How much DRM can you stand?

I'm fine with internet activation, but for the love of god, don't limit my installs. If I have to email or call someone to get an install that is a waste of my time that could be spent doing something else. Email is too slow, and phone calls are too long. Calling up any business is a matter of navigating a voice menu and then waiting for like 30 minutes for someone to answer the phone. That is not acceptable.

I can see how internet activation would be a hassle for someone who has no net access though. In that case it's bad, but most people have an internet connection if they have a computer. I don't know what the real solution is, but limited installs is not it.

I'm fine with:

• internet activation
• install limits when install credits can be redeemed by uninstalling the game

I'm fine with:

• internet activation
• install limits when install credits can be redeemed by uninstalling the game

In other words, what Take Two did with BioShock was fine by me. What EA has done with Mass Effect, Spore and the rest is not. fatshodan

I agree with the limited installs as long as you can one back when you ininstall. It's similar to what Apple does with iTunes. You can deauthorize a computer from playing your iTunes music so you get an install back. And you can reset your installs back every year to wipe the slate clean.

i think for offline games, a CD key is enough. online activation is fine for either online games or games with a big online component (like spore). limited installs are taking the piss a bit though imho....it just causes hassle.

im not against DRM on principal. but DRM should be transparent to the legit user and just cause headaces for pirates.

thats how it is on consoles. there protection systems arent perfect (though apparently the PS3 hasnt been cracked yet) but they can be a bit of a bother to get around and theres no gurantee that the workaround will continue to work after a firmware update or something. but if uve got a legit copy of a cosole game, itll work. no hassle from DRM or anything.

on PC its the reverse...thats just not right.

I'm fine with:

• internet activation
• install limits when install credits can be redeemed by uninstalling the game

In other words, what 2K did with BioShock was fine by me. What EA has done with Mass Effect, Spore and the rest is not. fatshodan

[QUOTE="fatshodan"]

I'm fine with:

• internet activation
• install limits when install credits can be redeemed by uninstalling the game

In other words, what Take Two did with BioShock was fine by me. What EA has done with Mass Effect, Spore and the rest is not. zomglolcats

I agree with the limited installs as long as you can one back when you ininstall. It's similar to what Apple does with iTunes. You can deauthorize a computer from playing your iTunes music so you get an install back. And you can reset your installs back every year to wipe the slate clean.

I completly agree with the first post of the topic. With one exception. It may have been taken an week for the crackers to crack the first DRM game but Spore was avialable on torrents on the next day after its realease. With a fully working crack.

I don't see why companies like EA keeps trying to do such dumb things like DRM. It seems they don't know anything about pirates.

PIRATES are people which don't care much whether they will play the game online or not. Since the dawn of games requiring an original CD key was enough to stop people from playing online and force people which want to enjoy the game online to actually buy it. PIRATES don't care if the game has 132423432 tools which stops them from playing the game online as they don't do it because the original key have stopped them from doing so a long time ago. All this protection tools do is harming their actual customers as they cannot enjoy freely their online content and cutting their own sales. Also... Mostly pirates aren't people which don't want to buy the game. They are people which can't buy it.Kids, teens, people from poor countires and so on. Putting anti piracy tools won't make them buy the game. In case of SPORE the only thing they should have done is to require your original CD-KEY when you register your account to browse the online content. Nothing more.

I'm fine with:

• internet activation
• install limits when install credits can be redeemed by uninstalling the game

In other words, what 2K did with BioShock was fine by me. What EA has done with Mass Effect, Spore and the rest is not. fatshodan

i agree completely with this statement

None. I don't like being treated like a criminal for being a legitimate customer. CD-Keys for online play are fine, that is not DRM and a legitimate way of tracking actual owners... it is when you bring in all this Mass Effect/Spore activation bull**** that I don't like it.

Steam is fine, it uses a non-invasive method to ensure that piracy numbers are limited. I actually really like Steam, since I can download and play my games on any computer connected to the internet. Sure, it would be nice to be able to have a physical copy and be able to install it without an internet connection but I doubt I will be installing my games on computers without internet connections anytime soon. I can hardly survive without my daily dose of the web so I will hardly ever be away from it long enough for that to matter.

Stardock made a game people wanted to buy and now they are raking in the dough. EA and these other developers/publishers crying about their "losses" need to start asking themselves *why* their games are being pirated and figure out a way for them to make gamers *want* to buy them.
foxhound_fox

[QUOTE="fatshodan"]

I'm fine with:

• internet activation
• install limits when install credits can be redeemed by uninstalling the game

In other words, what 2K did with BioShock was fine by me. What EA has done with Mass Effect, Spore and the rest is not. Makari

You mean they flat-out lied? Even though they said that was how it worked (and I remember them making this a very explicit point to quell the uproar about the DRM somewhat), they never designed such an implementation and never had any intention of giving activations back, deliberately lying to us and making up facts to make us think their DRM was less restrictive than it really was?

