DRMs

Is anyone else being inconvenienced by the widespread implementation of it? I haven't pirated game since Unreal Tournament 2000 was released over 10 years ago, and I never will again; however, while I can definitely understand the publisher's/developer's desire to protect their work, I can't help but be disappointed and, on occasions, frightened away by games with unreasonable security measures...

For example, take Command and Conquer: Tiberian Twilight. Horrible game if you're a gamer whose standard of acceptance is a few notches above outright self-inflicted torture. I cannot play this game because it requires a constant Internet connection. If the EA server goes down, you're screwed. If your Internet connection is slow, you're screwed. If your Internet connection so much as suffers a few hiccups, you're screwed. And this is just to play single-player campaigns, by myself (I don't play online that much). Do publishers like EA expect every potential customer, particularly those living in relatively rural parts of a country, to possess a strong and consistent Internet connection at home? What is the point of that; where's the reason?

 

Funny thing is that the games can still be cracked. So it doesn't stop piracy, but it ruins the game for those who pay.

 

There is no DRM on a pirated game, the only people who have DRM on their games are paying customers. Wouldn't it be nice if our DRM was removed once we became a paying customer? The people who pay are treated like criminals.

 

To be honest you can understand why people download from Torrent and such and dont pay for games.

Just think if you had actually gone out and paid £39.99 for Command and Conquer 4 which 99% of people agree is by far one of the worst games ever released not to mention it has destroyed my love for the legendary Command and Conquer series.

You havent missed out on anything. Stick with C&C 3 Kane Edition.

Most retailers wont offer refunds anymore so if you are going to download and try it first why not, You will probably only end up paying for 10% of what you test and waste your time ebaying the DRM knightmare purchases!

 

oh look! a DRM thread! havn't seen these before!

loljkz, but seriously been done before we all hate it, ruins games, hassle etc.

 

Just popped in to make sure we don't talk about any locations to get torrents or ways to break DRM or anything specific here

 

To be honest I dunno what this DRM thing your all talking about is, guess I have to pay for games to find that out

 

Do you mean I can justify it for them? No, no I can't.

Do you mean because they are entitled, self-indulgent, spoiled, selfish and immature without a thought of what it does to developers, other gamers, or the industry because they only care about the self-gratification of playing games? Yeah, I can understand that side of things.

Seriously, as noted, nobody likes DRM - whether it is Steam or CD-keys or online activations ... or like me playing the original Pool or Radiance and having to decipher a 'code wheel' DRM key to start the game last month.

So what to do? What I have done is vote with my wallet. I spend literally thousands of dollars on games a year, and Ubisoft is now no longer getting any PC game money from me due to their DRM. But I deal with Steam, for example. If you don;t like the DRM, complain. If you still actually want the game - shut up and buy it.

There is no justification for intellectual property theft. Rationalization to assuage your feelings is the best you can get.

 

You know the funny thing about intellectual property? It didn't exist until just over 200 years ago. Getting on a moral high-horse about it ignores the vast majority of human history and culture.

Just because you don't like it doesn't mean that you can't understand where other people are coming from. Games are priced higher and higher, and they cause more and more problems when you get them legitimately. So, when you pirate games you get a better product for a lower price. Capitalism in action. It may not fit within your moral compass, but trying to argue against it on a "you're naughty if you do it!" is a losing battle. The only way to truly fight it is economically, make it so the official product has more value than the pirated one. Saying you can't understand why people do that is saying you don't understand economics.

Remember, calling names (such as spoiled, selfish and immature, which are value judgments and not arguments) is not allowed here.

 

This answers my argument though you must be minted to be able to spend thousands a year on games but where I am in a studio flat trying to survive on a basic wage slaving my rear off to break even and living off £100.00 after my bills go out you can see why from my side of things it is not justified to spend £40 on a game that is poorly made and/or has copyright technology.

I will not say that anything to do with breaking the law is right but I totally understand why people do it for testing means and because in this recession its the only way they are able to game.

