How would you implement DRM?

[Cid Silverwing]

I wouldn't. Because DRM is bullshit.

But if pressured, Steam offers the most user-friendly authentication there is.

 

[Cheshire Cat]

Personally, I wouldn't. All DRM ever seems to do is screw with legal customers, as pirates always crack it open and get game versions without the DRM in.

Best way would be to make games worth buying again. Decrease the cost of the game, give nice preorder bonus' with the store bought games like Statues/soundtrack CD's etc.
That sort of thing :-D

 

[Denamic]

Steam.
'nuff said.

 

[Helgi]

I would use something like ubisofts DRM that requires you to be online constantly while you play, but four months after the release day I would patch it out. There is no reason to have DRM any longer than that.

 

[Xodion]

I would implement DRM in a similar format to Arkham Asylum.

"Hey, why does my character suddenly stop, shout 'I'm so guilty, waaaaa' and shoot himself in the head?"

"It's our DRM, all pirates have a main character who commits suicide because he feels so filthy for helping you have fun.
Also, you can't remove it because it's hardcoded into the save system and if the save system is replaced the game just stops working."

The save lock thing is my own little possibly-too-complex idea, but you know what I mean.

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.

Most people are picking up on the positive-marketing approach, giving away goodies and Day One DLC with keycodes, but these two are the best plans so far. As a programmer, I loved the Arkham Asylum glitch idea, and relative to the total time spent programming the game it was probably quite quick to do. If you built in a few of these throughout the game, including some very subtle ones, then told the world there was at least one, pirates would be hard-pressed to find them all (and to know if they had got them all) by the release date.

Or, an even nastier idea I had similar to the save-lock: put a tiny piece of code in that will, later in the game, scramble the saves. Wipe them completely. Obviously this code won't be in the official game, you add it to the version you send out to testers and reviewers (like the Arkham glitch). Then as soon as the torrents appear, TELL EVERYONE. Would you want to risk pirating a game when it might completely die and lose all your progress 10+ hours in? Do you trust the pirates that much?

 

[The DSM]

I would throw it into a fire.

I hate DRM.

 

[Darmort]

No online activation, no disk authenticity, a CD key just to prevent people from playing the same copy on several different computers and as much as I dislike the idea (however much it works), EA's Project Ten Dollar free day one DLC would be good. Perhaps the DLC installed on the disk rather than a code which can be installed one-time only to prevent keygens making new ones.

I'd also ensure that there were servers, a free poster with every purchase and a dog tag or something similar from the game.

 

[Uncreation]

snip

Oh, sorry, I guess I misunderstood what you meant.

Well, from what i've read from this thread people have a couple of interesting ideas, but i really doubt they would work. If it's something in the software, it WILL be cracked. If it's something like suing the pirates, it won't work either because there are way to many pirates to sue them all, and suing a few to make an example of them has never worked before, so...

I think DRM is just a waste of money. Money better spent on developing the game. Or, used on giving insentives to paying customers. Someone brought up the interesting point that a good couple of years ago, games came in boxes... that contained not just the game, but manuals, maps, badges, coins, sometimes even t-shirts and other stuff. Now it's just a lame DVD case, maybe with some useless coupon or registration sheet or something. I think this would be a good kind of insentive.

 

[GamerFromJump]

The same way Baen implements DRM. Seems to work for them.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

Why bother? We've already established that it doesn't stop pirates at all, so even systems that don't inconvenience legitimate customers would just be a waste of time and money.

Steam isn't any different. I was able to snag a pirated copy of Portal by the time I was looking into getting it. As I could tell it wasn't even cracked; it was just the files extracted from the CGF's. And the reason I got a pirated copy in the first place was that Steam was having issues with its store. Something about regions. That's right. I, Steve the Pocket, obtained a pirated copy of a Valve game because a bug was preventing me from obtaining it legally. I bought it once the bug was fixed, of course, but isn't that exactly the sort of thing people are complaining about?

Plus, with Steam you can't resell your games or even give them away to other Steam users. I don't have a problem with that, since I only get games I want to keep anyway, but I know most people expect to be able to do that, and in life it's just naturally accepted that you can sell or give things away when you don't want them anymore. As I've said before, even some SecuROM games, like Arkham Asylum, come with such ludicrously high activation limits that you could pass the game around at a rate of one person a week. (Of course, you could also let one person pirate the game per week, so at that point you really have to wonder why they bothered.)

 

[Vuljatar]

I wouldn't.

Don't piss off your fanbase and they won't fuck you over. Draconian DRM measures are the quickest and easiest way to piss off your fanbase. (Well, second quickest... I'm looking at you, MW2 PC.)

You make a game that's worth the money and you'll get the money. The vast majority of people pirating the game would not have bought it anyway--and certainly wouldn't have bought it new--so you're losing far less in the way of sales than everyone says.

 

[Therumancer]

Hypothetically a game company employs you to combat piracy of their software.

You already know that pirates can crack just about anything way faster than you can create it.

You've learned from customer feedback that it is certainly not the EA or Ubisoft methods that will work.

So how would you go about it?