I'm wondering if you're confusing things... I remember the way I heard it worked was uninstalling the game didn't give back an activation automatically, that you had to specifically tell it to deactivate an install upon uninstallation (not sure if that meant just checking some kind of box in the uninstall window or what), and that some people forgot to do this and, thus, lost one of their activations. That's what I remember it being. People explained this on the Bioshock forum very specifically, which is why I remember it.

Again, Stardock's a tiny outlier. We're up to 500k on Sins after almost 9 months on the market, incredible word of mouth, and US/EU/AU retail releases. Objectively, they're not raking in the dough compared to something like Crysis, they just don't spend a lot of money in the first place.Makari

Are you saying that those sales are that low because lots of people decided to pirate it instead, solely because DRM didn't restrict them from doing so? Because, of course, that's the only reason one can hold behind the logic that larger companies couldn't use Stardock's methods; that they too would suffer hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of sales if they didn't use DRM.

[QUOTE="Makari"]Again, Stardock's a tiny outlier. We're up to 500k on Sins after almost 9 months on the market, incredible word of mouth, and US/EU/AU retail releases. Objectively, they're not raking in the dough compared to something like Crysis, they just don't spend a lot of money in the first place.JP_Russell

Are you saying that those sales are that low because lots of people decided to pirate it instead, solely because DRM didn't restrict them from doing so? Because, of course, that's the only reason one can hold behind the logic that larger companies couldn't use Stardock's methods; that they too would suffer hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of sales if they didn't use DRM.

I can live with Internet Activation but that is it. I use to do more frequent upgrades of my PC hardware but now I do far fewer upgrades because I don't want to have to deal with re-activating the OS plus applications. Luckily, my Vista system has remained stable for the year that I've had it. That hasn't always been Windows strong point though...

I recognize the need for software companies to prevent piracy. It takes money out of their pockets. What I can't stand is DRM that limits the number of installs you can do of software you purchased. Things like that have the opposite effect and actually cause people to pirate software, in my opinion.

[QUOTE="fatshodan"]

I'm fine with:

• internet activation
• install limits when install credits can be redeemed by uninstalling the game

In other words, what 2K did with BioShock was fine by me. What EA has done with Mass Effect, Spore and the rest is not. matt120282

i agree completely with this statement

count three

I'm fine with:

• internet activation
• install limits when install credits can be redeemed by uninstalling the game

In other words, what 2K did with BioShock was fine by me. What EA has done with Mass Effect, Spore and the rest is not. fatshodan

sounds reasonable to me.

No, I'm saying that they operate in a completely different paradigm - it's a gross exaggeration, but it's like trying to tell Coca-Cola how to do business because something you did with a lemonade stand worked. People always talk about what Stardock does and how it's what everybody else should be doing, but the 'sales' - the upshot of Stardock's methodology, according to these posts - are still lower, and wouldn't be enough to support the bigger games financially.Makari

Right, but that's still sidestepping the question. I understand that bigger companies couldn't support themselves on the sales that Stardock's games get, but that's not the point. There are reasons Sins sold 500K as opposed to the 1 million plus figures that bigger budget companies go for in their games. The argument that those companies can't use Stardock's methodology because of the lower sales is only applicable if those lower sales were a direct result of Stardock's methodology; no DRM. That is, that the sales were that low because no DRM caused higher piracy rates, and that bigger budget companies thusly could not afford to follow Stardock's methods.

I personally continue to argue that they sell at the amounts that they do because (1) they don't have retail distribution worldwide from the day of release, (2) they are minimally advertised games (word of mouth on forums and even great reviews only go so far), and (3) it is a game in a genre that is not the most popular out there. On top of that, it's a space strategy game, and I know I've seen multiple people just on these forums say space RTS's don't appeal to them (indeed, there was a time when the idea didn't appeal to me, either; I always thought of space strategies as not having enough to be interested in [no real scenary, just a bunch of spaceships floating and fighting in space; sounded bland]).

The more I read about those DRM threads the more I think it was just a measure to stop second hand piracy. That means, lend to a friend, borrow or sell it later

I can not stand the thought that EA and others comapnys actually do this thinking it will stop crack-dowloaded versions over the net. I think what is paying up this proceduree is the "numbers" they have of how much second hand piracy they prevent it with this method

Funny also, to see that we all were/are pirates one day or another, to devs eyes

[QUOTE="Makari"]No, I'm saying that they operate in a completely different paradigm - it's a gross exaggeration, but it's like trying to tell Coca-Cola how to do business because something you did with a lemonade stand worked. People always talk about what Stardock does and how it's what everybody else should be doing, but the 'sales' - the upshot of Stardock's methodology, according to these posts - are still lower, and wouldn't be enough to support the bigger games financially.JP_Russell

Right, but that's still sidestepping the question. I understand that bigger companies couldn't support themselves on the sales that Stardock's games get, but that's not the point. There are reasons Sins sold 500K as opposed to the 1 million plus figures that bigger budget companies go for in their games. The argument that those companies can't use Stardock's methodology because of the lower sales is only applicable if those lower sales were a direct result of Stardock's methodology; no DRM. That is, that the sales were that low because no DRM caused higher piracy rates, and that bigger budget companies thusly could not afford to follow Stardock's methods.