Gaming is King! Id fight my way through a Metro tunnel with only 10 bullets left and 2 minutes on my gas mask just to get a taste of Dragon Age 2 next year!

 

Is it announced yet? Yes, I'd do much more then that to get a hold of it.

 

Computers didn't exist until the latter half of the last century ... my point being that intellectual property is in itself a reaction to and reflection of the advancements in technology.

Huh? There are two parties involved with capitalism, a seller and a buyer. In REAL capitalism there is a goal on the part of both parties for an end that is mutually beneficial. These days consumers seem happy to get a low price even if it means the company goes out of business or uses child slave labor or whatever ... but those are all well above the state of piracy. In piracy there is the party who is producing property and the one who - without knowledge, permission, or reciprocated benefit - has taken that property against the express wishes of the producing party.

I understand that the vast and overwhelming majority of pirates want stuff without having to pay for it, and since technology has enabled it, they do so ... and then construct a smokescreen that co-opts the legitimate concerns about pricing and DRM and other issues you mention.

There are those for whom and murder and other things fall within their moral compass. My assumption is that a shared set of values for gamers such that we all like playing games and want to see continued development of such games. Piracy is a clear and documented threat to that - can we really not agree to that yet?

I point directly to Stardock's Demigod - on opening weekend there were >120,000 players online ... 18,000 of whom were legal. Supporting the other 102,000 consumes *real* money and *real* time ... and therefore is a *real* economic impact.

That is right, because the internet is full of those whole will rationalize and apologize for those who take the property of others.

You wanted to bring history into it, so here is a core law that goes back several millenia - you have no right to that which is not yours. Something that someone else thought up, developed, created and produced ... if by its very definition someone else's property, and therefore NOT your property, and using the core beliefs going back thousands of years ... you have no right to it.

I understand economics fine - I also understand that the majority of people pirating have plenty of money, aren't engaged in any sort of moral campaign ... and quite honestly I find that relating piracy to a true economic progression shows a lack of understanding of how macroeconomics works.

I believe there is a fairly wide difference between marking generalities for attitudes which might precipitate certain behaviors in a hypothetical discussion and actually calling names.

Whether or not an individual person chooses to pirate software is their own business. But when someone posits 'honestly you can understand', it was more like a discussion of that hypothetical situation.

 

No my friend:

EA has revealed that Bioware's sequel to Dragon Age: Origins will hit store shelves on March 8 2011.

But remember this is a Bioware creation so this is subject to a lot of change

I recommend Metro 2033 though if you have some free time I need a story to keep me interested and I was gripped by it!

 

Because music, and books and so on didn't exist before now? They're also covered under "intellectual property".

In piracy, there are ships and raping and pillaging. In copyright infringement, there are bits being copied, nobody is being deprived of anything. There's a reason that theft laws doesn't cover copyright.

No, we can't. Proper piracy is murder. Copyright infringement is simply copying. Murder deprives someone of something tangible. Their life. Copyright infringement deprives someone of... well, pretty much nothing. Only their government mandated right to control copying.

If they could detect who didn't have legal licenses, it would have been just as easy to shut them off. They wanted to keep providing those services. It's not taking property, and probably wouldn't even hold up under theft of services. Really. Look at the law. It's not charged under those laws for a reason.

No, it's not. Otherwise you would be charged with burglary if you got emailed an attachment. You need to clear up this misconception if you want to have a legitimate discussion.

You're the one equating virtual copies to theft. Electronic bits are for all purposes infinite. When supply is infinite, cost drops to zero. There's macroeconomics for you.

To bring this discussion back to DRM, you're saying you can't understand that someone will take the cheaper, better product over one that screws up their computer and doesn't run and costs much more? When people feel they aren't getting a fair deal, they go elsewhere.

Imagine it this way: you have a mile long street, full of places people want and need to go on both sides. With no crosswalks. It's illegal to jaywalk... would you blame people for doing so? It's the same situation with DRM. People are expected to pay for being hobbled.

