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.

I don't think this argument is new. I think that if Ubisoft respected it they would have reacted a long time ago. It seems like sound logic to me too, especially given how well their efforts have worked at preventing privacy (not at all) - maybe they're just trying to get the PC userbase to switch over to consoles where control is much easier.

Yeah. but you left out the part that the asshole movie theater is there because of the shady looking one in the first place. I blame them both.

@Veektarius - I don't think that's the case, otherwise they would have just abandoned the PC market entirely. I mean, that's the easiest thing to do, right? The real reason they don't is that for all their hemming and hawing, the PC market is still profitable, even with the piracy occurring on that platform. I mean, Ubisoft is putting their major titles out on OSX, and that market is even smaller than the PC market. What does that say?

As far as driving gamers to consoles because they're viewed as more secure platforms, that's also a double-edged sword. Piracy for systems like the Dreamcast, PS2, Xbox, DS, or the PSP was universally trivial, but they still put games out, even without the ability to add their own DRM systems. Furthermore, all consoles and handhelds are subject to a very healthy (some would say excessively healthy) second-hand market, something that simply doesn't exist on PC. They haven't really done anything about that either, unless you count EA-style Project Ten Dollar initiatives, or pre-order incentives. Bizarrely, Those are incredibly positive forms of "DRM" in that they give customers added bonus content just for being customers. It's never the case on PC though. Remember CD checks? You spent $30-100 on a fancy optical drive back in the day, and the industry pretty much made it useless by using it as an overpriced hardware dongle. You had to leave discs in the trays if you wanted the convenience of firing up your favorite game, but still had to sacrifice that hard drive space for a full install on top of that. What was that all about?

@TheDudeOfGaming said:

Yeah. but you left out the part that the asshole movie theater is there because of the shady looking one in the first place. I blame them both.

Yes, all movie theaters exist because movies are made. I don't think there really needs to be blame assigned, just awareness of the big picture.

I'm not white. I've been in stores that weren't even that upscale and had employees follow me around very conspicuously to make sure I didn't shoplift something, presumably. It's incredibly stressful to me as a customer, and in the end I'd never go back to that store. If I couldn't avoid going back to that retailer, one or two times in my youth, and I'm not proud of it, I shoplifted just to spite that store. By that logic, you're saying I'm also at fault for being followed around initially?

Everything they're doing is counterproductive. I'm singling out Ubisoft specifically because of their attempts to include always-on DRM, or sneaking in DRM when they specifically said there wouldn't be any. I'm not anti-DRM. If it's non-intrustive, I don't mind at all. Steam is fine. Serial numbers are understandable. There's just something about these "always on" DRM schemes that feel like they're treating you like a criminal.

maybe they're just trying to get the PC userbase to switch over to consoles where control is much easier.

Ubisoft games have been personally blacklisted ever since they started using DRM. It's really that simple I just don't buy their shit. They don't care, and I don't have to deal with any hassle, so it's a win win.

Next on the list, EA. Origin is more hassle than it's worth.

@abdo said:

@Veektarius said:

maybe they're just trying to get the PC userbase to switch over to consoles where control is much easier.

I think so too, seeing as how Assassin's Creed II, AC: Brotherhood, Call of Juarez: The Cartel and now Driver SF have all been released on PS3 & 360 first, with the PC version coming out about a month or more later. As for Driver, Ubisoft have slightly toned down their DRM: you have to sign into their servers every time you fire up the game, but once you do, you can choose whether you want to stay online or offline, meaning that if you're playing single-player, you don't need to worry about your internet connection, and if you're playing multi-player, well obviously once your connection gets cut off you'll be disconnected from your session, which happens in all multi-player games regardless of DRM. To me this sounds very similar to Steam, and that works just fine. Plus, in this day and age, I think it's fair to guess that very few people don't have their PC hooked up to the internet, and if you have a PC powerful enough to run the game, then I'm pretty sure you're connected. I'm not defending Ubi, and I'm not fond of their stance on PC games; later release, inconvenient DRM, but at least this is a step in the right direction, even if they've still got a lot to learn. Cool analogy by the way.

I think you're right about the PC delay, although I think they're just hoping that for whatever impatient overlap of people with lots of disposable income, powerful gaming PCs, and loose morals decides they want to play the games immediately and don't care if it's $60 on a console or for free off piratebay as long as they can have it early. That's fair, I think.

