So i have a strong dislike for DRM because i feel it ruins the experience of legitimate consumers and doesn't do much to stop illegal usage of the product. It's in fact possible to have a better experience from download to online multiplayer play session with a pirated copy . However, aren't i just saying what people have been saying for a long time? (I forgot to cover the multiplayer part as the blog went on. Sorry!)
First off let's take a game like The elder scrolls oblivion which was popular in it's time; and I'll use it as a example. You can find ton's of torrents out there providing this game with a crack and thousands of seeds per torrent. Now i decide to download this game illegally and my download speeds start to hit over 2MB. I quickly have the game and all DLC/Expansions; so i install them and then replace the main .exe to run the game with the cracked one. I right now have a running versions of TES:4/O. In my Steam Library i own TES 3 ,4, and 5 i decide to download the game legally. I start up steam and what's likely the first thing to happen is that I'll have to install a update which i can't skip. next i start the download process and I'm guessing I'll get a speed of 500KB which is one/fourth of the illegal downloads speed. After I've completed the download best case i can run the game from a exe, but worst case requires that i activate the game, followed by only being able to play if i run it though steam.
Now I'm not trying to justify the usage of illegal downloading of a game based on this; and in fact it's a flimsy argument if i did. Steam is a form of DRM and it's convenient even though it has flaws. However there are other DRM services that one could easily make a argument to download illegally to get past.
For the fun of it, I'll make the argument that DRM is the reason why you should pirate however i don't support piracy but think the argument still has merit to be made. I would like you to remember before you say anything about what i'm about to say, that laws are made for a reason; you don't follow a laws because you they're the law but because there is a reason behind it.
I will give three games that all had DRM that was similar at one point or another. Assassin Creed 2; Diablo 3; and Sim City 5. All of these games at one point or another, had always online DRM.
Assassin Creed 2 was released by Ubisoft and at one point hackers found out what the server IP address was; and i do use the word hacker very loosely. Anyways, the hackers did a denial of service attack on their servers and people were unable to get into their legally bought game; while pirates were able to get into the game because there cracked versions didn't need to connect to Ubisoft servers. In this instants, pirates had the advantage; they could play the game when people who bought the game could not. Ubisoft from what i can tell has learn from this mistake and released a patch that allows you to play offline.
Diablo 3 also has this feature. At launch of this game, people were getting errors that was preventing them from playing the game. From what i understand, this was related to the servers getting over loaded. I don't know much about this nor do i know if this game was ever cracked, but wouldn't a pirated version be nice so we could play the game when it was released?
Sim City... oh god this failure. Of all three of these games, this has had to longest down time of any of them and it's the newest. It requires you to install a piece of software called Origin which in concept is EA's version of Valve's Steam (i won't get in to how much i loath origin) and you use it to install and run your game. Next after you launch the game and play it, you have to be online to start playing. Now if for some reason you lose connection to the server (for instance if the servers should go offline like they did) then you get to see a disconnected indicator for 20 minutes until the client stops you from playing the game (until you relogin). Now the game is built around the idea of multiplayer but here's the thing, alot of people don't want to play multiplayer; so what they do is create a private region as they're called and they just don't invite anyone into the region. All the information is stored on the EA/maxis servers even though all this person is doing, is playing the game single player but online.
There are about 5 official reasons why online play is required and some of them have easily been proved to be outright lies. All it takes is one line of code to remove the offline limitations; but granted you would need to right some code to do stuff like load maps which i believe are saved on your computer anyways after you disconnect from the server. I think the major problem is, the company made a bad decision that everyone told them was a bad idea, and all they've really done is lie or use straw man arguments to support. (In fairness to EA/Maxis, i think you should realize that I didn't check to see if i was correct about my statement.)