I'm not advocating copying games. I buy all of mine. But I'm also saying that copyright infringement is a very logical, understandable step that people take when they feel that they're being taken advantage of because games are very expensive and can't be returned, especially since there is nobody being deprived of anything other than potential revenue, which may or may not have happened in the first place.

 

what is the thing about DRM screwing up ur computer? Will my computer suddenly explode and it says u got pwned by DRM on ur screen, if so am so going back to rapidshare and warez forums. The only reason i buy my games is so i can have them all on Steam and install em when i want, so please explain me more of the DRM threat.

 

DRM is stuff like StarForce, basically any copy protection. Even Steam is DRM, but it's more acceptable than most DRM schemes for most people.

More reading: Why DRM Sucks
Why DRM sucks Imaginary Lands

 

Depends on the drm.

Ages past some DRM was so horrible that it could accidentally break windows since it decides it needed to slip into the system or something.

 

Intellectual property needs to be protected, and unfortunately, no one has come up with a better solution than DRM. You can quote economics as much as you want, but with the invention of software, you're essentially dividing by zero. Because software can be copied at no cost, it is out of the scope of basic economics. Data itself is infinite and worthless, but the ideas behind the data aren't.

DRM became more and more invasive because people would keep bypassing it. Therefore, companies started creating DRM that installed at the operating system level, and if anything goes bad at that level, it can really mess a system up.

The current trend is moving towards requiring a constant internet connection. A few years ago that would be unacceptable as a good portion of customers still didn't have a reliable internet connection. These days, that segment of the customer base is getting smaller and smaller, so the tradeoff isn't as significant.

 

If 100 people implement some kind of DRM, there will be 100 000 that will be trying to crack it and eventually will succeed. It's just buying a few days for the software developers to sell their product before it gets cracked.

And don't forget that piracy is widespread mainly in countries with low income - China and India for example are about half of the population of the planet and the average income over there is like 2 games a month! So how do you expect those people to be able to afford to pay for games when they can barely afford to cover their basic needs.

If the games industry had flexible price policy like a certain percentage of the average income in a given country then piracy would be much lower.

 

That's been the case since all prior DRM was mainly client-side. If the companies continue on their path to requiring a constant internet-connection, they can implement a mainly server-side DRM which will elevate the difficulty in bypassing it to much higher levels to the point where it's completely infeasible.

You would think that price has something to do with piracy, but when you're competing with free, you can never win. A pirate is not going to pay even a dollar for a program for which they can get for free. The real-world example is World of Goo. The game was cheap to start with, and the developers even offered a name-your-price period for selling the game. Even with all of this, there is an estimated 90% piracy rate.

 

It's not just about having a stable internet connection.

What if EA decided to shut down the servers related to the DRM game a year or less after I purchase the game, which they've done in the past with some of their less than successful or dated products? I've basically paid $40-$50 to rent a game. Actually, it's worse because even a rented item functions and maintains some value, while a PC game with stringent internet connectivity requirements is essentially rendered useless when/if the publisher decides to sever the game's server.

I'm all for certain DRMs and developers wanting to preserve their IPs, but I'm not buying a game with internet connectivity requirements for the simple reason that the value and function of the product that I paid for could potentially dissolve to nil at the publisher's whim. Where is my guarantee that it won't happen? If they want to disable their game's online community, fine, because I don't play games online anyway, but if examples like C&C4 is but a harbinger of things to come...lol...

What scares me the most as a PC gamer is that new generation of gamers and future majority demographics will see this as the norm and willingly accept it.

 

There is no guarantee. Client-side DRM doesn't work, so they're switching to server-side. The best case scenario is that they patch the game if they take the servers down so that it no longer requires an internet connection.

They're not going to drop DRM, no matter how much people plead. Though honestly, DRM is going to be a temporary "solution" until everything gets moved to cloud computing, which really isn't that far off.

 

Sooo, maybe that should tell you something. Are you saying that this theoretical 90% would buy the game? Probably not. So what difference does it make? You spend millions of dollars, inconvenience customers, and in the end, the pirates still walk away with a hassle-free product.

