Digital Rights Management is a minefield for game publishers. It seems to be a situation where they are damned if they do and damned if they don't as they balance negative consumer reaction to anti-piracy measures with the risk of having all their products freely distributed.
Codemasters' CEO Rod Cousens believes there's a different way. It's not an unpopular idea to leverage microtransactional content downloads as a revenue stream and to ensure that players are using legitimate copies of the software. But I have to give credit to Cousens for being straight and calling this practice what it is:
The video games industry has to learn to operate in a different way. My answer is for us as publishers is to actually sell unfinished games - and to offer the consumer multiple micro-payments to buy elements of the full experience.
And why not? It worked for Shareware back in the day, except you generally didn't have to buy boxed product. I honestly don't know what idea I like worse, having my full games be hurt by intrusive and sometimes crippling DRM systems or paying money for what could be considered a very extensive demo. As long as they're willing to drop the retail prices to correspond with the reduced quantity of content, I'm on board.
Who Needs DRM? [CVG]
Conrad Zimmerman is Destructoid's News Editor and home to the busiest mustache in the gaming press. An amateur historian and pop culture fanatic, Conrad possesses a nearly limitless wealth of videogame factoids and a passion for the power of games to teach, inspire and entertain. He enjoys reading, writing and turning things which should be fun into work.
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Contest:
5:30 AM on 07.15.2010
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Oh wait, he means the second hand market really. My bad.
If half a game is half price and the rest adds up to the other half, fine.
Don't let bobby cockdick hear about this. Shit that would be horrible. Imagine full price for cod with one gun and each additional gun being another 10 quid!
In other words, this is just a terrible idea.
The best way, IMHO, is to stick with either a simple disk check, one time internet activation, use Steam or Impulse or, simply, to add no DRM. All these elaborate choices simply serve to fuel the pirates on, or people download it because they see it as sticking a finger up at "the man".
DRM wasn't broken, there was no need to "fix" it.
saying that if like Forza3 and the DLC is just a free code in a box I'd much rather have it then something that requires me to always be online or drags my machine down
..and I know he isn't.
Also the idea of it preventing piracy though ludicrous, if they can pirate the game they can pirate the micro-transactions.
Ubisoft tried a holiday season of no DRM and was rewarded for it with record high piracy and .txt files in the torrents calling them dumbasses for making it so easy.
In other words, if people REALLY want to see this shit go away, they would quit using every excuse in the book to justify stealing shit and just stop stealing shit. Publishers aren't creative, developers are. So every design a publisher pushes forward is in reaction to a problem, not trying to preempt the problem.
Since this would also bring the cost of used games down, it wouldn't be much of a hit for the used game market, until the games got ridiculously low, and you were paying $10 for the game, and then having to buy $10 DLC. However, DLC can be discounted as time goes on, as well, to entice more people to buy it.
Then, this would act as a pretty decent DRM solution...until the pirates started working on cracking the DRM.
Gamefly would be pretty boned by this, unfortunately.
I'm in full support of this movement, though, provided that the games become significantly cheaper.
Think about it for a moment: How many times have you gotten that brand new plastic wrapped game home, that you paid 69.99 for, only to find out that it's an unplayable mess. With this system, you would only pay for as much of the game as you wanted to play! With $5 installments, everyone would have saved about 54.99 on Alpha Protocol!
Not to mention that it will be abused like every other form of DRM, someone will always take it too far. Like Activision.
Actually, no, I would never buy games with this bullshit.
Gamefly probably thinks the idea sucks.
I've found through microtransactions, I have paid a lot more for some of my games (Rock Band, I'm lookin' at you). Do I regret it? No. I love my game. It's a polished, quality product. Would I pirate it? Probably not, even if I could. I like the company enough from their history that I want to support them.
on-disc DLC?
But uh, yeah. Don't some companies already do unfinished games or the like?
Treating us all like criminals is not the smart thing to do.
You want to stop piracy and used purchases - then you have to do what you REALLY have to do - stop releasing physical copies of games. Whether people like that or not is beside the point, you sell through digital distribution and each game is automatically generated a key, too.
So long as you keep fighting the consumer and the pirates at the same time, you're going to keep on losing revenue you could be getting.
If you cant put out a quality product, go away!
Remember folk, your dollars spent count as votes towards these decisions. I won't buy this crap.
I would like to see them come out in favor of cheaper digital versions...honestly Valve games sold digitally have 30 to 40 dollar profit margins as where retail is only 5 to 7 dollars profit...maybe instead of increasing the price for PC games to that of consoles, they made them cheaper.
These publishers are going for the "risk big, win big" and when they lose, they blame piracy instead of their prices. Steam had a sale recently and I bought like 6 games I would not have otherwise purchased. GoG does the same thing for me. If you're not Halo, Final Fantasy, Call of Duty, etc, don't expect to make a billion dollars.
If games were reasonable prices, people wouldn't even need to pirate them. Instead of trying to forcibly drive up the cost, find the sweet spot. Imagine how many more sales each game would have made if they were $10 or $20 cheaper.
Piracy is not a supply and demand issue. It's a criminal issue. Companies do not walk into projects blindly. They have focus groups, marketing to appeal to public interest, etc.
