I’m not a fan of DRM, I think it’s mostly ineffective and can potentially annoy legitimate customers more than anyone else. It might help sales a little to not have your game all over every torrent site on the day of release or before, but beyond that I don’t think there’s much you can do. And it’s rare that a game is not cracked before release these days, so I don’t see what good it does. The crackers will inevitably crack the protection, and there will always be people wanting free stuff. If a publisher ships a game with no DRM, what will happen differently? Are people going to start burning thousands of copies and giving them out to everyone they see? Anyone who is willing to pirate software will have no trouble finding a way to do it.
Having said all that, DRM is not that big of a deal. I’d bet that 99% of people will never even notice its there. I only know it’s there because I notice an occasional activation dialog or disc-check indicated by spinning disc cursor thing. I’m not saying no one has ever had a legitimate issue with DRM, just that it’s not any more likely to be a problem than any other aspect of software. It’s almost equivalent to complaining that DVDs can be scratched or broken so it’s not acceptable for stuff to be put on DVDs. There are some things you just have to live with, and for now DRM is one of them. So can we stop making a big deal about the DRM for every PC game that comes out?
Which leads me to the inspiration for this post. This two page Q&A about GTA4’s DRM is probably one of the dumbest things I’ve seen on IGN recently. Although I suspect the entire Q&A was written by Rockstar, despite IGN acting like they took the initiative to ask Rockstar these questions. And I can see why Rockstar would want to get this information out there in a way they can control. So I guess it’s not that dumb really. They do sort of attempt to answer the question of piracy making DRM pointless, and their answer is better than what most companies come up with.
In the seemingly inevitable event that some dirty pirate manages to crack GTA IV PC and make it available, what are the advantages and disadvantages to using a legitimate copy over a pirated one?
Rockstar: Aside from the fact that warez are a great place to pick up a Trojan or key logger, using a cracked copy of GTA IV PC will result in varying changes to the game experience. These can range from comical to game-progress-halting changes.
Rockstar Games rewards loyal, paying customers and will offer incentives and downloadable content that will only be available to registered users of the game, running non-hacked copies, via Rockstar Games Social Club.
The second part of the answer I’ve got no issue with. That should be the only protection a game needs, post-release support exclusive to paying customers enforceable with online registration and a serial number. As far as the first point, I’ve occasionally heard about a bad crack that can interfere with game progress, but they’re usually fixed very quickly after discovering problems. Still their answer is not totally off base. The only problem is this doesn’t address the pointlessness of DRM. I guess maybe you could stretch the logic that if pirates have to crack the DRM they’re more likely to screw something up and introduce new bugs into the game, but that’s not a good thing for anyone. Someone who downloads a badly cracked game and encounters a bug probably isn’t going to blame the crack, unfair as that may be.
There’s nothing new or surprising about the DRM Rockstar is using, if anything it’s more lenient than most DRM schemes these days in that it allows unlimited installations on an unlimited number of computers. And yet you can see the comments on IGN or anywhere else this story was posted, almost every single one of them is acting like this is terrible and they’re not even going to buy the PC version now (most of them already weren’t I’m sure). People are dumb and I hate them. This is nothing new, I think what annoys me about this is they’re not entirely wrong to have a problem with DRM. They’re just taking the wrong angle on it, and overreacting.