Assassin’s Creed 2 has some impressive DRM going into it. The game is going to require a constant Internet connection, even for single-player gameplay. It will constantly be phoning home to confirm that you’re playing a legitimate copy of the game. Saved games will be stored on remote servers. And, should your Internet cut out for any reason, the game will promptly exit.
Needless to say, that’s generated an awful lot of discussion on-line.
There’s speculation that this may, finally be the DRM that works. It isn’t just a matter of patching out some disc check or something like that… The entire savegame code will have to be re-written to save locally instead of on a remote server.
The problem, of course, is that this DRM is only going to affect paying customers.
This is something I keep saying, but nobody seems to want to listen.
Pirates never have to deal with DRM. They download their game, run the crack, and play the game. No disc checks, no serial numbers, no phoning home, no constant Internet connection required.
If your DRM scheme is complicated enough, it’ll take a little while for the pirates to crack it – but it will be cracked. There’s an army of terrific coders all over the world who would like nothing more than to crack your DRM. And the more complicated and difficult to crack, the bigger the challenge is, and the bigger the reward for the person who finally cracks it.
Some folks are impatient… They’ll go out and buy your game instead of waiting for the DRM to be cracked. But at that point they’ve become paying customers – not pirates.
So your paying customers – the ones who’ve handed you cash for your game – are the ones inconvenienced by your DRM.
Somebody on the forums complaining that they can’t re-install Spore because of the activation limit is a paying customer. Somebody complaining that their CD-KEY doesn’t work is a paying customer. Somebody complaining that their game won’t run because their Internet went down is a paying customer.
The pirates aren’t complaining on your forums because they’re happily playing the game – without any of those restrictions.
It gets bad enough that folks who’ve legitimately purchased a game will go looking for a crack just so that they can play it. You’ve turned your own paying customers into criminals. Sure, they paid for it… But, legally, anyone who runs a DRM-bypassing crack is a criminal.
Of course they’ve got a choice… They don’t have to crack that game they just bought. It’s their own problem that their CD-ROM drive doesn’t work with your DRM, or their CD-KEY was used by some pirate on the other side of the world, or their Internet is flaky… You aren’t forcing them to crack your DRM.
But most folks like to be able to actually use the things they pay for.
So you’re creating an environment where the pirate version of a game is actually superior to the legitimately-purchased one. It works better, it is more likely to run on a given piece of hardware, it doesn’t require a disc to be in the drive, it works without Internet… Whatever. The pirate version is good enough that folks will seek it out even after they’ve paid for the legitimate version.
That’s not a good thing.
You really don’t want your paying customers to feel that the free version that the pirates have is better than what they paid for.
You really don’t want your paying customers to learn how easy it is to acquire the pirate version of your software.
You really don’t want your paying customers to be looking around those pirate sites and seeing the tremendous array of software that’s available.
Because the more they do that… The less likely they are to keep paying for your crippled products… And they’ll just go for the good stuff right from the start.
downfall
