?

-Seperate Lan-mode, for free download. 99,9% of the acts of piracy that I've encountered, are in the situation, where your sitting on a lan, and want to play a particular game with a cuple of friends. You obviously won't buy ten copies for that. Now if the publisher just allowed Lan-only versions of the game, with no single-player (or maybe a couple of demo-levels) and no online-multiplayer, and gave them away for free, Number one reason for piracy would be eliminated (and sales would even rise, due to more people trying things out, getting interested, buying to play online.

-Treat customers well. If you treat legal customers like their all criminals waiting to happen, you will only make them pirate more.

-More fan-service - free dlc, the means to get to know other players, modding tools, goodies all exclusively for those, who signup in an online-social thingie, that you need to have an original code for. If someone pirates a game, plays single-player then likes it, and buys it to play online, or get dlc - thats fine, a sale is still a sale.

-Make the things cheaper: Why is it, that some games are 30 bucks, some 40 and some 60? That's not due to the 60 buck games being so much more expensive to make, the publishers are just more greedy. And someone who pirates, because he (or she) is a piss-poor student, desperately trying to finance herself, and can't afford to buy all those shiny games she'd like to have because they're so damm expensi... oh sorry, getting a little carried away there. And yes, it's kinda sad, nobody from the industry asks me.

This. Pretty good suggestions, although I doubt that the "seperate Lan-mode, for free download"-idea will work.

 

[sammi43055]

Games with extras are nice. I personally think BioShock 2 had a really nice box set and I hear that God of War 3 will have a nice one too. Anything that gives you more than just a box, crappy box art, a game manual and a game are nice.

 

[saejox]

Serial Key for multiplayer, no need for dvd check.

 

[Delusibeta]

For single player games, disc check only, to be honest.

For multiplayer games, I would use the TrackMania Forever model. For the main game, one serial number associated with 1 account, unlimited installs and no DVD required. And a portion of the game served up (and compatible with the main game) for free. Perhaps add in a stream of new DLC (a la Mass Effect 2 or Team Fortress 2. Hell, even TM United's new patch of over 100 new community tracks will do).

 

[Zannah]

This. Pretty good suggestions, although I doubt that the "seperate Lan-mode, for free download"-idea will work.

Why wouldn't it? Compared to single-player campaigns and online modes, Lan-mp is a relatively small feature, but one of the main reasons to pirate things - and those people wouldn't pirate if they could get their lan free, and would be more likely to purchase the game, if they like it.

 

[GamingAwesome1]

Where's that Shamus Young article when you need it?

But some sort of devious DRM following in Batman: AA's footsteps.