Bohemia Interactive's FADE Digital Rights Managment

Just found out about this from a Kotaku article. Reminds me of how Demon Souls handled players who got the game early.

In their attempts to thwart pirates, most PC publishers end up pissing off paying customers with intrusive or bothersome DRM. All, that is, except for Bohemia Interactive, who the likes of EA and Ubisoft could learn a thing or two from.

Bohemia's games have long used a copy protection system called FADE, which is part-security device, part wonderful troll.

You see, most forms of DRM, or digital rights management, try to cut the user off at the source. Prevent them from ever booting their game up. This may sound good on paper, but once pirates get past the gates—and they always get past the gates—they're free to play the game.

But FADE lets pirates download a game and start playing. Start enjoying the title, seeing what all the fuss is about. It's only a few hours in that things start to go a little wrong. In Bohemia'sArmA, for example, your aim starts to get a little wonky. You'll notice the AI getting erratic. These glitches start to slowly increase in size and occurrence until, bam, you've been turned into a bird, or the screen looks like it's suddenly underwater.

Sometimes the pirate knows what this is and admits the defeat, but other times it gets even better. They take to official forums to complain, where they're revealed as pirates. Other times, because they've got a taste for the game, they'll do the right thing and go and buy a copy.

Once FADE hits this point there's no recovery, and to this day, a decade after it was first used, from Operation Flashpoint through to Bohemia's recent Take On Helicopters, there's yet to be a widespread means for pirates to circumvent the system.
If it works for Bohemia, and can even encourage sales instead of punishing legitimate customers, surely other publishers could give something similar a shot?

Source: http://kotaku.com/5858150/now-this-is-how-copy-protection-should-be-done-people

So what do you think? Is creative "deprogramming" the future of DRM?

I can't imagine that hackers won't be able to get past this as well. I guess they won't reveal how a pirated copy is detected directly.

I love any idea that doesn't involve punishing the consumers.

I think there's far too much of a risk of hurting legitimate consumers with a system like this. Also, many people to genuinely pirate games to try them out and if they pirate it and it totally breaks for them, they probably won't buy it.

Honestly, the best experience I've had with DRM is Steamworks, and I want all games to use that over other forms of DRM. I can see the flaws in it for some people but it works perfectly for me and my gaming situation. Aside from that, I actually kind of like SecuROM as aside from the first launch it's fairly unintrusive.

Obviously no DRM is preferred though.

I doubt that this is the future, similar stuff has already been tried in the past, way back when copy protection meant typing in stuff from the manual, and it never really catched on. The reason is of course obvious: crackers will crack it sooner or later and it always runs the risk of flooding the Internet with bug reports about problems that don't exist in the full game, but are caused by the DRM. No developer likes that kind of bad press.
 
However the future will look similar, in DRM I see mainly two main trends:
 

1. Give the user a free peek at the game. Music stores do it, book stores do it and services like OnLive do it already for games. I wouldn't be surprised if this gets implemented into other services as well, in one form or another, be it a time limit play or a free-to-play base-game that requires you to pay for additional missions.
2. Successful DRM is DRM that improves the users experience, not trashes it. I am a big hater on all kinds of DRM and copy-protections in general, however even I like what Steam does (well, not all of it, but that's a different story). Steam uses its DRM for empowering the user. With Steam I can install a game on multiple computers, download it in multiple languages, redownload it when ever I want, store savegames in the cloud, autopatching, etc. Steam allows me do to things far easier then DRM-free media would allow, as Steam is managing my games, not me with boxes of DVD and manually copying savegames around. In the long term I expect all services to follow Steams model, piracy then becomes mostly largely a non-issue, as no piracy can match the convenience of a well managed DRM shop.