DRM is one of those topics that you see people taking some silly stance on and arguing one way or another. It’s such a stupid argument, especially when you get people saying “I hate DRM so I pirate games!” (derp derp…)
I thought this particular take on DRM from Frank Pierce of Blizzard was great:
“The best approach from our perspective is to make sure that you’ve got a full-featured platform that people want to play on, where their friends are, where the community is…”
In other words, if your game is good people will want to play it and will want to buy it. If there is doubt one way or another whether your game will suck, or perhaps there is a history with the developer being hit and miss, then people are going to be far more inclined to pirate.  Frank Pierce’s statement really does reflect an ideology that I’ve been throwing all my support behind for years. Good communities foster longevity and can even make bad games tolerable. Make a good game that people want to play and they’ll have a reason to want to log in and invest time and money. I’m speaking from personal experience here.
This statement was made in regards to StarCraft 2, which does have a decent form of protection anyway since it requires you to log in to play online (single-player is playable off-line), and has no LAN b/c of pirating. Blizzard has also used programs that run in the background to monitor WoW as well, so I wouldn’t say that they’re 100% going with this idea that great games are pirate-proof. This mindset though is the right one to have in MMO’s, RTS, RPG, etc., and it extends beyond just the discussion of DRM. Make a good game and people will want to play it. Create a feature rich and polished game with the platform for people to play together (like Bnet) and pirating games will quickly fizzle away.
That having been said, the problem is if you go heavy DRM like Ubisoft is planning to, you get the counter-intuitive effect of the pirated games being better, because you can play single player in an offline situation like an airplane. MMOs are relatively pirate-proof since no emulator will have the same community, but making single player games require an internet connection will kill a fanbase faster than almost anything.
The WoW-monitoring processes aren’t there so much to deter pirating as they are to deter cheaters.
World of Goo. Great game, insanely pirated. If I remember right the GTA game for DS was also excellent, also heavily pirated and undersold.
Your argument is that if the game is good, people wont pirate it. I say the reverse is: the better the game, the more people will pirate it because they want to play it. Only by including DRM (in the form of matchmaking services) can they stop that.
Unfortunately, single-player games for PC can’t include that, and the good ones will get pirated if they even try to go DRMless. Look at it this way: do you think Ubisoft WANTS to spend all that time and effort on making authentication servers for single player games and dealing with it? No, they do so because they can’t see making any money with traditional DRM good game or not.
The only solution IMO is to ignore the PC as a single player platform, or treat it as pure loss and try to make money with console ports.
@DBlade
Sadly enough, I have to agree with him on this point. It seems that pirates could care less for letting the companies make money, regardless of how great the game is. I use to pirate, I’ll admit it. Did I do it from some view of justification? No, I just pirated to play games I couldn’t afford. I still pirate, yet now I pirate to play a bit of the game and see if it’s worth the $60 price tag some come with.
I think DRM is the lazy-mans go-to option, while I am sure there are other ways to do these things. They put money into an abusive system to basically stop themselves from having to update their anti-piracy mods every time someone trumps it. Seems like a loss of dedication to tools then it does with innovation towards anti-piracy.
A popular single player game will always be pirated, whether it has DRM or not. The key is to incentivise not pirating, in other words things like multiplayer match making services and online leader boards.
There’s a certain % of people that will pirate everything, I guess the point about “Make the game worth buying” is that this is one way to reduce the % down to that “hardcore” of pirates while everyone else buys it. DRMs are another tool but with the associated backlash….
Every game should of course be “worth buying” but it’s amazing how much blatant crap gets released.
I don’t pirate so instead I’m incredibly selective and even if I find a game that’s universally acclaimed I apply other criteria to it such as Price. For this reason I’m probably not going to buy StarCraft 2: I know it will be great but the price is too high and we all know it’s only Part 1 of 3.
I find that services like Steam killed any desire to pirate. Generally painless patches, social aspects, time played tracking, bringing the game and saves anywhere, etc.
