PC game developers foretell the death of DRM

by Griffin McElroy on May 11th 2009 5:30PM

If you were one of the many recruits in last year's war on restrictive, invasive DRM, you may want to check out a recent article on Gamasutra that features opinions on PC gaming piracy protection (that's a mouthful) from a number of gaming industry movers and shakers.

The general sentiment of these interviewees is that DRM is extremely ineffective when it comes to preventing piracy, and that developers should either come up with alternate ways of ensuring the retail product is more valuable than the pirated product, or determine a different way to make money altogether (such as micro-transactions). For interesting insight from fine folks like 2D Boy's Ron Carmel and Stardock's Brad Wardell, we highly suggest checking out the full article.

[Image]

Source

Tags: 2d-boy, drm, goo, piracy, pirates, securom, stardock, world-of-goo

Reader Comments (52)

"But 2D Boy's Carmel expects that game makers will learn to live with piracy rather than fight it -- as he has.

"We will see lots more free-to-play games," he predicts, "with companies making their money through micro-transactions and such. When you tell gamers ‘take my games and don't pay me,' there's no reason for them to hack what you've built. All you need to do is come up with some other way to earn your money." "

Yes, I can imagine this would be the most robust/thorough solution.

The lack of any substantial market for used PC games due to the use of DRM and CD keys is one reason I do most of my gaming on consoles now. On the console, I can easily rent and buy used games. I like collecting games, so I rarely sell any of my games, but at least the option exists if I want to.

If Steam let users resell their licenses for games, I might be more interested in doing more PC gaming. However, I am still not comfortable with any download-only purchasing system which ties games to an account on a proprietary system. That's basically the original Itunes model, which sucks. If the company goes out of business, then all your game purchases could disappear overnight when they shut down the DRM server. Or maybe you'll only have a problem when you discover that you can't reinstall the games you purchased on your new computer, because the download company no longer exists and their servers are offline.

Previous 50 Comments