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.)
I basically aggree. Main problem with DRM is indeed with it causing way more trouble and annoyance (on many levels) to regular users than to pirates (who don't get affected at all). The games basically working better when pirated always makes me wonder myself what are the publishers thinking and what the reason of DRM existence is, being proven they're completely ineffective every time. Isn't that basically PROMOTING piracy?
ReplyDeleteAs for SimCity in particular, I bet Maxis must be pretty pissed right now. Not only because all the hate they're getting, but that being caused by the direction EA made them go (I don't think anyone believes Maxis when they say all this always-online bullshit was their idea to begin with). It's a shame, because the game is pretty damn good. But oh well...
Thank you for the input. I think i might write a article based on Sim City more specifically. I'd be going over the results of the launch and comments made by the company along with reactions made by sites.
DeleteI would expect crackers ("hackers") would have a hard time cracking DRM-secured games, though I've never talked to one about it. This difficulty may extend the non-pirated lifetime of the game from 0-4 hours to 1 week onwards. This extension keeps the release free of pirated versions online. I would expect that's an important advantage for the payed-for version; it's possible to obtain it on release day.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, for games where the online multiplayer is important to enjoyment of the game, cracking DRM doesn't give pirates any advantages. In this case, the DRM is actually beneficial, if made correctly. Systems such as VAC can be put into the game to reduce cheating among players, which can be an essential process in some environments.
Basically, DRM can be useful in certain cases, and what you're noticing are the poor uses of DRM. I can't say I'm a big fan of DRM myself, but I can say that it's not exclusively bad.
In the future i might explore this topic again but this comment will have to do for now. While i have no first hand experience of cracking, software, i do know that people start creating the cracks before they have their hands on the game. They can do this because Systems like Steam don't change their DRM between releases. They basically make a guess of how they'll protect the game and then finish it up once the game is released.
DeleteThen move to popular games like skyrim, it's release date was 11/11/11 yet people had their hands on it before that date.
I never considered Vac DRM because really it limits you from using servers that use Vac not the game it self, if i remember correctly (Which i might not).
However, i have seen a video of how to get a cracked version of LeftForDead2 which the person with a bit of tweaking was able to get running multiplayer with people. But going back to arguments i believe i made in my post, most people at that point would just rather buy the real deal since the service is better (Less of a headache).
Sim city is a multiplayer game yet people would rather have 1 city that they can play single player on their computer with no internet.
Yes, it's possible to make DRM that's beneficial but the problem i see with that, is the fact companies are trying to right now find ways to make DRM beneficial and jam it down are throats.
Not trying to attack you or what you said Zeus, but i find your examples shaky. Also, for your beneficial DRM, i would have used steam as an example since it really is helpful for doing more than the DRM part. The major problem i was having is that your arguments, i could find examples to support them but then i could find examples that didn't support them. For instants Borderlands is designed to be played CO-OP and you can, online, with a cracked .exe
I hate the lack of a edit button on blogger. BLAH! It means i now have to make sure my post are grammatically work.
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