I personally continue to argue that they sell at the amounts that they do because (1) they don't have retail distribution worldwide from the day of release, (2) they are minimally advertised games (word of mouth on forums and even great reviews only go so far), and (3) it is a game in a genre that is not the most popular out there. On top of that, it's a space strategy game, and I know I've seen multiple people just on these forums say space RTS's don't appeal to them (indeed, there was a time when the idea didn't appeal to me, either; I always thought of space strategies as not having enough to be interested in [no real scenary, just a bunch of spaceships floating and fighting in space; sounded bland]).

There's other anecdotal evidence like.. Bethesda. With Oblivion, they only used a simple disc-check - no Safedisc, no SecuROM, not even a CD-key IIRC. The game sold veryy well on the PC, etc.... but with The Shivering Isles, they saw fit to quietly toss in SecuROM 7. Relic did it with Company of Heroes... there's examples of well-regarded companies quietly shoving DRM in where there previously was none on some of the best-selling PC games of the last few years. Why?Makari

My guess would be that they wanted to see if perhaps having DRM in place would decrease the extent to which their games were being pirated (that is, to see if there would be less hosting of their game on torrent sites). Perhaps they also figured it was a relatively uninhibiting DRM and thought it couldn't hurt anything to use it. I personally am not against DRM totally (though I'd certainly be happy if the industry did away with it entirely, as I don't believe they'd suffer for it at all and it would only make things easier on us), just DRM that can easily become a nuisance like Mass Effect's and Spore's (and most definitely potentially harmful DRM like StarForce), and I'm sure most people feel the same. I'm sure Bethesda and Relic also knew this, so they knew it would do little to no harm. Like you said, their games always sold very well, and like you also said, none of them have any way to know how much piracy affects their sales at all. So it can't be that they had solid evidence that their games were selling much less than they would have or something.

Also, concerning what you said about the companies knowing more than we do, I'm sure they do to an extent, but not as much as one might think. Remember not to let yourself go down the Appeal to Authority logic path. Someone being in the field of and exposed to something more than others doesn't necessarily make them an expert (and the way many devs seem to not have a solid, factual argument when they speak out about piracy tells me most know hardly more than we do, really), and even in the event that they are, it doesn't automatically mean what they propose always trumps what people of lesser knowledge say. Being an expert on an industry doesn't even come close to meaning you will always draw impeccable conclusions, have the best outlook and opinion on the situation, or suggest actions to be taken that are guaranteed most effective.

quote!JP_Russell

Maybe on Beth/Relic, but it's a stretch. Both of them used Safedisc/SecuROM in their past releases, we know that much... CoH and Oblivion were both exceptions in that they tried no copy protection on very successful titles, and then went back to using it again. It's suspicious.

Makari

I agree, it is strange. I don't know why they would do it, because as you point out, their games sold plenty well without the DRM, so the possible explanation that a need to use it again to bring good sales would is out, of course. Heck, maybe it was as simple as development time getting too tight at the end and they didn't have enough time to implement any DRM protection. I don't know.

It's not so much an appeal to authority as most on this forum are eager to believe that the companies know nothing more than we do, and are saying 'Activision doesn't know wtf because hey, I'm looking at some site where someone else who doesn't know any more than i do agrees!' I've said over and over that many of them invested pretty heavily into researching filesharing networks years ago, and I'm pretty sure they can learn a lot in 4 years.

Makari

Yeah, like I said, some people in the industry do know more than we do for sure. And I agree that some people underestimate their knowledge but some people overestimate it, as well. It's honestly even worse when someone automatically assumes that, say, Cevat Yerli knows exactly what he's talking about when he thinks they'd get double the sales without piracy because he's "in teh industree," that he's done all kinds of super duper research to confirm this to a degree beyond what we mere citizens could ever imagine. Those people are even worse in my opinion, and those people on these forums most definitely are using false logic. Why are they worse? Because they perpetuate the giving of and perceived credibility of misinformation through false logic even more.

And... yeah, other things like we're finding out just now that Activision has been quietly suing people right here in the US for a time now, and doing so successfully. We didn't hear about it only because part of the settlement clause was to.. not talk about it, lol. Rewind a week or a month and you can find people emphatically stating that we don't get individually prosecuted for it here in America. IMO there's a lot of stuff going on that we simply don't know about, and most of the people talking aren't actually doing any research - often because there isn't much out there to be researched.Makari

Exactly, including many of the devs that speak out about piracy. And it's much worse when they make zealous assumptions based on nothing concrete than when some random forum goer does, specifically because most people fall victim to appeal to authority and go "there in teh industreeeee tey must be rite!!!11!1" even though the dev in question quite obviously has absolutely no facts or even common sense to back up a legitimate argument, relying solely on their position to give them credibility.

Exactly, including many of the devs that speak out about piracy. And it's much worse when they make zealous assumptions based on nothing concrete than when some random forum goer does, specifically because most people fall victim to appeal to authority and go "there in teh industreeeee tey must be rite!!!11!1" even though the dev in question quite obviously has absolutely no facts or even common sense to back up a legitimate argument, relying solely on their position to give them credibility.JP_Russell