Blizzard have said you don’t need to be online to run SC2 single player so they are taking a bit of a gamble with the DRM there but good for them! It’s about time developers stopped worrying about pirates and just focused on making excellent games. I totally agree with the ethos that if it’s good, people will buy it. Besides, if someone really wants to hack a game even the best DRM isn’t going to stop them.
I agree with xabbot on Steam reducing piracy.
Added to his points are that the Steam sales are amazing! If there’s a game I can’t afford or don’t want to buy right now, I know I’ll be able to find it on Steam in 12 months time for half price or better.
Also since Steam keeps a record of my games I don’t have to worry about losing or damaging disks. At this point I’m seriously considering buying KOTOR again on Steam because I’ve lost the disks of my original version.
I agree the Steam thing. I think we forget sometimes that DRM actually stands for Digital Rights Management. Steam is DRM, but it actually helps the USER manage the rights to their software as well. Now, I have plenty of problems with the way software rights working general, but thats not the point here. Rather, something like Steam lets me manage that software in a way that is convenient, easy to use, and avoids most of the worst things that we usually associate with DRM (like Spore DRM, Ubisoft DRM, etc).
Blizzard can take an above the fray public stance on DRM because it’s a solution required by single player only games, and they seem to be heading in the (smart, IMO) direction of making the more worthwhile aspects of their formerly single player games like Starcraft *require* a registered online connection, which is their version of DRM.
As others have said, I think it’s sad but to a large degree I think we are going to see an increased focus on developing for the consoles, and only “ports” for the PC. At least for single player games.
For PC gaming, the focus is likely to be further towards the subscription model, where the vendor is able to much more easily convert their effort into income. As to be blunt, it is hard to copy a community…*
* – yes I know there are pirate servers out there for MMOs, but it’s not as common as piracy for your typical single player game, and people using those servers definitely miss out of the sense of community.
Blizzards choice to remove Lan from Starcraft 2 was just plain down greedy and stupid, why not simply force you to logon to Battlenet and THEN allow lan play afterwards(while staying connected if your that paranoid)
Before you tell me about the abvious fact that we can still play in the same games while lanning but just on the internet, just keep in mind people living on different continents who will suffer from bad latency.
I think some of the paradigms here are mixed up.
I don’t agree that a good game automatically deters piracy. Nor do I agree with Dblade that a great game attracts piracy (I also disagree that World of Goo is a great game, it’s very well made but that’s not the same thing).
The truth IMHO is just that piracy is attractive to some people because:
A. It’s convenient. To counter that, DRM is absolutely the wrong approach.
B. It’s counter-culture. Anti-corporate, anti-capitalist and anti-consumer.
Now I don’t agree with point B at all and I’m generally too stubborn for point A. Either way, I think the grand mistake in addressing piracy is always that the focus is on revenue.
IMHO there are very few pirates that do so just to save money. Even when they say they just don’t want to pay, look to point B. That’s the motivation.
Strong DRM and online-only play will both lock out pirates, but it’s not likely to turn them into ordinary consumers.
[…] Specifically, this is about Game piracy, because that has a long and entrenched history to it. Keen brought this up (and I’m repeating some of my response here) with the idea that there’s a correlation […]
@ Rog: Quote: “…IMHO there are very few pirates that do so just to save money…”
Really? Very few?
Everybody I know that has pirated something has done it solely for economic reasons: A) They had no extra money to spend on games at the time, or B) They were uncertain whether the game would be worth $50-$60 and wanted to try it out before spending the cash. None of them has pirated something just for kicks or convenience.
But back to the original post… I don’t pirate games, but I won’t purchase them either if there’s a chance they will suck. Nor will I purchase a game if it has excessive DRM. (Ubisoft has permanently lost my business.) So I’m of the opinion that, while a great game will still be pirated, it will be purchased far more often as well, especially if it’s more convenient to buy it. I’ll always buy a game if I know it’s going to be worth it…
[…] Specifically, this is about Game piracy, because that has a long and entrenched history to it. Keen brought this up (and I’m repeating some of my response here) with the idea that there’s a correlation […]