DRM, yet again

Penny Arcade did an excellent series on DRM, accompanied by three interesting posts on the topic. I find Chris Remo's post (from Part 2 of the series) quite interesting.

He suggests that the people raising a stink over SecuROM (which would include myself) are overreacting. This may well be the case, but this has been a long time coming. Yes, EA has increased Spore's activation ration from three to five (a single "activation" apparently means unlimited reinstallations on a single PC until the end of time. Or you upgrade your video card. Or you have to reinstall Windows because SecuROM fucked up your registry, in which case you'll use another activation). There is also apparently a deactivation tool that can revoke a previous activation so that it can be used again on a different/upgraded PC. This seems like a reasonable concession, but it still ignores the underlying problem - SecuROM itself. A lot of the fuss is because there is no mention of SecuROM or the activation limit - not on the box, not even in the license agreement.

Spore was available on torrent sites three days before its commercial release, and is well on its way to becoming the most-pirated game of all time. Why is EA still bothering with this shit? It didn't help them at all, and the trivial amount of "casual piracy" (i.e. lending your disc to a friend/family member) that it may prevent can't possibly compensate for the cost of running the activation servers. There is also no doubt that the inclusion of SecuROM cost EA sales. Yes, Spore has sold more than a million copies so far, but leaving SecuROM out from the beginning would have helped their sales, their reputation with customers, and their bottom line - which is all EA seems to care about.

Chris also points out that when the activation servers have been shut down at some point in the future, a viable solution would be to simply crack the game and play it anyways. That sounds like a perfectly valid solution to me, but the problem is that cracking the game's copy protection is still illegal. True, nobody's going to give a shit about cracking Spore ten years from now, but what's the advantage for the end user? When piracy is faster, cheaper, easier, and more convenient than the legal purchase, both in the short-term and in the long run, how does this business model make sense? I'm not advocating piracy at all here, but from a consumer's perspective it seems that, in this case, one has to compromise a lot more than one's hard-earned money to make the legitimate purchase.

So what is the solution? I'm a pretty big fan of Valve's Steam myself. Yes, Steam is a DRM solution, but it's one that's fair to gamers. It allows me to back up my game files to an external hard drive, and I can even dump them to another of my computers and have everything work. I can re-download any of the games I own, as many times as I want. The only restriction is that I can't be signed in to more than one computer at a time, which is definitely something I can live with, as there's only one of me. On top of that, it offers extra features to improve the user experience - a one-stop game store, a chat system that works in-game, automatic updates for any installed games, demos and trailers for new games - the list goes on and on. Yes, Steam games can be pirated, but the bottom line is that the paying customer gets a better experience than the pirate.

Now, Remo writes in his blog, "You can point to Blizzard and Valve all you want. Not every developer is, or can be, a Blizzard or a Valve. In the real world, that’s just how it is. Other companies can’t really afford to sit around and generate twelve years of goodwill while they hope that their games turn out to be some of the best-selling titles of all time." Fair enough, but what's EA's excuse? They're a publishing powerhouse, and they've been buying star development companies with amazing portfolios, like BioWare and Maxis - companies with credibility, that used to be known for their creativity. So not every company can make a Half-Life, or a Portal, or a Team Fortress 2, or even a Steam. What every company can do is take care not to screw over their paying customers.