The Impossible DRM

[SimuLord]

If I recall correctly, the intent of DRM is NOT to stop piracy. As you point out, that's an impossibility, and most sane people recognize that. The intent is instead to DELAY pirated copies from becoming available, because nothing hurts a game more than day 0 (or earlier!) piracy. In that respect, DRM would appear to at least have a fair shake of doing the job: eventually, yes, someone will crack it, but if you can delay that even a week that will make a huge impact on your bottom line. I'm not saying I'm a fan of it, I'd much rather developers focused on making their products "better than free" by adding intangible value to it (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly08/kelly08_index.html is a good article on that subject), but it's not necessarily an act of futility.

Now, I don't have any numbers with me, so it could still well be cost-ineffective, but it does change the nature of the numbers game somewhat.

The mere fact that pirates have to wait a day or a week or a month before the game is cracked will not send them to the stores on Day Zero. They're still going to steal it, some of them will even brag about it as if piracy makes them smarter than the corporations (you see this a lot from the 11-to-15 set), and they're still going to call people who actually pay for the games and support their development "sheep" and "fanboys" and "mindless pawns of the corporate machine" and whatever else their little kleptomaniac minds can dream up.

If the corporations really want to fight piracy, they can make multiplayer games and release them on Steam where the pirates will be locked out of the large community of legitimate players (you'll notice that games like TF2 and L4D aren't pirated in nearly the same proportions because private servers just plain aren't as good as what Valve's offering.)

You alluded to this in your post ("adding intangible value", "better than free"). I think that's exactly the solution companies need to come up with and I also think it's why EA has things exactly backwards with the use of SecuROM to basically make pirated games better AND free (although to be fair to EA, they finally seem to understand that Steam is a distribution channel that will make them more money. Here's hoping they continue to utilize that platform so they can wash the bad taste out of their customers' mouths.)

 

[starstriker1]

Like I said, I don't have numbers on me, so it's difficult to make an informed argument to what's actually happening. My inclination is that hardcore pirates are ALWAYS going to pirate, no matter what you do, so those are people you just have to ignore. What stopping day 0 piracy might do, however, is to convince "pirates of convenience" that they want to go and just buy the game instead of waiting a week. For many people, that IS a compelling argument, as remarkably few people have the patience to wait.

I can't definitively argue that it DOES result in enough people rushing out to get it day one to justify the technology investment and the lost customers/goodwill, but looking at DRM in that light changes the context from one of utter futility to one where it may be economically justifiable.

 

[wasalp]

This is probably one of the best written articles I've actually read in a long time (not that some of the others aren't good). One question I've got that wasn't addressed (probably because of lack of information): What about concepts like OnLive. Wouldn't these services stop piracy? It's my understanding the actual "game" is on a server somewhere else and is streamed to you as you play, much the same way MMO's are. In addition to it's other benefits (less hardware requirements, no disks etc. to lose/break, possiblility of cheaper prices/better quality control), this would seem to be a possible solution. I'm no expert on the matter, however, so feel free to correct me if I'm mistaken about something.

IF you did read the article with alot a attention you should know that they did mention the fact that once the game is on your ram(stream does that too) you could just copy it. It would probably be harder tough(Im not sure). So it would still not completely stop pirating.

(sorry if someone posted this before I only read the first page of comments)

 

[starstriker1]

That's not how OnLive is supposed to work. It is literally supposed to be a video stream to your computer from their servers: the game itself is never on your hard drive.

That's not to say I'm convinced that it will work (bandwidth, server load, and lag all seem like disturbingly large obstacles) but in theory, yes, OnLive would be 100% pirate proof because there would be nothing to pirate.

 

[SlayerGhede]

While I acknowledge that Pre-launch piracy probably does affect sales, either through buggy alpha releases causing bad word-of-mouth, or people just plain 'forgetting' to buy the game when it comes out, DRM is not the solution to that. Every incident of Pre-launch piracy is an example of a leak. Someone got access to the game before they should have, somehow. DRM isn't going to magic away the security flaws in your distribution arrangement. If it leaks a week early, that's an extra week for someone to work on cracking your DRM, and an added e-peen incentive too: "I'll be the first to crack it!" Those games that were delayed a week before pirating probably never leaked in the first place, the first pirate had to buy, borrow, or steal a retail copy first.

Second, the argument of delaying the piracy to frustrate would be pirates into buying the game would work... if there were only one game in the entire world or everyone completely lacked patience. It's not like pirates are by nature any more impatient than consumers, and most people who don't pirate don't buy more games than they can afford as soon as they come out. They buy what they can, then buy what they couldn't afford when it first came out at a later date. Replace buy with download it works for pirates as well.

Of course, this is all assuming the groups pirate and consumer don't overlap. Some pirates purchase by priority, some consumers pirate out of desperation or animosity, and sometimes they are the same person.

 

[Arbre]

Reminds me of the Spyro article at GamaSutra. In it, the people at Insomniac learned from the Spyro 2 issues (it being pirated the day it came out, rendering the sales figures of the game to plummet severely). For Spyro 3, they made it in such a way that the copy-protection is very hard to crack. It took hackers two months to fully crack the game (according to them, these two months after game's release is the most important. The hackers ended up thanking them for putting up such a challenge.