I've been around copy protection since it first got started and can see all the arguements on all sides. In general I feel the industry has remained profitable despite even the worst piracy. Hypothetically cutting into piracy MIGHT raise profits, but since there is no guarantee that all those people unable to pirate will buy the games in question even if we succeed it's impossible to tell if we will gain more than we will lose by annoying our customer base.

Of course this is spoken from the perspective of someone outside the industry, who is very critical of it, while at the same time feeling piracy is not worth the risks it entails (without considering any legal ones).

That said I feel no legal method right now would work in actually stopping piracy. Meaning that if they asked me to solve the problem I would actually see the potential solution as investing money in political lobbying to change the laws rather than developing new copy protection software. Nailing a pirate or three here or there isn't going to make much of a differance, but say if you can get an alliance of software companies to lobby for tighter laws on which to have the goverment arrest people, and help finance the construction of more prisons to put the people in (given the whole issue of 'do we want to waste prison space on game pirates') well, that might work. Again it comes down to the whole issue of whether or not there is enough money to be made.

See, one thing people forget is that private industry DOES donate to the goverment for the running of prisons and such. A lot of times when someone wants to see a law changed to see arrests made towards their benefit, one of the things they do along with the usual is offer money to help deal with the fallout, and house and maintain prisoners and such.

A somewhat simplistic definition on the "how" but it's one possible solution.


The other of course is simply to ignore legality yourself and go after the pirates by doing things like putting up pirate copies of your own game on sites loaded with viruses and malware to wreck the computers of those DLing the games. Then you wind up competing not with crackers but with virus protection, and the rate at which sites (especially anonymous torrent sites) can detect and keep up with you. This kind of thing has been done, and I don't generally agree with it, but hasn't been practiced on a truely massive scale.

See, a lot of why I don't pirate is because I don't think it's worth the risk to my computer along with the moral considerations. Not many think like me, because the odds are fairly minimal. Make it so your really flipping a coin when you DL, and are dealing with professionally constructed viruses and such customized to hide in the pirated games (as opposed to by some individual pirate with a sick sense of humor). Start frying hundreds of thousands of computers and well... let's just say it hasn't been done on this scale but it would probably work. Of course being illegal this would mean the companies having to cover their tracks well and deny being involved.

Then of course there are totally insane measures. If say MAJOR pirates and the guys known to be leading major torrent sites wound up being killed horribly as opposed to being sent to Swedish Court or whatever it would probably have an effect. Enough bodies and eventually some guy is going to think twice before cracking the latest game for fear that a game company will hire some drug addict to kill them in their sleep if they are caught. Of course you do this and the goverments will catch on, and then the game industry will have more to worry about than censorship concerns. Still it WOULD address the piracy issue, albeit at the expense of other problems that are arguably more inconveinent.

As an aside, there was one short story I read in an anthology called "Shock Rock" that used fantasy type of thing to do exactly that to music pirates. Basically the concept was that the big time rockers really were all evil black magic practitioners, and sick of being robbed, they created an anthology album called "Ritual" that got passed around and inevitably pirated, at which point it would kill the listener by going berserk and playing a message clearly stating "Yes! everyone was right, we are devil worshipping black sorcerers, and you were stupid enough to steal from us!" as it did.

Totally irrelevent here, but I suppose the gaming industry could TRY and make pacts with dark powers to curse pirates with virtual demons that would leap out of their monitors or whatever. Realistically with the way I imagine it would turn out IRL I'd imagine it would be just as effective as DRM... a lot of annoying ritual, and no real results.

Honestly though it would be kind of amusing to see Bill Gates or someone busted for conducting pagan rites in his office, or pentagram carved goat skulls hanging on the walls in the offices of Valve or Blizzard "... and here is where we perform the sex rites with unbaptized 13 year old virgins to ensure World Of Warcraft's continued dominance, and the failure of all it's potential rivals.... you didn't REALLY think all these bugs our competition launched with was simply bad coding did you?" It would liven up the next photographic office tour. Also just imagine Gabe Newell in a black robe chanting nightly to reduce the piracy of Left 4 Dead games or something (or to place a curse on Victoria's Secret for not letting him win that contest).

 

[yoyo13rom]

Well by the looks of it Ubi's DRM isn't perfect, but it kinda seems to get the job done.
Me personally, I would hire the best pirates on the world and ask them to make a DRM that even they couldn't crack.

 

[Rickyvantof]

I'd develop nanobots that combine into huge killing machine robot ninja's. They travel through the internet in search for people pirating games. They upload themselves onto their computers and jump out, turning into the big ninja robot. Then it will shoot lasers from its eyes while doing awesome stuff with nunchucks.

That'll solve everything,I'm sure.

Seriously though, the only way to prevent piracy as well as possible is by rewarding the people who play the game legally; instead of punishing the honest people for pirates.

 

[veloper]

Patch PC games often. Have some minimal copy protection, like for example the disc or CD keys.

Then spend the money saved from DRM on more community building, like doing more interviews with the devs.
Don't piss on your fans. Make more fans.

 

[Rayansaki]

DRM just isn't viable in this generation. In theory, in a new generation where services like OnLive are the source of all your gaming, piracy will be stopped. The method PS3 uses is as good as it will get at the moment.

As for people praising Ubisoft's DRM, I will NEVER, EVER buy a game with that, even if I intended to buy it otherwise.