May 28th, 2010 
Cliff Riseborough 
As reported on CVG, Gamesbrief analyst Nicholas Lovell has told PC Zone that Ubi-style server DRM benefits the pirates more than the genuine customers.
Digital Rights Management is "too draconian" and "pirates now have a better experience than legitimate consumers" as a result.
"It seems crazy to me that Ubisoft didn’t emulate Steam, which by some estimates has more than half the market, and instead went for their own, draconian system."
"There is no doubt in my mind that pirates now have a better experience than legitimate consumers," he continued.
Some of the alternatives Lovell suggested would be releasing smaller games for free, then charging more for DLC and content released later.
Certainly, when someone pirating a game can play without the hassles of needing an Internet connection 100% of the time (when many legit buyers are having problems with slight connection glitches causing constant problems), that’s not exactly a system doing its job.
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[...] Games industry analyst believes Ubi-style DRM benefits pirates … [...]
I really wish the industry would stop using the term pirate to describe unauthorized use of someone’s I.P. It’s associated with Maritime troubles we see on the news, not someone downloading a free song. If you can’t make the distinction, then somethings definitely wrong with your psyche.
Anyway, none of this is helping anyone, not the developer, the publisher and certainly not the consumer. The lines have been drawn between consumer activists and the industry; the more DRM, the more the likelyhood some gamers will revert to other methods of gaming entertainment.
That could be by revisiting the past, seeking out the gray area of abandon-ware, to all out ‘illegal’ torrenting. None of these are a way forward. Personally, I’ve chosen to dust off my collection of old games and purchasing off sites such as Good Old Games, with the odd Steam deal and variants. Game modding has become a big part for extending a game’s re-play life.
Very, very few of my purchases are new games, not solely because of DRM, but also the cost, as they’re is too ‘rich’ for my standard of living. Not only that, but the single player portion has become way too short to justify that cost.
This can lead to a domino effect with people of like mind. Where the need to upgrade hardware becomes less important, leading to niche markets struggling on to the big video card manufactures becoming not so ‘big’ anymore.