Piracy is wrong, but it's not theft. It's more akin to vandalism. The producer still has the IP you pirate, you just make it less valuable to him by pirating it, just as you make my car less valuable to me if you smash in the windshield with a baseball bat. Regardless, software piracy is wrong. So, however, are these stupid and excessive anti piracy schemes that don't work and just punish legitimate customers.

The assertion that the DRM will eventually be good enough to beat pirates as Frogboy said strikes me as deeply flawed. To win, DRM will have to protect against everything the pirates might do. The pirates, on the other hand, only have to circumvent everything the DRM *DOES* do. DRM is fighting a vaguely-understood amorphous enemy, pirates are fighting a very precisely understood and specific enemy. I don't believe that DRM will ever actually stop pirates, although it might stretch the time frame between release and cracking a bit. Long before then, however, the DRM will stop legitimate customers, because every harsher iteration of DRM makes life worse for them. Eventually, the publishers will drive away their customer base.

Releasing software is a business. It doesn't matter how few pirates get your software, it will not succeed unless enough legitimate customers get your software. The publishers have already reached the point where they're driving away more customers than pirates with their DRM, or at least it seems that way to me. I don't see the situation getting better for the dinosaurs. Soon enough, it will be companies like Stardock and Valve, that have business models based on providing service to those who pay, rather than obsessing on denying service to those who don't pay, who are the only survivors.

As a business, the purpose of software publishers isn't to make artists feel good for "getting" those pirates. It's to make money by selling software to customers. The current DRM craze has long since moved away from this focus.

And if your local mechanic shoves a but plug up your *** everytime you have your car in for repair, the simplest solution is to remove the but plug after you leave. Most would probably opt to take their business elsewhere though

I doubt I'll be buying Spore if this is indeed how the DRM will be. In general I stear clear of any games with too zealous copy protection. The game has to be really good if I'm going to buy it in that case.

Okay, all this "most pirates wouldn't buy the game anyway" and "piracy does/doesn't cost companies sales" talk is stupid. This stuff is impossible to measure. People here like to point at Stardock and say "this is proof that piracy doesn't hurt sales!" but for all you know, Stardock's games are popular despite not having copy-protection, not because of it. We simply can't say either way.

The bottom line for me is if I'm selling games, I would definitely want to err on the side of caution and protect my product.

Won't you want an internet connection to play Spore anyway? It's supposed to populate your game world with downloaded player-generated content.

I'm going to be buying both games. I am looking forward to Mass Effect more than any other title, and Spore as well. I don't plan on losing my internet connection for more than 10 days at a time. If I do, whether or not I can play a game would be the least of my worries. And in any case, an internet connection is certainly easier to find than a lost CD/DVD, so I actually prefer it this way.

Of course, if the copy protection software is overly invasive or hogs too many resources, that doesn't mean copy protection is wrong. It just means that, in this case, it is being executed poorly.

Thats the point. A good game will sell without DRM, despite pirates. Nobody is claiming a crappy game without DRM will sell just because it doesn't have it.

Pirates do not buy software, the company is not losing sales. If a pirate breaks the DRM and pirates it anyway then the company makes no money and losses the money from disgruntled customers and the cost of the DRM. If they don't have DRM their customers are happy, they save money not implementing it, and the pirates still pirate the software.

Either way pirates get free software, and will still not buy the game. And there are people who will get the pirated version just to avoid DRM.

It would make sense to protect your product if you could do so effectively without harming your customers. It is not effective, DRM is easily broken/removed by pirates. It then only hurts the legit customers.

Oh boy, another company who thinks putting this crap in actually helps.

Here's some free advice for EA: making a paid copy of the game run worse then a pirated copy does not encourage people to buy the game. In fact, your setup tells people not to buy the game at all if they're going to be offline for extended periods. What you're actually doing is ENCOURAGING piracy, since its not like these measures will actually stop anybody from pirating it (they'll be stripped out by release).

Why are so many game companies run by absolute morons?

Not to mention legitimate users will now consider piracy to avoid DRM.

