Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Phmcw]

Here is an amusing story I like to tell whenever the topic of a discussion switch to DRM.
Not so long ago, a friend of mine, fervent adept of file-sharing, and myself spent quite a lot of time playing medieval total war 2.
When we heard of Empire Total war, we were delighted, and he, for one, decided to buy it.
It is to be understood that he could get pretty much anything, quickly, and with virtually no risk, given that he was quite expert at in matter (I for one, use almost exclusively free software, and only sin a his house.)
He proceed to buy it, and get ... an awful half finished product.
Those who bought that game early on know of what I'm speaking about : he game was littered with bug.
That notwithstanding, installation was an hell, steam did a lot of trouble and the stupid DRM wouldn't let you play if you were not on-line.

Quite cooled with he experience, he later proceed to acquire napoleon total war, in a quite less legal way... and found out it worked way better on his old laptop, than the earlier Empire total war. Dumbfounded, he quicly install a cracked copy of the later and found out that whatever DRM (including steam) that have been removed was such an hurdle that he could experience a net gain in performance.
He then sweard to never buy anything again, and I'm happy with whatever linux distro I choose to install .

[nenjin]

I can say I've had the opposite experience too. Some pirated copies run terribly compared to the legit versions. As games get more complex, and DRM features are woven into multi-threading, the room for error increases a lot as people go in and start hacking DRM features out of the code.

Still, it's an amusing battle to watch happen. I forget which game it was, I think it was Arkham Asylum, but basically the DRM scheme was you had to download a text file of the poem JABBERWOCKY from the master servers for all your controls to work right. A release copy didn't have this text file, and updating "validated" your copy. (Along with Games For Windows Live, Steam and all the other controls.)

When the pirates found that out, they had a GOOD laugh about it.

[GlyphGryph]

I only pirate games that work better pirated than they do with DRM. If I like the game, I will occasionally purchase it and then pirate it anyways, so I can play a game I actually own.

Or, at least thats how it worked when I actually bought corporate PC games. Now I just do donation based linux stuff and indie stuff I almost never regret paying for and I am much happier without the hassle of pirating stuff just to be able to play it.

[Zangi]

Its EASY and basically a no-brainer.  At least from my recent experience.

Honestly, I have not been burned by any of the acquired stuff in the past few years.

[nenjin]

I can think of a fistful of games that, if purchased at full price, I would have ultimately been dissatisfied with.

Mercenaries 2.
AvP 2010.
Elemental. (Utterly disappointing when purchased at retail price.)
Wolfenstein.
Resident Evil 5.

That's off the top of my head. Not that they were BAD games (except Elemental), but just that for what I got out of them, for how deep they were, $60 is not the right price for me, anymore. That's why I love Steam so much. It brings these games down to prices that actually reflect what I think they're worth, and I can buy with a mostly clear conscious.

Paying release prices has always been for people that just simply couldn't wait...but lately I actually feel like I'm being cheated sometimes even at lower price ranges. Like...graphics withstanding, I'm playing the same crap from 5 to 8 years ago, and paying maybe x2 as much.

[fenrif]

I can say I've had the opposite experience too. Some pirated copies run terribly compared to the legit versions. As games get more complex, and DRM features are woven into multi-threading, the room for error increases a lot as people go in and start hacking DRM features out of the code.

Still, it's an amusing battle to watch happen. I forget which game it was, I think it was Arkham Asylum, but basically the DRM scheme was you had to download a text file of the poem JABBERWOCKY from the master servers for all your controls to work right. A release copy didn't have this text file, and updating "validated" your copy. (Along with Games For Windows Live, Steam and all the other controls.)

When the pirates found that out, they had a GOOD laugh about it.

I'd heard that the piracy protection for Arkham Asylum was that there was a hallway early on you needed to cape-glide down to progress. If the game was cracked or not verified or whatever batman could only ever glide partway down the corridor before falling to his death. There was an article floating around the game blogs a while back about someone emailing tech support saying there was a bug in the game and getting a reply back saying "nah it's a copy protection thing, theres no bug in the game but there's a bug in your morals" or something similar.

In the same vein, ARMA2 had some copy protection thing whereby if you pirated the game your aim would always be wildly off. You could play as much as you wanted, but you'd never be able to actually hit anything. In a game like ARMA where you're mostly fighting at long range it isn't immediatly apparent that you're shots are going a couple of inches to the side of your crosshair. I'm pretty sure theres a few stories about people emailing in to tech support for that one too.

In a rare console example the DS version of Chrono Trigger would load up and let you play completely normally untill you enter the first warp thingie, whereupon it would play the warping screen forever, never actually letting you get to the next area.

It's still DRM, which is kinda crappy (Arkham Asylum used securom or something) but at least people got to try the game out to a degree. Stuff like this is more the kind of copy protection I'd like to see.

Wolfenstein.

