DRM News

When talking about piracy you always hear the same excuses trotted out, ‘DRM’, ‘games too expensive’, ‘corporations make billions it doesn’t effect them’, etc… So what would happen if all that was taken away? No DRM, low low price, no ‘evil’ corporation? If you listen to the piracy apologists that would be when they would buy games.

Now I am sure you’ve heard of the Humble Indie Bundle. If you haven’t you haven’t seen it listed in our Game Sales Page which has it listed (Shame on you!). What this Humble Indie Bundle does is allow you to pay what you want, even a penny, for a bundle of games, and you can allocate how much money goes to the developers, or to the EFF or Child’s Play, or you can mix and match and give each one a bit. In 7 days they’ve pulled in over 1 million dollars from a little over 118,000 people. Pretty impressive.

Now what does the Humble Indie Bundle have to do with piracy? Well even though you could pay a PENNY, not have to deal with DRM or those ‘evil’ corporation, and your money can go to charities, people are still pirating it, it looks like about 25% of people have pirated it. Why? Every excuse for piracy has been taken away yet apparently 25,000+ people have decided to pirate it.

Jeffery Rosen, cofounder of Wolfire Games, about the piracy rate of the Humble Bundle. "I think piracy is absolutely inevitable—this is a really clear example of it," Rosen said. "People will literally not pay a penny to a charity in order to legitimately get a bundle of games that they want."

Rosen points out that the Bundle has stripped away nearly every rationalization for piracy. "A lot of the common rationalizations for piracy simply don’t exist here: DRM, an agent between you and the developers, or high prices. Some people rationalize it by claiming they can’t pay—but they could have asked their mom. They could have e-mailed us (we’re currently at inbox zero for support requests)." Rosen claims they received thousands of technical support questions throughout the week, about 10 of them relating to payment.

Those who e-mailed and said they couldn’t pay? The number was so low that Rosen personally made a contribution on their behalf.

So this is the interesting thing about the DRM debate. People are going to pirate because they can. No amount of DRM, or lack of it, is going to change that. Ubisoft’s draconian ‘always’ on DRM has been cracked, just two months after it was released. The cracking team seemed to take pleasure at cracking it and thanked Ubisoft for the challenge. It seems that more companies are going towards a more draconian DRM solution, yet it doesn’t work. Nor does no DRM. So should companies just use it as part of their business model? (Well actually they have, one of the reasons publishers keep using for high prices is piracy.) My personal opinion is that mild DRM to stop casual piracy (handing a friend a copy of the game you just burned to CD) is needed, but anything else is really just money wasted by publishers. Its not only used by people to pirate a game it also makes things more difficult for actual purchasers of the game. There are going to be the idiots that pirate the game because they get a kick out of it, but that should not mean that the paying customer has to suffer for it.

One interesting fact uncovered by Cracked.com is that complaining about piracy and how it ruins business is nothing new.

And still the world turns.