A perspective on DRM

[Davros]

People have been saying "if you don't want to pay for the game, then don't pirate it". I'd like to tell the devs and publishers "if you don't want to put out a working game, then don't charge for it".

Davros declares Zabaglione his personal hero

no doubt some b3d readers will be angry with you as youve broken the golden rule - you've critised software

complain about any other product and you'll get nothing but sympathy and support
complain about software and people will do 2 things:
1. defend the software for not working properly
2. have a go at you for complaining

 

[Mintmaster]

I did get your point, I just don't see how the enforcement of copyright laws or not is really going to significantly swing the moral balance here. It certainly hasn't had more than a minor impact on music piracy anyway.

Maybe the reduction in piracy has been minor, but I'm pretty sure that without any enforcement it would be much worse. In the long term it definately has an impact.

 

[DemoCoder]

One only has to look at China for an example of what lack of enforcement does. First, one can go purchase practically any VCD/DVD from a street vendor for pennies on the dollar. I once came home with about 200 DVDs in my luggage on a trip, bought for about 25 cents each.

Secondly, the Hong Kong film industry was nearly destroyed by piracy, despite in large part, being run my the mafia (triads) Essentially, the mainlanders would have cheap DVDs of movies out at the same time they were released to theaters, sometimes prior to theatrical release!

The piracy rate is about 95% in mainland China. That's right, 95 out of 100 people buy pirated dvds.

DRM does nothing to inhibit Chinese pirates for two reasons: 1) they're good at getting around it 2) Chinese consumers don't care about video quality as much, so analog capture of a Hi-Def source, crappily compressed and put on VCD sells pretty well. I got made fun of by my Chinese relatives because I spent extra money getting DVD-9 encodings of movies which cost about $2 at the time, instead of paying 25 cents for the VCD. Then we watched some VCDs together, and they were like "see, the quality of these is pretty good", whereas to me, I thought I had been transported back to the days of long-play VHS.

Maybe there's a business model for producers to make small movies and TV shows that can be sold on the cheap, like MP3s, but with zero enforcement of copyright, the era of Lords of the Rings, Batman The Dark Knight, and other expensive movies would be over.

 

[KimB]

Well, that's where the government should step in and enforce the law. I don't think anybody would argue that piracy that makes money isn't significantly damaging to the industry, or that it isn't very, very wrong.

But we're not talking about that here. We're talking about individuals pirating software/movies/songs through, for example, downloading or copying from a friend instead of buying them. With that sort of piracy, where essentially zero money changes hands, it's difficult to argue harm (except in the case of customer support, of course, but that's another issue).

Furthermore, I argue, it's highly unlikely that piracy is likely to become widespread across the board. Any significant increase in piracy is likely to be linked to a particular region, economic class, and/or type of product. And if that happens, businesses will simply move away from catering their products to those people, and they will just end up hurting themselves.

 

[pcchen]

I expect that once word gets around of this terrible port, sales will be pretty poor, and Activision will be whining about piracy on the PC costing them money instead of the fact they put out a broken game on the PC that no on wanted to buy. I guess they'll think they need more DRM to make people buy a broken product.

People have been saying "if you don't want to pay for the game, then don't pirate it". I'd like to tell the devs and publishers "if you don't want to put out a working game, then don't charge for it". Then maybe people will care about whether your industry lives or dies, and will have some respect for your products and the living you make from it.

So what? You think only bad products got pirated? Or good products are less pirated in any way?

I don't care whether Activision of any other publishers who created bad games, using piracy as excuses or anything. My point is, piracy is a real issue. It will not go away even if some bad game developers using it as an excuse. Good game developers are still hurt by it. You can't just say: hey, this is used by this bad game as an excuse! So everyone complain about piracy must be making bad games! That's bad logic.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

So what? You think only bad products got pirated? Or good products are less pirated in any way?

I don't care whether Activision of any other publishers who created bad games, using piracy as excuses or anything. My point is, piracy is a real issue. It will not go away even if some bad game developers using it as an excuse. Good game developers are still hurt by it. You can't just say: hey, this is used by this bad game as an excuse! So everyone complain about piracy must be making bad games! That's bad logic.

