DRM sometimes impacts the law-abiding gamer?. How about ALWAYS?.

DRM doesn't help developers make money. DRM helps developers lose money.

my question is, how does DRM affect piracy other than to encourage people to pirate games to avoid DRM? the whole DRM industry is a scam.

As other industry analysts have said, a rather significant portion of piracy is due to two factors: A) People who would not have paid for the game anyway, and thus is not actual lost profit, and B) People without easy, convenient access to games for purchase. Steam as a model was conceived with the latter demographic in mind, and has succeeded in bringing the games market to a lot of people who had difficulty purchasing games in the past due to location(lack of a market), and also the industry's (largely arbitrary) rules on international distribution.

If you say to North Americans 'hey, here, you can have this game, but you guys in Europe have to wait a few weeks, and hey you guys in Austrial, how about two months, that seems fair' then YES people are going to get impatient and pirate the game. I bet you could cut down on a significant portion of piracy if you'd lobby to abolish the delay on international distribution. That alone could make up a good 10-30% of piracy, and I think that's a conservative estimate.

So a large portion of piracy is NOT actually lost profit. Guys like this like to assume that if they could outright prevent piracy from happening, ever, then every single pirated copy of the game would translate into a sale. But it doesn't.

Let's face it, DRM exists solely to delay and complicate piracy long enough to increase sales among people who have limited patience in putting effort into pirating a game that they want right off the bat. And the people who fall into this demographic is probably a relatively small portion of all piracy incidents. The rest do not translate into sales.

So in keeping that in mind, perhaps DRM should be specifically designed with this intention in mind. Current models are having the effect of causing serious problems for relatively large portions of their paying customer base, and likely resulting in as many lost sales(in the form of refusal to purchase, as well as returns when games don't work), as it does in actually transforming one potential pirate into a customer due to impatience.

The industry needs to get its head out of the clouds and admit that there is no real solution to piracy, and while combatting it is necessary, it should not be done at the expense of paying customers.

First of all, I think he's making some very broad generalizations.

Second of all, I work at a company that makes games for a mobile/casual market- and something I'm seeing a lot of lately is that free flash games are keeping gamers just as entertained as the top sellers that cost like $60.

Games for the iPhone/iTouch are priced quite low, even when they're of a pretty decent quality. Hell, some of them are free.

What I'm driving at here is that gamers don't even need to pirate games anymore to get something entertaining for free. A game doesn't NEED to have high production costs to be good.

But guys like this like pretending that it's entirely the fault of the pirates.

I think understanding piracy is important and that if anyone profits from a game being produced, it should be the people involved in creating the game. That being said, I think philosophically the argument that piracy needs to end because otherwise it will end game production is the wrong argument to follow.

When a product is made, the producers hope they have understood their market niche enough to bring purchasing consumers out of the woodwork. The consumer is ultimately the holder of all the cards. Software producers run the indisputable risk of having every single copy of a game they have created played exclusively by pirates. Software is easy to duplicate and any tools necessarily to hack protected software seem to circulate quickly as if cracking software is a game to pirates. So the risk of losing money on a software product is a very real one.

Game producers have a consumer and it isn't the pirates. Cater to the purchasing people. Watch their behavior and limit your budget according to your risk return strategy. Build reusable parts as much as possible to assembly line things the consumer can't get enough of. These things are probably trickier than they sound but they serve to illustrate that there is a purchasing consumer that can be wooed and courted. Forget the pirates, not because you can't stop them, but because stopping them will require you to shift your energy from the core perspective.

Every software company should have a donate tab on their site. Why? Because pirates pirate. One of the more realistic reasons a pirate would pirate software is a limited budget on their part. Naturally a pirate with a limited budget is not likely to add to your sales figures in the normal sense. Consider this pirate and the noble equivalent, the used game purchaser, in the same light. They are economy gamers and unfortunately the system is set in a way that the primary producers and developers get none of their spending... at least not directly. Perhaps if they enjoyed your game, they could donate a small amount of money as a tip. This at least provides one more avenue by which games might be more profitable by the care and support of the fanbase.

To assist in the above post, game costs and profits could be made more public. If we, the gamers, knew that our favorite games were losing money, perhaps we would make a change. We can't afford to be the life raft for all products, but each one of us has our own gaming urges and if we felt we could help without being exploited maybe we would.

In summary, DRM acts to minimize risk but the real risk is discouraging fans and customers from supporting their favorite products by making things too costly, too clunky, or too glitchy. Software is difficult to get right. I'm not marginalizing the complexity. I just see the risk a little differently.

