Piracy is wrong, but it's not theft. It's more akin to vandalism. The producer still has the IP you pirate, you just make it less valuable to him by pirating it, just as you make my car less valuable to me if you smash in the windshield with a baseball bat. Regardless, software piracy is wrong. So, however, are these stupid and excessive anti piracy schemes that don't work and just punish legitimate customers.

The assertion that the DRM will eventually be good enough to beat pirates as Frogboy said strikes me as deeply flawed. To win, DRM will have to protect against everything the pirates might do. The pirates, on the other hand, only have to circumvent everything the DRM *DOES* do. DRM is fighting a vaguely-understood amorphous enemy, pirates are fighting a very precisely understood and specific enemy. I don't believe that DRM will ever actually stop pirates, although it might stretch the time frame between release and cracking a bit. Long before then, however, the DRM will stop legitimate customers, because every harsher iteration of DRM makes life worse for them. Eventually, the publishers will drive away their customer base.

Releasing software is a business. It doesn't matter how few pirates get your software, it will not succeed unless enough legitimate customers get your software. The publishers have already reached the point where they're driving away more customers than pirates with their DRM, or at least it seems that way to me. I don't see the situation getting better for the dinosaurs. Soon enough, it will be companies like Stardock and Valve, that have business models based on providing service to those who pay, rather than obsessing on denying service to those who don't pay, who are the only survivors.

As a business, the purpose of software publishers isn't to make artists feel good for "getting" those pirates. It's to make money by selling software to customers. The current DRM craze has long since moved away from this focus.

This is something I considered as well. The big problem is, if you buy the game, you're basically saying to the game publishers that you approve of their copy protection schemes. Every sale of the game supports the copy protection. This type of DRM is not something I'm willing to toss money at. So, I won't be buying the game, and since I don't believe in pirating software either, I guess I won't be playing it at all. Shame, but there are plenty of other games out there that will keep me amused.

And if your local mechanic shoves a but plug up your *** everytime you have your car in for repair, the simplest solution is to remove the but plug after you leave. Most would probably opt to take their business elsewhere though

I doubt I'll be buying Spore if this is indeed how the DRM will be. In general I stear clear of any games with too zealous copy protection. The game has to be really good if I'm going to buy it in that case.

Spore? Spore?! SPORE!? WHY!!! OH WHY!!!!!!??

The game I wanted the most... and now it is gone.

CURSE YOU IDIOT CORPORATE PEOPLES!

Okay, all this "most pirates wouldn't buy the game anyway" and "piracy does/doesn't cost companies sales" talk is stupid. This stuff is impossible to measure. People here like to point at Stardock and say "this is proof that piracy doesn't hurt sales!" but for all you know, Stardock's games are popular despite not having copy-protection, not because of it. We simply can't say either way.

The bottom line for me is if I'm selling games, I would definitely want to err on the side of caution and protect my product.

Won't you want an internet connection to play Spore anyway? It's supposed to populate your game world with downloaded player-generated content.

I'm going to be buying both games. I am looking forward to Mass Effect more than any other title, and Spore as well. I don't plan on losing my internet connection for more than 10 days at a time. If I do, whether or not I can play a game would be the least of my worries. And in any case, an internet connection is certainly easier to find than a lost CD/DVD, so I actually prefer it this way.

Of course, if the copy protection software is overly invasive or hogs too many resources, that doesn't mean copy protection is wrong. It just means that, in this case, it is being executed poorly.

But wouldn't you agree that it's just as valid to err on the side of caution and not annoy your customers with invasive copy protection? IMO it creates a much better environment if companies are more concerned with making their customers happy than they are with trying to foil the pirates, especially since (to date) no one has been able to keep a game from being pirated anyway. It's all wasted effort from what I can tell.

Also another thing that annoys me with (especially driver based) DRM is that it pretty much guarantees that the game won't work with the next version of windows, since the drivers are only designed for XP/Vista. This was a major headache with the transition from XP to Vista, and also with XP to XP x64 edition. Games that would have worked (not all but a pretty large part) on Vista didn't because of XP specific DRM drivers.

Thats the point. A good game will sell without DRM, despite pirates. Nobody is claiming a crappy game without DRM will sell just because it doesn't have it.

Pirates do not buy software, the company is not losing sales. If a pirate breaks the DRM and pirates it anyway then the company makes no money and losses the money from disgruntled customers and the cost of the DRM. If they don't have DRM their customers are happy, they save money not implementing it, and the pirates still pirate the software.

Either way pirates get free software, and will still not buy the game. And there are people who will get the pirated version just to avoid DRM.

It would make sense to protect your product if you could do so effectively without harming your customers. It is not effective, DRM is easily broken/removed by pirates. It then only hurts the legit customers.