Saying that ANY company just sort of whips shit up unknowing if it's going to sell through or not is a ridiculous notion. There is always an element of unpredictability when dealing with the public at large, but it's a very small factor that is observed in the extreme and influenced from every conceivable direction.
Trying to blame piracy on price is inane. Even games at reasonable prices ARE STILL PIRATED. Piracy is a criminal act, and as such cannot be influenced by any rational, legal adjustment. Example: the death penalty doesn't prevent murder, nor does it contribute to its prevention in any sort of way, but specifically as a deterrent.
Now, murder is not piracy, and I'm not trying to equate the two. What I'm doing here is suggesting that if the most heinous crime a person can commit cannot be influenced in a positive way through the threat of punishment of DEATH, then maybe we have to look at other ways to handle the situation; much like if DRM doesn't prevent piracy (and it never, ever will), we need to start looking at other options.
In both the case of murder and piracy, however, the establishment is not to blame. It's the fucking criminals.
DRM will not fix the problem, though, as I already mentioned. Not to get too ridiculous with the legal comparisons, but in an effort to keep the ball rolling, DRM is like gun control legislation: it really only affects those who behave in a legal manner. People who want to get guns are going to get guns, regardless of legality; just like people who want to pirate games are going to, regardless of DRM.
yeah but I am sure there are less pirates stealing cheep games.
The problem is that most company want to make the blockbuster game that will fund their company for at least 20 years.
There is nothing wrong with that but it cause people like have to wait 5 years to buy there dated software at a "decent price"
I admit I pirated borderlands because i wanted to try it (and my friends lan it ), and I saw even with all of the content of the game it is just not worth $50. So after 6 months on steam they finally had a half off sale to the point that I could buy the game and all of the DLC for $20 and then I spent an extra $40 and got the four pack so that I could sell it my friends that were pirating it for $7.50 per game !!!
no doubting that games appeal to people , but when companies offer insane prices its like a swift kick in the grind; sure you will be better later but is it really worth it?
DRM enforces pricing of software and insures that company make their projected income, and if they want to keep the prices up another year no one can stop them cause in their own way they have a monopoly on price of the game; there is nothing wrong with that except that most game makers take advantage of that today "activtision" and leave their games at full price for four years straight.
These are criminal acts making average people pay full price on a game that is going to make you filthy rich!!!
I buy most of my games on Steam because Valve unlike most game makers actually have sales with more than resonance prices ( like portal for free )
but when have you heard EA and Activison gave away last years hottest games away for free like ( crisis and COD4 )?????
now is it really to hard to sell the next big game exclusively online and cut the price to $10 or $5?????, cause if a billion people bought that it would be almost 100% profit
I do have to agree there will be people stealing stuff still, but it is just going to happen.
Sorry, but you don't seem to have the slightest clue of how economics or the gaming industry work. Many companies have a go at big risks. Every day, businesses fail because they made poor decisions. Every day, products hit the shelves and do poorly even though tons of money was poured into them.
Piracy is not a criminal issue. Criminal activity involves commiting a crime of a just law. That's something Martin Luther King Jr mentioned in his past. Laws regarding piracy are not just. Because government has been in bed with corporations (known as corporatism or the same thing Mussolini advocated) for so long, corporations have major influence over laws. Though, that's a topic that I could fill a book with. So, I'll avoid commenting on that any more.
The RIAA is a great example. They refuse to adapt to the times of digital distribution and instead, they blame piracy for all of their problems and spend a stupid amount of money taking teenagers to court to scare people into doing what they want them to do. Movie, music, and game industries waste millions, if not billions total on DRM software to "protect" their products when in reality it hurts their sales, hurts the legit buyer, and gets cracked and pirated anyways. These people are not smart. Retrofraction is just another person who reinforces the things I mention. I personally "pirate" things as well but I always buy the games that I like. I also get back up versions of my old games which is still considered pirating by law. Most people who pirate would agree that they would purchase reasonably priced games with no DRM. Why? Because it's convenient and morally correct.
@sheppy: That's like the 3rd time i hear that "record high piracy when they took out DRM" story from you, yet i have yet to hear anything about sales (which i suspect also went up, from Ubisoft, any web site or you) during the exact same time , when that little piece of info is delivered i'll start believing into this "piracy is killing the industry" story i've heard the last 20 frigging years.
"Piracy is a criminal act, and as such cannot be influenced by any rational, legal adjustment. Example: the death penalty doesn't prevent murder, nor does it contribute to its prevention in any sort of way, but specifically as a deterrent."
You say that the death penalty doesn't contribute to the prevention of murder, yet you follow that up by saying that it serves as a deterrent. That in itself was enough of a contradiction, but you actually state that criminal acts cannot be influenced by a "rational, legal adjustment". If that were true, our entire system of law would be pointless.
More importantly, though, we need to stop with these awful analogies. Comparing piracy to theft for the sake of understanding its impact is one thing, but bringing up murder and gun control is just absurd. The stakes are nowhere near equivalent between those two issues and piracy.
No dedi's no mod tools NO LEAN how the hell did you think you would did with ARMA 2 as competition
No wonder nobody buys your games you retard.