“Girl, you can’t even call this shit a war. Wars end.” Ellis Carver, The Wire
Digital Rights Management, or DRM for short, will undoubtedly be the final nail in PC gaming’s coffin. It’s been a long and arduous death, with plenty of false alarms and premature scares, but if anything is going to force the untimely cardiac arrest of computer games it’s probably going to be these ridiculous anti-theft policies.
In a vain attempt to stop ethically-flexible web denizens from looting their latest releases, game studios across the world pack DVDs full of nuisance authentications and cruel restrictions. From limited installations to server side authorisations, modern day DRM makes it preferable to just bend the law and pirate the damn game. Or buy it on the Xbox 360. Or glue your genitals to a moving bus.
Because the loser of this battle is always the honest, paying customer. On top of actually shelling out hard earned dosh for the game, they’re limited to installing Spore five times before phoning up EA to prove their innocence. Meanwhile, morally-ambivalent pirates can play the game freely with nothing more than a torrent and a cracked exe or a fraudulent serial number.
The latest soldier in this interminable battle is Ubisoft who have announced that Assassin’s Creed II, when it launches on PC, will be repeatedly calling home like a home-sick student, to reassure itself that everything is going to be all right. If your internet goes out during play, the game screeches to a halt until connection to the Ubisoft Mothership is restored.
It’s an absolute mess of a system. Not to mention the fact that you can’t play the game if your internet goes out, you can’t load it up while travelling with a laptop, you can’t resell the game and your privacy is seriously being infringed, it’s just plain old silly. I’d be more receptive of a system where Assassin’s Creed 2 protagonist Ezio breaks out of your computer and stabs you in the jugular if you so much as glance at The Pirate Bay.
The fight between publisher and pirate has effectively ended with this scheme. I’m not suggesting that this new DRM system is utterly uncrackable and now pirates will never play AC2 for free – quite the opposite actually. Nothing spurs on illegal activity like a monstrously profitable company opening up a new protection scheme.
I’m saying that Ubisoft has just lost its head entirely. In a world of instant gratification, on-demand boobies, BBC iPlayer and two minute noodles, no one wants to faff about with “Connection to server lost, we’re taking away all our toys until your WiFi reconnects” messages. People don’t like being treated like they’re guilty until they prove their innocence – something they have to do every 6 minutes, apparently.
The reception from gamers online isn’t the most intelligent or helpful, as expected. The notion of pirating the game out of angry spite might seem like a anarchically delicious idea at the time, but it just pushes the cyclical war through another phase. People pirate because they restrict, they restrict because people pirate. Ad nauseum. But the boycotts and angry forumers and frustrated bloggers (that’s me!) are showing that this ain’t cool.
So what’s the fix? Some publishers have dumped digital rights entirely. Most vocally, Stardock’s Brad Wardell ditched the notion of attacking legitimate customers by stripping digital rights from all their recent games. Sure there was still a hefty amount of piracy, but it also appeared high up on sales charts and they haven’t backtracked on the whole no-DRM deal yet, so I’d chalk that up as a win.
Similarly, in the music world, there is no DRM on tracks bought from iTunes anymore (I won’t go into the history, I’m not your economics professor, but it’s an interesting tale). Amusingly enough, EA Vice President Jeff Brown told the Financial Times that, “Apple’s practice of only allowing downloaded music to be played on three devices” set the standard for Spore’s restrictive access. Maybe they should take a look at how Apple handles DRM, today.
Ultimately, zero DRM seems like the best of some bad solutions. There isn’t a viable digital rights scheme on earth that would literally make a game uncrackable, plus the stricter you make the DRM, the more frustrated you make your actual legitimate, paying customers. From what I’ve witnessed, it seems the best tact is to strip out the DRM, make it as easy and accessible as possible to buy and play the game (like Steam) and just be happy with the customers you do have.
Or make a free game on Facebook and sell pretty hats for a quid.
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