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Mise on 31 January 2009
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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.

Sins of the Solar Empire has no copy protection whatsoever, and it has neither crap sales (over 500k) or a 90% piracy rate. And it probably isn't the only small budget game that has done well without DRM.

Yeah, most people will just get the game for free if they can - I've personally been called a lot of (negative) things because I've - god forbid - BOUGHT games that can be easily downloaded off Piratebay. But putting crap like rootkits and StarForce on the media of those who actually buy their games isn't exactly the answer. I can see why they do it, and I disagree with them - if the legal product has more value and is more accessible to the consumer than the pirate download, they'll buy it.



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