World of Goo publisher files for bankruptcy

[famousringo]

The_vagabond7 said:

Mise said:

The_vagabond7 said:
Goes to show that piracy is a problem. People can complain that companies go crazy with DRM but it's because they are terrified of this sort of thing. People will go pirate crazy if you give them the chance.

People will pirate like crazy anyway. Anyone who wants to download a game will likely be able to do so within a week, or a month at absolute worst - without any DRM BS. Meanwhile all honest customers will have the potentially harmful protections to deal with, along with any other paranoid crap publishers choose to push on their discs. The illegal product will therefore be better AND free.

Piracy is a problem, yes - a problem DRM will never solve by itself.

 

Correct to an extent. But alot of people are just "casual" pirates that aren't going to put forth any effort to pirate something with DRM, but if they can just google "get this game for free" then they will do it. I'm guessing games with DRM don't have a 90% piracy rate. I'm not saying screwing the customer is good, but you have to empathize a bit when you see this sort of thing. They extend an olive branch to the gaming community in good faith that they will buy a great product at a cheap price, and their olive branch gets stolen. That doesn't send a good message to publishers that are deciding how hard to crack down on piracy.

 

Erm, that describes exactly how easy it is to get a DRM-cracked pirate version of a game. Torrents of protected software don't get a lot of hits, it's the cracked software that shows up in a Google search.

DRM makes no economic sense. It tries to persuade more people to buy a product by raising the cost of the product. Unless there's a compensating increase in benefits (Steam, Xbox Live), there's no way it can succeed.