The DRM is crap, though. It's not even close to Steam. The big concern today is laptop play for most people, although unreliable internet is a great reason against the "always on" DRM Ubisoft used for Assassin's Creed II. The current setup you mentioned with the session start check whenever you fire up the game makes it nearly impossible to play Ubisoft games on planes, trains, or buses, and SPECIFICALLY punishing only those loyal customers that didn't go to the shadier parts of the internet looking for a crack to play their legitimate software on the go. That's no way to run a business. It trains your customers not to pay for your products in order to have a more pleasant experience with them. ( @Buzzkill , This phenomenon is EXACTLY why I don't own a "preorder" for the special edition of The Old Republic. I tried 4 times to order from their site and it was incredibly buggy. I finally gave up and will now probably wait until at least the first expansion to jump onboard. Inconvenience is directly responsible for turning this paying customer into a non-paying customer. So yes, I agree Origin sucks too, but for different reasons. As much as I dislike it I still use it for EA published games like Bioware titles and The Sims for the same reason I try not to get GFW titles on Steam -- too many overlays between me and my content.)

Steam gets around this by requiring a game be launched while online just once (the first time), as I learned the hard way on a long Amtrak ride to Montreal (fortunately I had enough videos and music to pass the time). Now though, whenever I expect to take a long trip, one of my "things to do" is look over my laptop game installs, update/remove games from my laptop steam list, and then go down the list and launch/shutdown each one while I'm still home. Inconvenient, but not terrible. For those games that have overlaps with GoG.com, I just use my installers from that instead, no muss, no fuss.

Developers really need to get over this mindset of developing with the pirates in mind. First and foremost should ALWAYS be the customer. ALWAYS. Throw away any ideas that inconvenience the PAYING CUSTOMER. If this happened in the movie industry, I wouldn't be surprised if DVDs came with a pair of glasses that shielded viewers from a strobe effect implanted in the film. Pirates would clean that up in 2 minutes, and then they'd have great copies of the movie, while the schmucks that paid $30+ are stuck watching their movie alone and uncomfortable (because they only have one pair of cumbersome glasses).

It's no way to run a business.

The problem of DRM is that it only attacks the legal user. A pirate doesn't give a damn about DRM because the scene releases always have it removed beforehand. In fact, the very premise of DRM makes people actively seek a pirated version instead of a legal one in many, many cases.

The moment DRM not only doesn't go against legal users, but it also enhances their experience with the game, that'll be the moment DRM becomes successful. That's why Steam is so popular: it doesn't feel like DRM.

Like I said before, I don't think that there is really argument to be made that Ubisoft's tactics are currently successful at preventing piracy, at least in the absolute sense. I think that a more interesting discussion is exactly what is motivating them to stay the course. Are they just inept? Are they standing by DRM to avoid admitting they made a mistake? Or is some purpose beneficial to them served by what they're doing? Are there, on average, fewer cracks available for a DRM game? Does the knowledge there is some sort of copy protection increase revenues because honest PC users switch to more expensive console versions? They've gotta have some reason for doing it.

@Veektarius said:

Like I said before, I don't think that there is really argument to be made that Ubisoft's tactics are currently successful at preventing piracy, at least in the absolute sense. I think that a more interesting discussion is exactly what is motivating them to stay the course. Are they just inept? Are they standing by DRM to avoid admitting they made a mistake? Or is some purpose beneficial to them served by what they're doing? Are there, on average, fewer cracks available for a DRM game? Does the knowledge there is some sort of copy protection increase revenues because honest PC users switch to more expensive console versions? They've gotta have some reason for doing it.

Well by definition, no cracks would be needed for a game with no DRM, but I'm guessing you mean something along the lines of "fewer cracks the harder the DRM is to circumvent", in which case yes, there probably are... but all anyone needs is one.

Two groups want DRM. The most obvious ones are the investors. They want to hear that the publisher and developer are putting in at the very least a token amount of effort to prevent piracy, especially casual piracy (i.e., "my friend doesn't have a copy of Starcraft 2 and it doesn't work, let me burn him a copy so we can play together"). The other group are certain programmers that see it as both an insult ("how dare they steal something I worked so hard on!") and a challenge ("I'll cook up something no one can crack!"). Of course, cracking groups delight in being issued such challenges, and it's a never-ending cycle.

