Swag Sunday: Assassin's Creed 2 (PC) [update]

Steam ftw.

Not that anyone will read this entry:

Steam and Impulse are the best existing DRM solutions, from a consumer perspective, *currently*.

Something that would be good would be a signed-executable ala XBLA, though. Signed to your hardware, or signed to your account. Signing to the hardware to allow offline play, and sharing of the game among multiple users of the same system, ala XBLA, or the ability to simply authenticate from anywhere to sign in with an account.

I could even accept a limitation of one "hardware sign" per account. (oddly, it'd probably be best to make that the machine that is your secondary, since it'd probably be a laptop that is likely to be offline)

Combine that with direct authentication for updates / multiplayer and you'd end up with something that'd be best for everyone.

The major downside to this is that everyone absolutely abhors the hardware necessary to make this truly possible, something like MS's Palladium, or Intel's CPU IDs. There are plenty of valid reasons for those criticisms, however, uniquely identifying a machine without some feature like that would be difficult. (Uniquely, so that the executable can be signed to it / your account alone.)

At the very least, signed .exe would allow companies to track specific individuals as the sources of casual piracy.

I agree. Steam is awesome. I've never had any problems with the 90 some odd games I have on the service.

Hands down - Steam. Not very original, but can that many people be wrong???

I wholeheartedly agree. Steam let's users maintain ownership and control of the games they purchased while giving developers a solid non-intrusive DRM solution.

I second Steam. Occasional online verification is fine, especially if it adds a unified experience and the ability to download / play wherever you happen to be at the time.

Remember, though, the goal of DRM is not to stop piracy. It is to maximize revenue. DRM accomplishes this not by locking down the game to everybody. It accomplishes this by denying an easy pirated copy to potential purchasers within the critical 2-week launch window of the title.

So from this, add whatever thorough and nasty DRM you so choose for the first three weeks of the game's sales life. One the title is basically cracked, however, release a patch that removes all forms of DRM except (and possibly including) the disk check. The DRM-free version is already out in the wild, you're just denying certain freedoms to your paying customers for basically no benefit to either of you. If they know the initial restrictions will eventually be removed, they'll put up with a lot more ugliness in the interim.

As a third prong, offer networked digital benefits to paying customers. Forum access, registration for future in-game bonuses and events, registration for future advanced access to titles, etc. Those with a valid, verifiable code (the only really effective DRM) are treated like royalty by the company. Sort of like Club Nintendo's rewards program for verified purchases. Those are benefits that you can definitely give legitimate customers, while denying access to pirates.

Whether or not Steam maximizes revenues (how could it with all those discounts?), it still picks up a lot of sales. There's a reason it's dominating the digital distribution market. Steam is definitely the best solution.

Steam

"Whether or not Steam maximizes revenues (how could it with all those discounts?) ..."

The Laffer Curve.

If the price was too high before, you could be losing marginal revenue due to decreased volume that would overcome the revenue gained due to a significant margin. E.g., if you sell 10 at $10, but 50 at $5, it doesn't matter if you made half as much per sale (assuming you have your unit production costs covered) since you made 5x the sales.

This is why cheap crap often outsells slightly higher priced but better quality goods.

Steam has to be the best. No contest. I can't think of any others that even come close.

Leave it up to MJ to completely ignore the rules...

I lol'd as soon as I read 'PC'...

Honestly though, Steam is the best.

Read in the proper way, the article seems to imply that "no DRM" is the real solution.

A "dongle", which is still fun to say. And dongles are still used for some pro A/V and CAD/CAM apps.

Dongles work, and they are still out there. though - how many dongles would you need? 1 per game? That could get a bit messy when you're trying to keep up with multiple dongles for multiple games.

Not sure how a multiple game dongles would work either....

I think there's the reason dongles kinda fell off the table. Unless you had a programmable dongle, or publisher specific dongles where you could sync all you Ubi games tot he dongle - then you don't require online access.

awww you beat me to it! I agree though StarDock is on to something. As is valve with supplying free content updates (to PC users at least), and Bioware with Cererus Network.

All a pirate has to do though is connect it to a public email address and BAM, everyone can use it to get updates

every form of DRM is fallable. This is the best method I think to make your consumers happy and respect you and actually want to support your product.