G
Guest
Everyone saying that a company has a right to keep its product from being pirated is missing one very important fact: DRM does practically nothing to keep a game from being pirated. There is no DRM that has not been cracked. All that it does is penalize the legitimate customer, and as a result it frequently drives away customers who would have otherwise paid for the product.
At best, DRM keeps the pirates from uploading the game for a day or two (even this is very rare; 95+% of games are cracked within hours of becoming available). This may, admittedly, result in increased sales in some rare cases, as some people who would pirate otherwise can afford to pay for the game and are too impatient to wait an extra day for it, but the vast majority of pirates don't fall into those categories; they are either too poor or too cheap to pay for the game. Moreover, in most cases these day-one sales will be offset by people who don't buy the game (either pirating it or simply not playing it) out of objection to DRM. Fallout 3 sold quite well on PC, and it had very minimal DRM, just a disc check. Do you really think that the number sales would have increased if it had used, say, Starforce or SecuROM for DRM? I doubt it; the bad associations that immediately come to mind for most people who are familiar with them ensure that many would opt not to buy it.
And for those who believe that people are just whining because they don't want to have to pay for the game - which, to reiterate, doesn't make sense because every game since the advent of DRM has been cracked, STEAM games included - I'm almost certainly going to receive Fallout: New Vegas for Christmas. I actually would have bought it a while ago, except that I just finished putting together a new gaming computer and have very few other things to ask from my loved ones for Christmas, and they insist upon getting me something. And when I get it, the first thing I'll do is tuck it away somewhere and start torrenting. Because, believe it or not, there are legitimate customers out there who are simply fed up with DRM and other recent practices among gaming companies, who pay for games whose boxes we'll never open. We torrent games primarily for one of two reasons:
1) It allows us to play the game without dealing with the hassle, invasiveness, or unreliability of DRM. In the case of STEAM, concerns range from being able to play on computers with no Internet access; to the possibility of the server being hacked or going down - temporarily or permanently; to disagreeing with aspects of the subscriber agreement; to concerns about customer service (see the first October 20 poster above for an example); to preferring to have physical copies; to limitations related to other aspects of STEAM such as not being able to roll back to earlier patches in order to use mods incompatible with more recent patches or features that were later removed. (Obviously, not all of these are applicable in the case of FO:NV.)
2) Since companies have an unfortunate tendency not to release demos anymore - I suspect that this is because they've come to realize that demos are likely to result more sales lost than gained, seeing as generally only people who are already interested in the game will use them - we play downloaded copies for a short period in order to make an informed decision about whether to purchase a game. Reviews, no matter how trusted the source, can only tell you so much; only by experiencing the game for yourself can you make a good determination about whether or not it has enjoyable gameplay, will run smoothly and relatively glitch-free on your hardware setup, etc.
At best, DRM keeps the pirates from uploading the game for a day or two (even this is very rare; 95+% of games are cracked within hours of becoming available). This may, admittedly, result in increased sales in some rare cases, as some people who would pirate otherwise can afford to pay for the game and are too impatient to wait an extra day for it, but the vast majority of pirates don't fall into those categories; they are either too poor or too cheap to pay for the game. Moreover, in most cases these day-one sales will be offset by people who don't buy the game (either pirating it or simply not playing it) out of objection to DRM. Fallout 3 sold quite well on PC, and it had very minimal DRM, just a disc check. Do you really think that the number sales would have increased if it had used, say, Starforce or SecuROM for DRM? I doubt it; the bad associations that immediately come to mind for most people who are familiar with them ensure that many would opt not to buy it.
And for those who believe that people are just whining because they don't want to have to pay for the game - which, to reiterate, doesn't make sense because every game since the advent of DRM has been cracked, STEAM games included - I'm almost certainly going to receive Fallout: New Vegas for Christmas. I actually would have bought it a while ago, except that I just finished putting together a new gaming computer and have very few other things to ask from my loved ones for Christmas, and they insist upon getting me something. And when I get it, the first thing I'll do is tuck it away somewhere and start torrenting. Because, believe it or not, there are legitimate customers out there who are simply fed up with DRM and other recent practices among gaming companies, who pay for games whose boxes we'll never open. We torrent games primarily for one of two reasons:
1) It allows us to play the game without dealing with the hassle, invasiveness, or unreliability of DRM. In the case of STEAM, concerns range from being able to play on computers with no Internet access; to the possibility of the server being hacked or going down - temporarily or permanently; to disagreeing with aspects of the subscriber agreement; to concerns about customer service (see the first October 20 poster above for an example); to preferring to have physical copies; to limitations related to other aspects of STEAM such as not being able to roll back to earlier patches in order to use mods incompatible with more recent patches or features that were later removed. (Obviously, not all of these are applicable in the case of FO:NV.)
2) Since companies have an unfortunate tendency not to release demos anymore - I suspect that this is because they've come to realize that demos are likely to result more sales lost than gained, seeing as generally only people who are already interested in the game will use them - we play downloaded copies for a short period in order to make an informed decision about whether to purchase a game. Reviews, no matter how trusted the source, can only tell you so much; only by experiencing the game for yourself can you make a good determination about whether or not it has enjoyable gameplay, will run smoothly and relatively glitch-free on your hardware setup, etc.