Sometimes programmers try to make their copy protection fairly insidious, such as the one for Arkham Asylum that prevented Batman from gliding properly, causing it to effectively break the game after about 20-30 minutes when you got to a poison gas-covered room you needed to platform around. Yes, it did get some of the more witless pirates to unwittingly identify themselves when they registered for the official forums to complain about that "bug", but how many more people were put off by the game or games like it? Pirates are also pretty vocal, and are a big part of the opinion-making group out there. Not specifically Batman, because that got fairly universal acclaim, but imagine how many sales they lost when casual friends asked their computer-savvy buddy his opinion of Game X, and he said not to bother because it was a broken mess..? There's no metric for that. What we do know is the time those programmers took to come up with a clever DRM method took away from time that could have been spent cleaning up the game proper, such as the case with Spyro 3 (and that WAS a console game). Great article on that here, btw: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php

I'd like to think most programmers aren't this way, though. How many professionals in the industry got their start through piracy? Downloading and learning to use tools they would have never been able to afford otherwise. A LOT of people in the graphic art and computer animation/modeling biz definitely benefited from some hands-on time with $500-1000+ pieces of software. Most of the people working in the games industry today didn't have limitless money to spend on games and pirated a ton just to feed that passion. I don't begrudge them that. If some poor kid blew his Christmas game on something horrible like Dai-katana and stuck to the moral high road without piracy, a year away from playing good games could have soured him on games in general and he would have gone into some other industry instead. (I know that's the case with a lot of casual Wii owners now who have even less interest in gaming than they did before simply because of all the shovelware they've encounted on shelves.)

Piracy strikes me as a bit of a necessary evil, greasing wheels in the industry that don't even realize they need greasing.

The best form of DRM out there, I think, is making paying for a game more desirable than not, and in that, the industry has failed. They should take a lesson from Netflix as the logical extreme of this. The film industry is living in the horrifying reality (for them) that anyone can just type the name of their movie or TV show into google and download their content in a matter of seconds, yet somehow, Netflix has convinced people to pay $9+ a month for something they could potentially have for free. How did they do that? It wasn't by forcing people to type in a serial code every time they watch a movie online, or forcing them to authenticate/deauthenticate any computer they try to view it off of, that's for sure.

@Veektarius said:

Like I said before, I don't think that there is really argument to be made that Ubisoft's tactics are currently successful at preventing piracy, at least in the absolute sense. I think that a more interesting discussion is exactly what is motivating them to stay the course. Are they just inept? Are they standing by DRM to avoid admitting they made a mistake? Or is some purpose beneficial to them served by what they're doing? Are there, on average, fewer cracks available for a DRM game? Does the knowledge there is some sort of copy protection increase revenues because honest PC users switch to more expensive console versions? They've gotta have some reason for doing it.

Well by definition, no cracks would be needed for a game with no DRM, but I'm guessing you mean something along the lines of "fewer cracks the harder the DRM is to circumvent", in which case yes, there probably are... but all anyone needs is one.

Two groups want DRM. The most obvious ones are the investors. They want to hear that the publisher and developer are putting in at the very least a token amount of effort to prevent piracy, especially casual piracy (i.e., "my friend doesn't have a copy of Starcraft 2 and it doesn't work, let me burn him a copy so we can play together"). The other group are certain programmers that see it as both an insult ("how dare they steal something I worked so hard on!") and a challenge ("I'll cook up something no one can crack!"). Of course, cracking groups delight in being issued such challenges, and it's a never-ending cycle.

Sometimes programmers try to make their copy protection fairly insidious, such as the one for Arkham Asylum that prevented Batman from gliding properly, causing it to effectively break the game after about 20-30 minutes when you got to a poison gas-covered room you needed to platform around. Yes, it did get some of the more witless pirates to unwittingly identify themselves when they registered for the official forums to complain about that "bug", but how many more people were put off by the game or games like it? Pirates are also pretty vocal, and are a big part of the opinion-making group out there. Not specifically Batman, because that got fairly universal acclaim, but imagine how many sales they lost when casual friends asked their computer-savvy buddy his opinion of Game X, and he said not to bother because it was a broken mess..? There's no metric for that. What we do know is the time those programmers took to come up with a clever DRM method took away from time that could have been spent cleaning up the game proper, such as the case with Spyro 3 (and that WAS a console game). Great article on that here, btw: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php