Draconic DRM is a crappy solution to an exagerated problem. Information, community building and some actual honesty from the publisher (Of course not including SD here) ranks towards the consumer would be a much better one. At least I now know I won't buy these games until there are some "fixes" out, thanks for the info.

Oh boy, another company who thinks putting this crap in actually helps.

Here's some free advice for EA: making a paid copy of the game run worse then a pirated copy does not encourage people to buy the game. In fact, your setup tells people not to buy the game at all if they're going to be offline for extended periods. What you're actually doing is ENCOURAGING piracy, since its not like these measures will actually stop anybody from pirating it (they'll be stripped out by release).

Why are so many game companies run by absolute morons?

To me, this whole thing doesnt seem like piracy at all. It seems like a veiled attempt to get free marketing data. Maybe im just too paranoid but think about this... It has to call home every 10 days, and of course it will have to send some kind of identifying materials to make sure their issued key for the product matches up with the system it was originally installed on, most likely hardware data/etc. So, now they have instant data about every single one of their consumers hardware makeup, they know the ration of intel to amd, ati to nvidia, etc, not only that, but they have all the info needed to keep track of how often their customers upgrade their pcs. But, what if they send more info to 'verify', what if they include more than just your serial number, what if the game makes you specify your name and your location (or it could just be traced from the IP address) at some point and it sends that out, then the company now also has instant geographical data on where there games are sold and in what quantity, plus when you stop updating, they know you've uninstalled their game, so they have a near perfect graph of the lifetime of any game they release with this scheme.

In my opinion, yeah, i'm probably a bit too paranoid, but i think they don't even care about copy protection, its pretty obvious noone really cares, everyone knows it doesn't work for long. I think they just want free marketing data, but anyways, i've already preordered spore (in the end, im just an addict, and thats the reason EA might win this one, the gaming addicts), but the one ill be playing will be the pirated version. My job sometimes requires me to go a few months running on just my savings, that means limited luxuries and no internet, hell my most powerful PC doesn't even have net access (broke the network card, dont use it enough to fix it), so its not really even a choice for me, even if i wanted it to be.

Not to mention legitimate users will now consider piracy to avoid DRM.

Game developers are right to protect their games from piracy. I just wish there was some better way to protect their products without making it so difficult to use. Unfortunately, the only two mechanisms are putting something on the installation media or having the user authenticate with some server on the internet. Can anybody think of anything better?

Piracy is stealing, I still don't know how anybody could think otherwise. The game developers do not work for free. If the developers cannot get paid for all of their hard work and investment, they will just decide to stop developing for the PC. Simple economics really.

Think about this way, what if your employer came to you and said they were going to reduce your salary by 10%? 20%? 30%? just because they did not fell like paying you? You would not be too happy.

As for SoaSE, they decided to write off the loss due to piracy. They still made money, but at a reduced rate. Good of them to be so nice...

If this stuff actually stopped piracy, maybe. But it doesn't. It absolutely DOES NOT WORK!

Both games will be on some Torrent site with this stuff stripped out by the release date. The pirated copy will work fine without phoning EA. Legitimate copies will have problems due to people being offline, servers going down, incompatibility problems, and every other issue that pops up every time a company tries this sort of thing (most recently with Assassins Creed).

Why companies keep trying a method that has been conclusively proven to fail at stopping piracy but succeed at causing problems for paying customers (thereby encouraging them to use the pirated version) is beyond me. Its like they hear the word "piracy" and suddenly go completely insane.

You have to take care of your paying customers first. You must not implement any kind of copy protection that will cause problems for legitimate customers. Can you imagine if some other industry tried this nonsense? How about a car that doesn't start because it can't contact Ford's authentication server, so it just assumes that its stolen?

I mean, honestly. The way to stop piracy is not by making the pirated copy of the game better then the retail one. Everybody except PC game executives (Frogboy excluded) seems to know that.

[quote]If it fails to connect, it will try again on day 6. Then on day seven and so on up to day 10. If it cannot authenticate at day 10, the game will not run until you connect to the internet and allow it to authenticate.quote]

So if the server fails or goes off line you will not be able to play your game. Again back to Why would you buy a game with this garbage on it.

Summed up nicely I might add good job Coelocanth.

They didn't "write it off" they gave people an incentive to legally purchase the game (support) instead of punishing them with horrible DRM BS.



Yes, Piracy is stealing, no one has argued it isn't But you have to realize DRM does not work. Pirates will steal the game anyway and rip the DRM out. Meaning only the legit customers actually deal with it and the company lost money buying/developing the DRM.

Its simple economics and common sense that DRM does not work and is not worth the expense. It hurts the consumer and doesn't matter to the pirates either way.