No, I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is that while devs rip off customers, potential customers will rip off devs and feel justified. It's another example of a negative relationship between the publishers and the paying customers, again driven by the actions of devs and publishers who feel they can justify poor quality product by claiming it's all because of piracy.

Next time customers will be pushed towards piracy "because Activision ripped me off last time", or in order "not to get ripped off this time in case the game is buggy". How is that improving the relationship between customers and publishers? How is shipping a broken game going to improve things?

Instead of making the customer feel they are getting a good product and have a moral obligation to pay for it, the exact opposite is happening. Maybe people will just stop buying Activision games, and yet we won't hear that Activision sales are low because they got a reputation for crappy ports, but because of this amorphous "piracy" where everyone copies their crappy games and finds them broken, instead of buying them and finding them broken.

It seems publishers are so concerned with hurting the people who don't buy their games, that they are forgetting to look after the people who do buy their games. Instead of turning pirates into customers, they are turning customers into pirates, or simply not customers at all. And it doesn't just hurt one dev or publisher, but the industry as a whole.

Footnote: "Spiderman 3 Web Of Shadows" breaks seven out of the ten of Stardock's Gamers' Bill Of Rights (interim version) referenced earlier in this thread.

 

[pcchen]

No, I'm not saying that at all. What I'm saying is that while devs rip off customers, potential customers will rip off devs and feel justified. It's another example of a negative relationship between the publishers and the paying customers, again driven by the actions of devs and publishers who feel they can justify poor quality product by claiming it's all because of piracy.

The problem is, it does not stop there. If people think it's ok to pirate one game because it's very bad, next time, they'll pirate another not-so-bad game (it even needs not to be from the same company), because they already pirated a game. Eventually, all games will be pirated, because you can't really find a game without any flaw. Any flaw can be used as an excuse for pirating a game.

The current situation is, even good games are heavily pirated. Of course, maybe some game developers are content with their sales, and disregard those who pirated their games. However, this is not going to last forever. When you see your games, good or bad, are pirated to a significant portion of your sales (or even higher than your sales), you'll start think about whether it's a good business decision or not. Then, there's only two ways to go: either trying to defeat pirates, or just leave this business.

This is, IMHO, what's happening in PC game market. Large game developers are now concentrate their efforts on consoles, which are less pirated. They do try to take some cakes from PC gaming market by making mediocre ports. Others just go to online model, trying to combat pirates through online services. Independent game developers who do not have money to make online games will have to go to consoles (fortunately now Microsoft are doing XNA), or other DRM-heavy platforms (such as iPhone).

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

The problem is, it does not stop there. If people think it's ok to pirate one game because it's very bad, next time, they'll pirate another not-so-bad game (it even needs not to be from the same company), because they already pirated a game. Eventually, all games will be pirated, because you can't really find a game without any flaw. Any flaw can be used as an excuse for pirating a game.

And this is why broken and unsupported ports are a bad thing - it damages the whole industry and blackens the attitude of customers towards the devs and publishers, actively driving gamers towards piracy instead of paying for games, or actually away from gaming altogether. It contributes to the downwards spiral, instead of breaking it.

Turn your argument around:

The problem is, it does not stop there. If publishers think it's ok to ship a broken game because of piracy, next time, they'll ship another not-so-finished game (it even needs not to be from the same company), because they already shipped broken games. Eventually, all games will be shipped broken, because you can't really find a game without any piracy. Any made up numbers can be used as an excuse for shipping a broken game.

Is that any more justified, and does that do anything to actually resolve the problems the devs and publishers find themselves in? Since when has ripping off your customers with unfinished and broken products ever been a viable strategy that safeguards your business in the long run? Quite frankly, I'd be glad to see those companies leaving the PC market if that's what they offer.

Devs like to talk about "piracy killing the PC" (as they have done for the last 20 years), but they've got blood on their hands for the constant stream of unwanted, broken, unsupported and plain old "not fit for purpose" products that they seem to think gives them a god-given right for sales and market share.

Really, the sense of entitlement coming from the devs and publishers every time they ship a turd and tell us it's solid gold is just as bad as that coming from the pirates. And still the best the devs can come up with (the likes of Stardock, Valve or Blizzard excepted) is just "more DRM, blame the pirates". They sound just like the movie executives trying to blame their latest multi-million dollar turkey on the public, instead of a shitty film that no one wanted to see.