I'd like to think most programmers aren't this way, though. How many professionals in the industry got their start through piracy? Downloading and learning to use tools they would have never been able to afford otherwise. A LOT of people in the graphic art and computer animation/modeling biz definitely benefited from some hands-on time with $500-1000+ pieces of software. Most of the people working in the games industry today didn't have limitless money to spend on games and pirated a ton just to feed that passion. I don't begrudge them that. If some poor kid blew his Christmas game on something horrible like Dai-katana and stuck to the moral high road without piracy, a year away from playing good games could have soured him on games in general and he would have gone into some other industry instead. (I know that's the case with a lot of casual Wii owners now who have even less interest in gaming than they did before simply because of all the shovelware they've encounted on shelves.)

Piracy strikes me as a bit of a necessary evil, greasing wheels in the industry that don't even realize they need greasing.

The best form of DRM out there, I think, is making paying for a game more desirable than not, and in that, the industry has failed. They should take a lesson from Netflix as the logical extreme of this. The film industry is living in the horrifying reality (for them) that anyone can just type the name of their movie or TV show into google and download their content in a matter of seconds, yet somehow, Netflix has convinced people to pay $9+ a month for something they could potentially have for free. How did they do that? It wasn't by forcing people to type in a serial code every time they watch a movie online, or forcing them to authenticate/deauthenticate any computer they try to view it off of, that's for sure.

@onan: Well, even if there's no DRM, you need stuff like a No-CD crack or a keygen or something. I guess what I meant is, does DRM decrease the number of people who successfully pirate a game in any way? We have a lot of conjecture that suggests it does not and obviously self-reporting isn't going to clear up the matter one way or the other, but maybe Ubi has some proprietary stats that suggest our 'common knowledge' isn't all that accurate.

As for the investors and angry programmers, yeah, that's true, but Ubi's under the same pressures as everyone else there.

And as for your stance on piracy, I agree with it. I pirated when I was a kid, mostly music, but some games. Now I pay for everything since I'm employed. Should that change, god forbid, I might lapse again. Still, I don't endorse piracy. It's sort of like stealing bread to feed your family - except way worse. It might be an okay decision at a given time, but you should never feel good about it lest you do it when it is not necessary.

@Veektarius said:

@onan: Well, even if there's no DRM, you need stuff like a No-CD crack or a keygen or something. I guess what I meant is, does DRM decrease the number of people who successfully pirate a game in any way? We have a lot of conjecture that suggests it does not and obviously self-reporting isn't going to clear up the matter one way or the other, but maybe Ubi has some proprietary stats that suggest our 'common knowledge' isn't all that accurate.

CD checks are a form of DRM, and no-CD cracks are circumventing those DRM methods. "No DRM" is just that, no DRM. Software that doesn't care if you install it everywhere, software that doesn't refuse to work if it can't phone home, software that doesn't require a key of some sort. Games from GoG.com have no DRM, and the same goes for sites like dotemu.com .

You bring up a valid point: You don't even view CD checks as DRM because they're just that trivial to get around. Most other cracks are just as trivial for the end user. The only person DRM affects is the casual pirate, and I do believe it's effective in preventing at least 50% of people who try to share purchased software just like they'd loan out a DVD or send a friend an MP3 of a great song. So yes, lets say it does stop that 50%. Of course, it's a double-edged sword, and the rest of the people who don't just shrug their shoulders and know how to use google at all get introduced to piracy. Those people think, "man, how how much money I can save!" and start pirating for themselves.

Unfortunately using the methods they have, they've created a massive Skinner box where people are punished for playing by the rules, and rewarded for pirating. That's Psychology 101. They're providing negative reinforcement of a desired behavior by treating customers in an antagonistic manner. They need to find a better way that isn't flat-out insulting, either through a hardware restriction (like consoles), slightly restrictive DRM in an extremely convenient package (Steam), or even just putting us on the honor system (gog).

Games are a digital medium. They need to stop treating it like a physical good that can be stolen, and start looking at it like music or TV. The former simply doesn't work, as the RIAA learned the hard way.

Edit: Ubisoft doesn't have any proprietary data. They pop onto torrent sites, see how many people connect, multiply that number by $50 or $60, and claim that's how much money they lost due to piracy. Everyone with half a brain knows that isn't a valid metric. It's what they use, though.