All I've ever asked for is a respectable return policy. Even if the customer incurred a fee for returning the product. I'd rather be out $5 than $50.

I fear cloud computing. It's big brother to the nth degree. Lose 100% control of what you buy and how you use it. But I don't see cloud gaming being successful any time soon, at least not until bandwidth is greatly increased and available to EVERYONE and latencies are near zero.

Don't even bring up OnLive. That is nothing but a piece of junk. It's a poor attempt to capitalize on deep pockets with no sense. It is far from where a cloud computing gaming experience should be.

 

This, IMO, is when people not only stop pirating the game, but stop buying it as well. I know I would never purchase a non-MMO (and I'd probably never purchase a MMO either, but that's mainly due to the fact that I don't like the genre) which requires you to be connected 24/7 or it kicks you out of the game. Frankly, I don't want anyone other than me having that much control over when I get to play my games (even Steam has an offline mode ffs).

Multiplayer. It's something that can't be pirated (usually), and if you do then you're just an asshat. I might not be the most anti-piracy individual in the world, but if you're using the game/company's online services and not paying for it, that's just wrong.

That being said, the only kinds of DRM that really bother me are the kind which would require me to always be online (and the solution to that is simple, I would never support a company who uses this with a purchase), and the kind that requires a disc in the drive (because, let's face it, this is annoying and we all download cracks for it even on the things we've legally purchased).

 

I don't know. I can only give you the data that's been released by these companies. They are the ones who've done the cost-benefit analysis regarding DRM. And obviously, they've chosen to stick with it.

People tend to have very little impulse control. Boycotts of video games never work out too well, just look at Modern Warefare 2 - half the people in the Steam boycott groups were playing the game hours after release.

Right, multiplayer is a solution, and that's why you see more and more games with a very strong multiplayer portion. MW2's single player campaign is only a few hours long, compared to it's extensive multiplayer, it doesn't really match up. This sort of upsets me, as I prefer single player games.

 

Just remember, as of a recent court decision (at least in the US), if the DRM is preventing your legally-purchased program from working, you're allowed to circumvent it.

That being said, of course you shouldn't have to resort to cracking your games just to get them to work in the first place. Any company that would take that road, especially if they shut down game x's DRM servers right when game x: the sequel comes out, doesn't deserve anyone's money.

I know it'll never happen, but there needs to be some sort of law that if you're going to force this kind of thing on consumers, you should have to guarantee you'll keep the servers up for at least a certain amount of time (say, 5 years). If it causes you to lose money because people don't buy the game due to the DRM, too bad, you should have thought about that in the first place.

 

Please provide links to data because I have not seen any. Any time this comes up nobody brings up ANY results. Or usually is just wish-wash numbers that represent "we think" or "we believe". If a company made several major releases with basic DRM (like product key) followed by several major releases with restrictive DRM, for a comparative analysis, then I'd believe it. But you don't see that. And several significant game releases, Sins of a Solar Empire as one, have shown that no or simple protection schemes don't hurt sales.

Executives that make these decisions are dumb. Sorry. They are easily swayed by numbers that may or may not be true. Someone is padding their pockets because of it. This kind of crap happens all the time.

5 years? If it's single player it should be indefinitely, until users logging on = zero. I have games that are 10-15 years old that I still play periodically. Imagine if all the great games of the 1990's had this restrictive DRM they'd be classics long forgotten. While five years is a long time for technology advancements, it's not long for classics. Heck even Half-Life 2 is over five years old.

 

Right, I completely forgot about single player games. Probably because I beat them once and only play the multiplayer after that

Then again I still occasionally break out the Star Wars flight sims from the '90s so I see your point. So yes, they should have to either maintain the servers indefinitely or, more realistically, be required to remove the DRM when they shut them down.

 

The bad side to DRM is my short story. I purchased Race On from Newegg, installed it on my computer didn't work. I got an invalid data error when starting the game.

