DRM News

In an interview with Computer and Video Game, Futuremark CEO Jukka Mäkinen and Producer Jaakko Haapasalo stated that any DRM a company uses needs to be hassle free for the consumer.

Jaakko: Piracy is a difficult challenge facing our industry, and particularly PC game developers. There’s considerable leeway in how you approach the problem, as there should be, but ultimately it’s the players themselves who will decide what is and isn’t acceptable. The question I ask myself with all DRM approaches is will it be more or less convenient for me, as a paying customer?
If it stays out of my face, I’m cool with it. But if it gets in the way of being entertained, inconveniences me or seems unnecessarily restrictive then … well, it’s not like there is a shortage of other games demanding my attention.

Jukka: Exactly. Whatever the DRM used, games need to be hassle free for those who have bought their copy the proper way. Taking good care of the customer is always better than chasing the thieves.

They also talked about the importance of not charging for every single scrap of additional content released for an existing property. They themselves released a large Moonrise level expansion pack for their first game, Shattered Horizon, for no extra cost last month. In fact, rather than charging for the expansion, they used its release as reason to have the game be playable for free on Steam that weekend, and half price to anyone interested in buying it.

Jukka: We are not opposed to selling additions in principle, but there are right and wrong ways to go about it. With multiplayer games for example, you don’t want to split the player community with artificial price fences on additional content. A paid update, if we ever do one, should not leave you feeling left behind if you don’t get it, or leave you feeling isolated if you do, but should instead feel like a natural and unconstrained choice to pay more if you want more.

In a day and age when it’s becoming increasingly popular for publishers to charge for every piece of DLC they can come up with for a title, that’s definitely a refreshing statement to read. It also reflects that, as usual, it’s the smaller companies who are more in tune with what their users want. Without layers of bureaucracy and management and shareholders between the developers and their customer base, smaller companies can interact much more positively with those buying or looking at buying their games.

Regardless of the size of the company, with DLC fever and the madness of Ubisoft’s DRM system currently dominating the industry, it’s nice to see that not everyone is marching to the same drumbeat.

Speaking at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference (where he was given the Game Developers Choice Pioneer Award), Valve President and co-founder Gabe Newell stated that intrusive copy-protection systems diminish the value of the product they are supposedly protecting.

From Develop :

“One thing that you hear us talk a lot about is entertainment as a service,” he said.

“It’s an attitude that says ‘what have I done for my customers today?’

“It informs all the decisions we make, and once you get into that mindset it helps you avoid things like some of the Digital Rights Management problems that actually make your entertainment products worth less by wrapping those negatives around them.”

What is especially noteworthy about this is the reported response.

Newell’s comments were greeted with cheers from the packed crowd looking on at the Moscone Convention Center – cheers that, tellingly, resonated from the developers and industry luminaries in the room.

Certainly, Steamworks does provide a layer of DRM by ‘attaching’ a game to the user’s Steam account. Whether or not each of you is okay with that is a decision for each of you to make. Still, it’s nice to see that developers do seem to understand the DRM issue, and they aren’t particularly fans of the more intrusive brands of it, either.