The game that randomly corrupts your save game, meaning you have to beat the game in one sitting or hope you luck out and it doesnt decide to wipe all your progress. If I'd have paid for that I'd have been severely dissapointed too. 

[Sowelu]

Don't forget Earthbound, which vastly increases random encounter rates, decreases random encounter awards, and right before the last battle--freezes and deletes all your saved games.

[nenjin]

The game that randomly corrupts your save game, meaning you have to beat the game in one sitting or hope you luck out and it doesnt decide to wipe all your progress. If I'd have paid for that I'd have been severely dissapointed too.

Lol. No, I hadn't experienced that one. More it was just kind of shallow. Fun for about 10 hours, and then you're in it for the story and nothing else. (Other than pointless collectibles.) That's really my gripe. Content production has gotten so streamlined now, companies can push out what look like $60 dollar games pretty quickly. (I'm looking at you, EA/Activision.) But when you get down to brass tax, there's about 10 hours worth of discovery there, and then you're either playing it because you love it....or you put it down.

For $60, I feel like I should be getting more.

[fenrif]

The game that randomly corrupts your save game, meaning you have to beat the game in one sitting or hope you luck out and it doesnt decide to wipe all your progress. If I'd have paid for that I'd have been severely dissapointed too.

Lol. No, I hadn't experienced that one. More it was just kind of shallow. Fun for about 10 hours, and then you're in it for the story and nothing else. (Other than pointless collectibles.) That's really my gripe. Content production has gotten so streamlined now, companies can push out what look like $60 dollar games pretty quickly. (I'm looking at you, EA/Activision.) But when you get down to brass tax, there's about 10 hours worth of discovery there, and then you're either playing it because you love it....or you put it down.

For $60, I feel like I should be getting more.

Which system did you play it on? Cause that save corruption thing was on the 360.

[Gantolandon]

Actually, does anyone have an idea of how we could stop DRM? There have been numerous petitions and that hasn't worked, so are there any other ideas?

Don't buy the game that is DRM-ed beyond reason. Don't recommend it to anybody. Don't do a Let's Play for it. Just forget it exists unless you're discussing its DRM.

Pirating it is another mean, but it's somewhat questionable. On the one hand, it shows that DRM is pointless. On the other - by playing this game you could encourage someone to buy it. If its publisher (not the developer - I don't think he cares much) wants to stop piracy with drastic measures, well, why not help him? Take your part in letting his product die and be forgotten.

[qwertyuiopas]

In my opinion, the ideal DRM would be a combination of a code unique to your download and a hash of the registration key you used being sent to the serveroccasionally during multiplayer, and then doing nothing about it.

That way, it would be easy to actually graph legitimate users vs pirates, without leaving any DRM code that may cause problems for the legitimate users.

The next step is to implement the bulk of the DRM as unlocking website features, such as posting in a special subforum, for the account that purchased the game. Since the account and website access would be handled entirely server-side, it can be completely secure and cannot be pirated, while the game gives people no reason to favour a pirated copy because of restrictive DRM in the main one.


The end result could be a DRM that actually works, by doing nothing at all.


But resticting access to the game unless you have an exceptionally good internet connection? That just gives people more of a reason to wait a week and then get it illegally, or do as I do, and ignore all recent games entirely, because if it has DRM that must be removed before you can properly play, then chances are that they don't care to make a truely enjoyable game, instead opting for "give me money, 2011, part 10, now with extra graphics!".

[Frumple]

Don't forget Earthbound, which vastly increases random encounter rates, decreases random encounter awards, and right before the last battle--freezes and deletes all your saved games.

Earthbound... the SNES game? I didn't even know they could do that when it came out, honestly. Did SNES emulators even exist in '94? ZSNES didn't hit th'net until '97, 'ccording to wikipedia.

E: I hadn't realized Wikipedia had such a well fleshed out number of articles on emulators. That... it feels weird. I'unno why.

[fenrif]

I don't think there were any emulators out back then, but you could get knock-off carts. I used to have a 55-games-in-one cart for the origianal game boy.

[Sowelu]

Don't forget Earthbound, which vastly increases random encounter rates, decreases random encounter awards, and right before the last battle--freezes and deletes all your saved games.

Earthbound... the SNES game? I didn't even know they could do that when it came out, honestly. Did SNES emulators even exist in '94? ZSNES didn't hit th'net until '97, 'ccording to wikipedia.

E: I hadn't realized Wikipedia had such a well fleshed out number of articles on emulators. That... it feels weird. I'unno why.

Check this out.  http://starmen.net/mother2/gameinfo/antipiracy/

[Aklyon]

DRM is pointlessly ineffective. The customers who buy it at full price have to deal with crap, while the people its meant to defeat will eventually rip it out (or otherwise workaround it), post the fix somewhere, and play a less bogged-down version. (though with obvious restrictions, like multiplayer)

Normal Copy protection (the old kind, like just having a serial you put in) was fine, and I don't get why it needed a change.