Quote:
Originally Posted by Jogurt the Yogurt  The effect of DRM on piracy is an acute vs. chronic issue—decrease in potential for piracy in a small and short-term way coupled with an overall long-term increase in piracy. This has been demonstrated in many examples for the past few years. Spore is one example, and World of Goo is an example of the opposite (high initial piracy rate—90%?—with higher overall long-term sales from happy customers), though it's really too early to tell what its long-term sales will be like. |
Um, no. DRM has almost zero effect on piracy rates. It is at best, a speed bump. Once the game is cracked, it's cracked. Piracy continues as normal. If anything, the DRM issue appears to be driving some paying users to pirate downloads to avoid the DRM issue.
Also, you seem to be assuming that WoG's lack of DRM resulted in higher piracy rates. Actually, they seem to have lower than normal rates. The WoG guys took a few new factors into account and came out with a more accurate rate of 82%:
http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
They compared this to a DRMed game called
Ricochet Infinity, which had a 92% piracy rate:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...hp?story=17350
This number gave Ricochet pause and made them do some research into the issue. What they found was that they gained 1 sale for every 1000 pirates stopped. (!) Which means that even the best DRM (e.g. using a service like Steam or WiiWare to make piracy more difficult) is going to do little to increase sales.
Spore is another good example. The game was released on September 4th. By the 11th, evidence showed that the game had been pirated 170,000 times:
http://www.forbes.com/2008/09/12/spo...0912spore.html
35,000 of those were within 24 hours of the release. That's despite the draconian SecuROM protection. Furthermore,
Forbes suggests that SecuROM may have accidentally spurred piracy on. (As I mentioned above.) Which means that:
1. DRM is ineffective
2. EA in unnecessarily punishing paying users
3. EA is losing goodwill and possible sales due to the DRM backlash
If you want to know how users are really starting to feel, watch this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-uulRB1OmY
I can identify with the guy as I personally have been bitten by DRM
twice. Two games that I never played because I either couldn't get it to work or because I would have had to make hardware changes to my computer. (i.e. Replace the fairly standard CD burner with a regular CD-ROM drive.)
Those experiences are one of the reasons I stopped bothering with PC Gaming. It was just too much of a hassle. And I know from those I've spoken with that I'm not the only one. I don't have the research to back it up, but I suspect that the game industry's war on piracy has done more to implode the PC Gaming market than it has to stop piracy.
The studios keep blaming piracy as the reason why PC sales are continuing to drop. They may be right, if only because their draconian
reactions to piracy have caused the destruction of PC sales.