The full article can be read here [http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011017/dodd_01.htm].

Moral of the story, you can't stop pirates, so it would be better to be able to delay them just a bit.

Exactly, that's the point of the DRM. Delay the piracy as far as possible to "force" sales.

And, if you read the article, you'll see that the thing they used was very non-intrusive. They just made the game like a multi-layered, lock puzzle. Fail one lock, the game can no longer be copied. And it fiendishly removed items necessary for progress so as to give some people the impression that they have cracked the game.

And how does that dispute my point pray tell?

 

[Syntax Error]

Reminds me of the Spyro article at GamaSutra. In it, the people at Insomniac learned from the Spyro 2 issues (it being pirated the day it came out, rendering the sales figures of the game to plummet severely). For Spyro 3, they made it in such a way that the copy-protection is very hard to crack. It took hackers two months to fully crack the game (according to them, these two months after game's release is the most important. The hackers ended up thanking them for putting up such a challenge.

The full article can be read here [http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20011017/dodd_01.htm].

Moral of the story, you can't stop pirates, so it would be better to be able to delay them just a bit.

Exactly, that's the point of the DRM. Delay the piracy as far as possible to "force" sales.

And, if you read the article, you'll see that the thing they used was very non-intrusive. They just made the game like a multi-layered, lock puzzle. Fail one lock, the game can no longer be copied. And it fiendishly removed items necessary for progress so as to give some people the impression that they have cracked the game.

And how does that dispute my point pray tell?

Not dispute, I'm backing it up.

 

[Cid Silverwing]

Somebody, for the love of God, print this out and staple it to the head of EA's CEO.

This.

 

[Cook66]

I find it odd that the article doesn't mention OnLive or similar concepts. Streaming content over a network would theoretically stop piracy in it's tracks. However, even if we look past all the potential problems with OnLive such as streaming to everyone on slow and fast connections (or none) or how much server and bandwidth hardware would be needed to replace the current gaming market I would guess some sort of playable copy of the game would have to exist.

If a playable copy exists you can be sure someone will be able to get it to some Scene group which will spread it all over the place. Still though... theres just no way every version of every major game release will be all streamed as video to all possible costumers. Maybe some concept games or rare releases will, but I doubt this will happen.

Still though. Piracy protection is possible, and a game does NOT have to exist as code on a gamers computer in order from him to play it, so I think this article deserves an update where this is clarified.

 

[Gongon]

I don't believe the real purpose of DRM is to limit piracy, but rather to limit re-sale and lending out of games (and I think Shamus has mentioned this in one of his previous articles). When you buy a physical copy of a game, you "own" the game and can sell it to whoever you want to, and that person can sell it again. The publishers won't see any revenue from this market. With DRM, online activation and limited installs per box, publishers limit this part of the market. Of course the buyer can just buy the game used and then crack it, but these are not the people who would do that. If you have the know-how to crack the game, why would you even buy it used when you can get it for free already? Someone who does not really know how to download a game from the interwebs would look at the price of a used game and the price of a brand new game, and make his decision.

Of course the publishers can't really go out and say "We do this to limit re-sales", so they blame it on piracy, throwing out random numbers about how much money they lose and how terrible pirates are without giving up any sources. This shifts the blame and gives the publishers a scapegoat. Something to take the attention away from the real issue. They know they can't stop the pirates, but they can damn well use that to stop people from getting their game cheap somewhere else. They want to stop those who do not have the know-how to pirate games, i.e the majority of the current user-base.

I don't blame anyone. Publishers try to make money, buyers try to save money. Simple supply and demand. And caught in the middle are the poor developers just trying to make the best game they can.

A couple notes on piracy and availability. Back in the days when I was an avid LAN-party-goer, we used to play up to a dozen different games during a party. Most of these games required a simple CD-check to play, but the annoyance of having to switch CDs all the time made us download cracked .exe files for most of the games we played, just so we didn't have to bring all our CDs and risk losing them. My point is; DRM, even back then, was limiting us to play the games we wanted to play, so we found ways around this so we could play our games the way they were intended to play.

Piracy will never stop as long as you get a better product by pirating. Publishers need to give you the game the way it's meant to be played right out of the box, without any intrusive protection and preferably with added benefits for those who bought the game first-hand. Though I doubt this will happen until we gamers start speaking with our wallets.

 

[w00tage]

Wasn't Oblivion released without DRM? As in just copy it using any DVD copy program? And didn't it still rock the sales charts for the year?
I've never seen any kind of DRM as nothing more than an annoyance for all involved. I think the real cause of DRM is fear on the part of the game company execs. They have to show that they care and are doing something about those bad pirates or the board/investors/stockholders (who are totally out of the ballpark on any technical issues) will be able to question their judgment, and the execs won't have an answer.

So the whole DRM thing is really just to make the job of game company execs easier. Which means it's NEVER going away.

 

[AdmiralMemo]

I don't know if anyone's pointed this out before (I'm not reading 90 long comments at quarter of midnight), but all arguments about losing money to pirates (though they weren't called that at the time) have been raised many times before.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18513_5-insane-file-sharing-panics-from-before-internet.html

 

[jpoon]

Spot on man, I've always thought DRM does little beyond provoke more and more people to pirate a game or find a workaround for the bullshit scam that is DRM.