What’s it going to take for PC game publishers to drop DRM altogether?

[orderoftheflame]

No, it was invented to deal with piracy, back in the days before DLC they generally stuck with CD Keys which frankly caused more harm than good. The only benefit they had was preventing more than 1 person using it online but then once the keygen is created that becomes useless too. All it did was **** people off who lost there key, i think we bought Diablo 2 about 3 times now. Just because something was intended for something doesn't its still used for that purpose now.

I fail to see how they caused more harm than good. They worked fine as a deterrent until a crack / workaround / keygen was created like any kind of DRM.

Surely because of keygens making cd keys useless, companies had to step it up leading to stuff like securom. i.e Piracy forcing the move to stricter DRM, nothing to do with DLC.

As for losing CD keys, simple answer is look after them better. If you're that bad at losing them, write new ones down in a little notebook or something.


I don't disagree that DRM is bad, and the industry needs to be more innovative with their ideas around it. It is however only one group of peoples faults that we have DRM, and that's the pirates. End of as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Evilsod]

I fail to see how they caused more harm than good. They worked fine as a deterrent until a crack / workaround / keygen was created like any kind of DRM.

Surely because of keygens making cd keys useless, companies had to step it up leading to stuff like securom. i.e Piracy forcing the move to stricter DRM, nothing to do with DLC.

As for losing CD keys, simple answer is look after them better. If you're that bad at losing them, write new ones down in a little notebook or something.


I don't disagree that DRM is bad, and the industry needs to be more innovative with their ideas around it. It is however only one group of peoples faults that we have DRM, and that's the pirates. End of as far as I'm concerned.

Not really. You could pass games round to everyone you knew so long as only 1 of you intended to play online. The CD Key really didn't achieve a great deal in the way of anti-piracy even though that was its intention. And blame Blizzard for putting the stupid cd key, that was critical to installing the game, on a flimsy piece of paper stuck to the front of the case. I did eventually write them down but then you lost those too

Piracy probably did encourage stronger DRM since that was the only reason for it initially. But then of course the new DRM was even more useless at preventing piracy and even better at annoying everyone else. Then they stepped it up and made it even more annoying for the legit customer.

Pirates are to blame for DRMs existence theres no doubt about that. But even if it didn't exist they would still put something in to prevent second hand sales and block moddability. After all some devs go so far out of there way to prevent modding... Not saying every dev would be doing that obviously but Ubisoft, EA and Activision seem to leading the charge of anti-'piracy' DRM. After all hasn't Kotick basically flat out stated that second hand sales are effectively stealing from them and that he wants to make every sale a $500 or somet...