Reading just now about Ubisoft justifying their excessive DRM practices lately, this time for the new Driver game, made me think of an analogy. The game industry today is like a great big movie theater. DRM is like an army of ushers patrolling up and down the aisles, flashing lights in everyone's faces, and pulling people out mid-movie into the lobby if they misplaced their ticket stubs until they're able to produce it. All in an effort to prevent the one or two idiots from sneaking in the back way.

This is so frustrating that many former moviegoers just go to the unmarked shady-looking movie theater next door where the guy in the projector booth sneaks copies of the movies over. You find it by word of mouth. Turns out there's no admission, the popcorn is free, the theater seats give great massages, they even serve free beer. You secretly wonder why anyone would go out of their way to make these things freely available to you. You enjoy it, but you still know deep down it's wrong. The only price you pay is the guilt that you're taking revenue away from the management in the legitimate theater who ordered all those ushers to shine flashlights in your face to begin with. Not a huge deterrent to a lot of people, unsurprisingly.

Customers hate being treated like potential criminals. The more publishers do it, the easier it is to make that moral leap to piracy for people who can easily afford their products. Everyone knows how to get them for free, after all, so whose benefit are they doing all of this for? Most of their customers pay in spite of their restrictive DRM efforts, not because of them. Someone just needs to look at The Witcher 2 to see that a game can be a success on PCs even without DRM. Or gog.com in general. People recognize quality in entertainment and want to support it. That's human nature.