The comments on that slashdot page are hilarious
Quote:
Engineering hours building unbreakable DRM: $1.6M
Marketing devoted to managing customer hostility to new DRM: $800K
Lost sales due to customers boycotting your product: $2M
Having some wiseass kid from Sweden break your DRM on the first day: Priceless
Discovering you just spent a ton of money to make the pirated version more attractive: Doubly Priceless.
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The thing is, the latest stream of DRM implementations have a very ironic effect. They make the purchase tied to and dependant upon the release of a crack, ie
some people buy the games thanks to the pirates. How is that so?
Well, i have frequent ISP problems. I will never buy something that doesn't work offline for single player. However, if SH5 is cracked i can buy it and install the crack on top of it and i'm good to go.
On one hand you could say the bean-counters will get the wrong message because all they look at is the amount of sales. What i would consider a good middle ground solution however, would be to buy the game, crack it and e-mail them telling them that the cracked version works better and we would prefer to buy that one if we had a choice.
I don't think DRM will survive in the long run. It's already being phased out of the music industry (where it was first introduced) and the first signs of weakness have appeared in the gaming industry as well. Look at EA. After the debacle with Spore (one of the most pirated games ever), their latest titles shipped with little to no DRM at all. For example, Dragon Age:Origins had a one-time online activation if you bought a digital download copy, while the boxed editions had a simple disc check. Look at other high profile examples as well, Fallout 3 had no protection whatsoever and it sold like mad.
In the day and age that we live in and having years of previous experience, it's naive of company executives to think they will be able to contain,railroad and manage the habbits of the PC gamer for their own needs. So, the only viable alternative for them is a very simple course of action that's been the cornerstone axiom of the market business since the ancient times: If you want to make good sales you need a good product, respect your potential customers and don't p*ss them off.
Or they can just keep chasing their DRM chimera until they go bankrupt.