I emailed Newegg and they said contact the Publisher which is Viva Media, no response 7 emails and 1 week later. Also the game can be installed via STEAM but no code was ever provided, nice.

So I explained this to Newegg and asked for a refund, they said NO, no surprise. They offered to send me another copy free of charge and they gave me an RMA. The same result, rinse, repeat with Viva Media.

I finally broke down and got the crack. I'm now playing the game. DRM does suck for those who pay.

 

Exactly. Perfect case in point. I'm all for protecting one's IP but with video games the best way to do it is to create a quality game that's released with few bugs and offer continued support.

 

A crying shame: World of Goo piracy rate near 90 percent

 

Again, that's a claim, and no indication or data how they arrived at it. Like I said, I've heard publishers and devs talk the talk, but until I see a third party do the research and publish specifics, its all hearsay. How can they tell it's 90% piracy rate? And again, they even admitted that some users that bought it said they pirated it first. So maybe it's actually benefitting them somewhat.

Although I respect companies like 2DBoy who eliminated DRM.

 

Ive learned that DRM is quite fun. It gives u a fight to play a game so that once u can finally play it, u will love it forever. Kinda like when u were a kid and you had to fight for what u wanted.

Or maybe im just a gangsta.

 

Well the way we're heading, you can't play it forever if at all at times...

Word!

 

I've always been against DRM. I too purchase all of my software/games, but in the end DRM only serves to inconvenience the honest paying customer while pirates get to enjoy the game with such inconveniences removed. Crackers always find a way to defeat DRM. You'd think the software companies (mainly game companies) would realize this, but they are too bull-headed to care. In the end it only shows what their priorities are, that they care far more about profit than supporting their customers, and I wont have anything to do with such companies.
It's the same with any form of "product activation" (including Microsoft). I'm totally against it for the above reasons. The fact that you're only allowed to activate a certain number of times before you're forced to buy another license is unreasonable at best.
The only reason I run windows now is because it came with my notebook, and therefore is already pre-activated. Otherwise I wouldn't have anything to do with it (and subsequently I'm running linux more and more for my everday activities).
I'm tired of the intrusive DRM being introduced every where, and I refuse to simply use it. There have been a couple of games I'd really liked to have gotten but chose not to solely because of it's DRM. Perhaps if more and more customers spoke with their wallets (by not purchasing/using those games) the companies would finally wise up and stop using it.

Or perhaps just a masochist.

 

I don't think even voting with your wallet will help unless its s concentrated effort by millions of gamers. And actually what would work more is if you buy games that have minimally restrictive or no DRM and send them a letter indicating that you bought the game, even if you didn't like the cotent, to support their lack of DRM. Companies will just blame lack of sales on piracy even if it is because people refuse to buy a game because of its DRM.

What we need is a return policy that protects the customer. Right now customers have zero recourse. Even if the game stinks or you think it stinks, you should have the ability to make a return within a reasonable time frame. I'd be satisfied even if that return period was like 3-5 days, and then you still have to pay 20% return fee. I'd rather spend only $5-10 on a bad or bug ridden game than $50.

 

“first, and most importantly, how we came up with this number: the game allows players to have their high scores reported to our server (it’s an optional checkbox). we record each score and the IP from which it came. we divided the total number of sales we had from all sources by the total number of unique IPs in our database, and came up with about 0.1. that’s how we came up with 90%.”

If you choose to ignore the data, that's your prerogative. Create your own narrative where only data that supports your argument is valid, and everything else is "hearsay".

 

And where do you see that quote? It's nowhere in the one you linked, or any links from there.

Also, I play games at probably a half dozen IP's myself. Home, parents, friend, coffee shop, school etc. even if the average IP's per user was two that would reduce the amount significantly. That's my point though there's really no way to know how many copies were pirated or if a pirated user would buy the game if they couldn't pirate it.

 

I say the same thing every time that there's a DRM thread here...

Piracy/IP Protection is just a cover story. DRM nowadays makes resale virtually impossible. Game devs/publishers haven't been too happy with the used game market, in which they want a cut. It's where Gamestop makes most of their money.