 

[pcchen]

Is that any more justified, and does that do anything to actually resolve the problems the devs and publishers find themselves in? Since when has ripping off your customers with unfinished and broken products ever been a viable strategy that safeguards your business in the long run? Quite frankly, I'd be glad to see those companies leaving the PC market if that's what they offer.

The problem is, with piracy, there's no telling for which is good or which is bad. When you are killing both good players and bad players, eventually only bad players remains (lemon car theory).

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

The problem is, with piracy, there's no telling for which is good or which is bad. When you are killing both good players and bad players, eventually only bad players remains (lemon car theory).

And that's why you worry about your customers, not about those that are not your customers. What you're describing above is known as "throwing out the baby with the bath water".

 

[KimB]

All of this is exactly why developers and publishers need to take their focus off of pirates, and move it to paying customers. Their focus should be on courting paying customers and keeping them coming back. But when developers enact policies to "fight piracy" that make people want to buy their games less, well, that just ends up generating the exact opposite effect, or at best drives these gamers to other companies' products.

Yes, we need companies to sign a gamer's bill of rights, and stick to it. Companies need to do it for their own survival, and we need it just so that we don't feel like we're getting raped in the ass every time we go out to buy a game.

 

[pcchen]

And that's why you worry about your customers, not about those that are not your customers. What you're describing above is known as "throwing out the baby with the bath water".

My point is, worry about your customers does not really work. In theory, when you make a good, nice game, customers will buy it, and it will be less pirated. In reality, no matter how good a game you make, people will pirate it. You are not getting a substantially higher sale.

Therefore, I think what we need is not just going DRM free. It just won't work. What we need is a good DRM platform which is fair to the customers (gamers) and also fair to the developers. Without it, offline PC games will soon die down and yield to consoles, which has nice, built-in DRM system.

IMHO Steam is already quite good for a DRM platform. I'm also watching the development of Stardock's Impulse, and they seem to have some sense about making a acceptable DRM platform. It's all about balance. Hopefully, with these developments, PC game developers can finally focus on making games, not making DRM systems. Also, SecuROM needs to die.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

My point is, worry about your customers does not really work. In theory, when you make a good, nice game, customers will buy it, and it will be less pirated. In reality, no matter how good a game you make, people will pirate it. You are not getting a substantially higher sale.

If you're not worrying about your paying customers, you're already a dead company. And while you're worrying about your non-paying customers, you're actually destroying your sales by driving away those paying customers by implementing poor implementations of DRM.

I've got no problem with DRM when it works, but I've yet to see it. It's inconvenient and sometimes very painful for the customer, it's more expensive for the developer in terms of implementation and support, and it doesn't work at preventing piracy.

When DRM actually works, or when devs start refunding games that don't work properly for any reason, then I think you can look at DRM as a viable addition to your product. Until then it's just hurting your customers, and thus your sales.

 

[pcchen]

If you're not worrying about your paying customers, you're already a dead company. And while you're worrying about your non-paying customers, you're actually destroying your sales by driving away those paying customers by implementing poor implementations of DRM.

Of course game developers worry about their paying customers. Otherwise, why investing millions of dollars creating a game? They are certainly not investing half of these money into creating DRM, right?

The problem is, when you see the money, time you invested into making the game, does not give you meaningful returns, where probably half of your sales are going to pirates, it's very hard to keep going this way.

There are many ways to make DRM work better. For example, DRM on consoles seems to be fine. The problem is, PC is an open system. It's very difficult to make a working DRM platform on an open system. Take media check as an example. In early days, media checks focus on making the media difficult to copy. There were many strange protection systems. The reason is that CD was not designed with this in mind. But this is actually an easy problem! Even the ancient Playstation won't work with a copied CD without a mod chip. But on a PC, you have to worry about many different possible CD-ROMs out there. It's not simple.

Now with DVD it's actually much harder to copy the media since DVD has "built-in" anti-copy system. But now the problem is not about copying physical media anymore. You don't need to copy the DVD when you can simply emulate it (actually this is an old trick, it's there when games were distributed on floppy discs). So now DRM systems like SecuROM or Starforce have to defeat these emulators. Unfortunately, CD/DVD emulators have legitimate uses, so this practice can cause serious problems.

