WTE and CSthor have hit the nail on the head.
DRM's true purpose is commercial, not security, its for the company to lock YOU in, and prevent YOU from selling what YOU bought to someone else. So if 2 years down the road, you're done with the game, your friend hears about the fun times you had and you just can't give him the game, he has to buy it.
The companies aren't stupid, the big companies know some angry programmer on the dev team will sneak out the code for the DRM / security, or a copy of the game will be gone over by a fine tooth comb the finest programmers and hackers and a crack found in hours. Any popular game or awesome game has it happen to it.
Starcraft 2 is an example, when the beta release was made open to the public, my friend had a pen drive with a full working beta, just transfer to your hard drive, run the install, boom, had SC 2 beta without registering.
The publishers want to lock in the 90% of people who like to game but don't know too much about the nuts and bolts behind it, and make the most $$ out of it. They know they'll never get a cent from the hacker / friends of hackers / pirate "nations". But the bigger base of people (and richer) nations that don't know, will pay.
Even if it means infuriating good paying customers. Look at World of Warcraft. They just had a new iteration of that game. First day, no one could get in, crashes, lags etc. But the forums were full of those posts by 1 out of a million that could get in and tell the glory of the game.
And all those angry players that threaten to quit are still playing a week later when the login load is balanced, new servers are up.
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Originally Posted by csThor
That's smokescreen-talk. To counter piracy a working copy protection would be sufficient. DRM is about tying customers to the publisher, introduce more and more stringent DRM schemes and pay-DLCs, prepare the way for true cloud-computing and ultimately force pay-to-play (even if called "club membership fee" to ease the public outcry) for any kind of game. This is what DRM is about - it's about introducing various new ways of squeezing even more money out of customers, money which will flow to the Publisher alone and which will not be used to develop better games. And this is why I believe DRM is inacceptable while copy protection is.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WTE_Galway
The pirate scare is a little bit like the mythical terrorist scare, its exaggerated out of all proportion.
Its well documented that:
a) commercial pirates will crack any DRM if the title is worth selling out of Shanghai
b) casual pirates tend to be collectors who would never buy the product anyway.
The REAL purpose of these online DRM is to prevent resale of the products second hand on ebay once the user is bored with them. It also makes the move to "pay per year/month" software eventually much easier.
By the way I am amazed how many people on these forums seem to get outraged at NG for insisting on royalties and then turn around and endorse onerous DRM schemes. Seems a bit hypocritical really.
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