Quite honestly, I don't recall a single game in which DRM prevented piracy either before, or a few days after release.

 

Yeah, take a look on the torrent sites the day before and the day of release of any game pretty much and you will see the game available for download usually.

 

Its like in the book "you are not a gadget" pretty much everything is becoming free over the hive. Free information is leaked to anyone.

Wikipedia, games, movies, music, books, newspaper...etc

I really dont see anything positive coming out of it and theres no way to stop it. Well, except maybe shutting down the net. Doesnt the someone have the authority to do that now? ha just imagine if it happened. no good

 

So you're saying free, open software, news, books, games, are all bad? I just want to make sure I'm reading that right.
Open software can only benefit the community. You have developers donating their time, for free, to develop software we can all use. You have a community of volunteers that are there to help with support and troubleshoot problems.
You have people that devote huge amounts of their time, and expenses, to report the news, do reviews. There are tons of free published books, fanfiction is a great example of free published works.
For whatever reason, there are many who simply just enjoy programming, and writing good software for everyone to use, and that includes games. And nothing positive can possibly come out of all of that?

 

It's called advertising. Google isn't free, someone else is just paying for us to use it.

 

Ah, but you could argue, that's only because google is charging for it. I'd argue that open source is truly free, only paid with people's free time and efforts.

 

Yeah, I agree, open source is the way to go. Except I like to see people's hard efforts rewarded. Like the example used, Google has operating costs. I guess they could file as a non-profit organization, and to be honest it might flourish well beyond what it is today if they did that.

 

So youre saying that just because they are good hard working people, its ok for everything to be free? Some people need to make money to support their families. Is that bad? I know you think that its all good and dandy that people devote their time to make free software, but just because they benefit out of something free doesnt mean that everyone will.

Everyone is getting paid less, authors, musicians, artists, etc. and what does this lead to? nothing good, because if u dont get paid for what u do, u r going to have to resort to something else... ie: sitting at a lousy cubicle wasting ur life.

Im not saying that it is bad for me, Im fine, but I know there are millions of people out there that could be doing something else with their imagination besides their 9-5.

Also, im not trying to start an argument, just saying what i feel.

 

Right, but there has to be a middle ground. Publishers take a large portion of the profits, only feeding very little to the devs. It's the devs that deserve the money, not the publishers. I think the likes of Steam and such are good though, because developers can publish right to the consumer, as I understand it Steam doesn't take near as much of a cut as other publishers.

 

Why? Seriously. You make that statement as if it's a fact, but there's no proof behind it. Actual research actually shows that patents and copyright retard the overall industry and increase prices. Case in point, the fashion industry and it's lack of copyright. India's movie industry. China and Japan's gadget industries. Ever wonder why they get all the cool stuff before we do, if ever?

I play my games from multiple IPs. I travel a lot for work, so I play games from various hotel IPs, my home ISP periodically refreshes my IP, as do many others. People with dial-up have different IPs every time they connect... that number is completely pulled out of their rear, and it's highly slanted in the wrong direction. How far, nobody knows. But I can tell you that I personally contributed 10 or so IPs directly to their database. With a legitimate copy.

 

@snowmobile; of course people should be compensated for their work, if they so choose, but we should be able to have choice. If there's for example a program that is free, that does the same job or better than the paid version, I should be free to choose what I wish.
I believe as pitabred said, that patents and copyrights actually retard the industry. Open source helps to create innovation, and also gives the closed source industry an "incentive" to keep prices down and keep innovating as well.
I agree with htwingnut there has to be a middle ground.

 

You should most def be able to choose what you wish. DRM is here to say "hey were trying." Theyre doing their part, now its up to you, the gamer, to do your part. Buy the game or suffice with a pirated version. btw my job is to catch pirates out here in the gulf of aden, kinda cool aye? lolz Pirates are floating around the net, taking whatever they please just as they are floating around here.

To some people a free print of Mona Lisa is better. That doesnt mean its better just bc its free.