The ill-fated trusted computing was one possible way to solve this problem. Basically it created a closed system inside an open system, which makes a working DRM platform possible. Personally I think the cost is reasonable. Unfortunately, fear mongering articles on the internet were too successful, so there's still no satisfactory way for solving this problem.

A proper DRM system can also be beneficial. For example, currently many stores refuse to refund for returned softwares, because they can be "copied." It's not completely illegitimate though. However, with a working DRM system, where it's very difficult to "copy" a game, it would be much easier to push them to accept returning a game for a refund.

 

[Mintmaster]

Well, that's where the government should step in and enforce the law. I don't think anybody would argue that piracy that makes money isn't significantly damaging to the industry, or that it isn't very, very wrong.

But we're not talking about that here. We're talking about individuals pirating software/movies/songs through, for example, downloading or copying from a friend instead of buying them. With that sort of piracy, where essentially zero money changes hands, it's difficult to argue harm (except in the case of customer support, of course, but that's another issue).

Ask yourself this: If the guy was giving them away for free instead of 25 cents or $2, would people acquire fewer of them?

Of course not. The 25 cents per DVD going to the reseller is irrelevent to the movie industry. They're worried about lost sales in the long term where most people think it makes no sense to buy a movie instead of pirating it because it's become acceptable by society.

To anyone involved in making a film/game/album, the two cases you distinguished between are the same. Of all the people getting these cheap/free copies, they're worried about those that would have legally paid for the product if such an avenue wasn't there. Now, the relation isn't 1:1, but it's certainly not 1:0 either.

Furthermore, I argue, it's highly unlikely that piracy is likely to become widespread across the board. Any significant increase in piracy is likely to be linked to a particular region, economic class, and/or type of product.

Why do you say this? The more people do something, the more acceptable it becomes. The obvious example is speeding.

DemoCoder's example of China is very solid evidence against your claim. This is a mostly closed system, with Chinese movies targetted for Chinese consumption being pirated in China. It simply became acceptable by Chinese society to pirate, just as it's become acceptable by DC's extended family.

 

[KimB]

Ask yourself this: If the guy was giving them away for free instead of 25 cents or $2, would people acquire fewer of them?

That's not the point. The point is that once you get to selling of pirated products, you have people making their living off of piracy. This is a fundamentally different scenario from people just doing it in their spare time. When people are making a living on something, they are much more likely to actively promote it.

Furthermore, there is always the possibility that people will think they're purchasing a legitimate product if they're paying at all.

DemoCoder's example of China is very solid evidence against your claim. This is a mostly closed system, with Chinese movies targetted for Chinese consumption being pirated in China. It simply became acceptable by Chinese society to pirate, just as it's become acceptable by DC's extended family.

And the result? Fewer people make pirateable products for the Chinese market.

 

[Frank]

My point is, worry about your customers does not really work. In theory, when you make a good, nice game, customers will buy it, and it will be less pirated. In reality, no matter how good a game you make, people will pirate it. You are not getting a substantially higher sale.

So, the quality of your product doesn't influence the amount of sales?

 

[pcchen]

So, the quality of your product doesn't influence the amount of sales?

Yes, but it's relatively little. The main reason behind this is, when your product has broader customer base, the piracy rate is likely to go up. So when you expect to make your customer base twice as large (by investing more money, for example), you probably only get 15% larger, and that's generally not worth the effort. That's why the market is more likely to be filled with mediocre games.

 

[KimB]

The main reason behind this is, when your product has broader customer base, the piracy rate is likely to go up.

Why? The total number of pirates is certainly likely to increase. But why would the piracy rate?

 

[Frank]

Yes, but it's relatively little. The main reason behind this is, when your product has broader customer base, the piracy rate is likely to go up. So when you expect to make your customer base twice as large (by investing more money, for example), you probably only get 15% larger, and that's generally not worth the effort. That's why the market is more likely to be filled with mediocre games.

So you're saying, that the worse the quality of your product, the more money you'll make off it? And what about marketing? That would work counter-productive as well.