If this stuff actually stopped piracy, maybe. But it doesn't. It absolutely DOES NOT WORK!

Both games will be on some Torrent site with this stuff stripped out by the release date. The pirated copy will work fine without phoning EA. Legitimate copies will have problems due to people being offline, servers going down, incompatibility problems, and every other issue that pops up every time a company tries this sort of thing (most recently with Assassins Creed).

Why companies keep trying a method that has been conclusively proven to fail at stopping piracy but succeed at causing problems for paying customers (thereby encouraging them to use the pirated version) is beyond me. Its like they hear the word "piracy" and suddenly go completely insane.

You have to take care of your paying customers first. You must not implement any kind of copy protection that will cause problems for legitimate customers. Can you imagine if some other industry tried this nonsense? How about a car that doesn't start because it can't contact Ford's authentication server, so it just assumes that its stolen?

I mean, honestly. The way to stop piracy is not by making the pirated copy of the game better then the retail one. Everybody except PC game executives (Frogboy excluded) seems to know that.

They didn't "write it off" they gave people an incentive to legally purchase the game (support) instead of punishing them with horrible DRM BS.



Yes, Piracy is stealing, no one has argued it isn't But you have to realize DRM does not work. Pirates will steal the game anyway and rip the DRM out. Meaning only the legit customers actually deal with it and the company lost money buying/developing the DRM.

Its simple economics and common sense that DRM does not work and is not worth the expense. It hurts the consumer and doesn't matter to the pirates either way.

I have to wonder that too. You'd think these people never spent even a second doing market research or learning how to market to a target audience instead of projecting a fancy, hip, cool image like EA tries to do so desperately. Unfortunately, the marketing presentations and statistics companies like Securom promote to management of game companies normally convinces them or principle stakeholders to add the protection. It's like buying a timeshare--it's one big scam with icing and a cherry on top so it looks more appetizing.

I've run into a couple of games over the years which run better pirated because of the copy protection screwing things up. I've also lost an older CD drive to copy protection because the game kept checking the disk so often. Because I game on a laptop and am commonly mobile somewhere, I also install no-cd patches for all my legally purchased software so I don't have to lug around my couple hundred disc carrier. Yeah, I purchased every game that I have but that doesn't mean I'm going to tolerate the copy protection scheme especially when I'm playing by the rules. One of the top reasons people make the switch from PC's to consoles is because of the complexity and hassles of installing and maintaining a working gaming PC and the games themselves. Copy protection just makes things much harder than they need to be. It's like watching a movie where the first 5 minutes are a couple of anti-piracy segments you can't skip.

Oh just got this from the Bioware forum

-Derek French Technical Producer BioWare

Here is a link to the new thread that has not been locked I know of 3 so far.

If this link is not allowed on the forum Admins just delete it and let me know not to do that anymore.

BioWare Copy Protection Thread

Make your opinion known guys let them know about it.

Was buying - not buying anymore.

Got sucked in once by Bioshock and vowed never again.

The more I think about this (and read the forum posts), the more I wonder what crack Bioware was smoking when they agreed to this EA nonsense. First of all, you only get 3 activations. Didn't they learn from the Bioshock fiasco that this isn't enough? Because of all the activation problems on release week, people used that up in a hurry. So they upped it to 5.

And additionally, they have some sort of revoke tool you need to download and use w/Bioshock to free up the licenses. This is just blatantly horrible because if you uninstall Bioshock, it does NOT free up a license. You have to run the revoke tool after uninstall. And the revoke tool has to be run from the PC that you installed the game on. So if you reformatted the drive and got rid of the PC, whoops, too bad, can't revoke a license.

Do you know how many PCs I've installed games on and never bothered to uninstall it? Never mind if I had to do the additional task of removing a license...

I don't know what Bioware is going to do with regards to freeing up licenses, but you can bet that just like with the release of Bioshock, all of the information is not available yet for us to make any sort of reasonable decision as to whether it's worth buying Mass Effect PC and Spore.

-HM

So TRue, so True.....