Using DRM is akin to partaking in a hopeless battle. My thoughts I covered in my blog entry:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JakeRomigh/20090428/1270/quotEntertainment_as_a_S
ervicequot_To_Change_or_not_to_Change.php

It boils down to the fact that pirates WILL crack your game, no matter what you use. At that point, the pirates have a better product than your consumers. Lock down the online features and updates instead! Control the flow of value of your product.

Wow, I'm a fool. I linked the wrong article I wrote. Sigh. At least it isn't a clickable link, so it doesn't look like I'm fishing for views.

Layman's Look: Combating PC Game Piracy with Value, not Invasion

Let's see how HTML in comments work... Who knows? Maybe it'll work.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JakeRomigh/20090513/1317/Laymans_Look_Combating_P
C_Game_Piracy_with_Value_not_Invasion.php

I guess not. Certainly a low point for me, a triple post.

The issue is a can of worms. Before you start decrying piracy, you should look at what causes such. What is a person's impetus for theft? Nine times out of ten, it is desperation. Putting more restrictions on software alienates accessibility for more people. Times are tough enough in our economy.

So, what type of environment does piracy(criminal activity) flourish in? One that restricts freedoms. Given a free choice, people in general will opt for the right choice. Take away those freedoms, and underground activities boom and flourish (remember a little thing called prohibition?).

If the average american has $50 a month to spend on entertainment software, then their choices are restricted by cost. If games cost $50 then they can legally purchase one game. If games cost $5 or $10 then they can legally purchase ten or five games respectively. The current average pricepoint is geared towards the $50 pricepoint, which decisively limits the market of legal buyers to upper lower wage earners (over 50k a year). I'll stay away from the tedious details behind my reasoning (and will provide my observations in private request), but basically for every one person in the U.S. that can legally afford the $50 pricepoint, there are ten that cannot.

Computer gaming is no longer a hobbyist's venture like it was in the 80's. Computers have permeated all classes of society, and the entertainment available to them ought to take into account this much broader market that is available. Unfortunately formulas of selling 100k copies at $50 to recoup costs and make a marginal profit is a focal point of most game distributors. If the costs come down, then a broader market is able to buy games. As an aside, a question for marketing folks could be, would you rather have 100k copies sold at $50 or 500k copies sold at $25?

Let me reiterate once again, if the costs come down, then a broader market is able to buy games. The key focus here is 'able to'. For every one person that can legally afford a pricepoint of $50, there are ten that cannot. The piracy stems from those who cannot afford the pricepoint. If we broaden our market focus in general in the games industry and bring the pricepoint down, then game piracy wont be an issue. The problem is people who analyze piracy see that as a potential number of people paying the retail price, but they don't seem to realize that those who pirate cannot afford the retail price. The numbers are through the roof for piracy because there are currently in the US alone about ten people that cannot, for every one that can, afford the standard pricepoint.

Make games readily attainable for the broader market and you will see profits beyond any seen in the games industry. One prime example of reaching for a broader market is a game that wow's millions of people every day.

We have numerous examples of DRM and restrictions causing good games to implode, and numerous examples of reaching broader markets causing good games to blossom.

If you don't like piracy then help foster an environment that doesn't allow it to thrive.

It'd be nice if the loudest people decrying piracy were more open to discuss it. Unfortunately when you say, "Piracy is theft, plain and simple, of the intellectual property and the creativity and the energy of the investors in this industry and the artists who make the great games. Period. Okay?" I think you're pretty much slamming the door shut for open debate. Especially when the statement isn't even factually correct theft != copyright infringement.

Jonathon Walsh nailed it down.

I am from Brazil, a article on Enquierer I think was about the piracy here, and things here work this way (note: not all info from the article, as game developer I done some "field research" and normal research around):

Piracy here always exist, but it was negligible until a certain point.

Thus we can guess (but not prove) that this certain point in the history has the explanation of piracy reasons.

Certain point:

Before it, it was expected that our games market would be much bigger than it is now, maybe because it was a market at that time that was big enough to companies care to do official releases here, like they do on US, Europe and Japan.

Here the war between Mega Drive (as it is sold here, and STILL is sold here) and Super Nintendo was raging, TecToy manufactured Mega Drives and cartridges, and Gradiente imported some and manufactured other some of Nintendo goods (I don't rememeber what exactly they manufactured, I think that the console was imported). You could easily find those for sell, cartridges too, owning a Mega Drive and a Sonic 3&Knucles or owning a Master System and Sonic 2 for it was the best way to impress your friends that do not liked soccer, if your friends DO liked soccer, then Super Star Soccer Deluxe or Ronaldinho Socccer for SNES were the solution, also both "sides" loved MK, you could all the time hear childs on the streets talking about MK, that they went to arcade, or that they talked to X person and learned how to get reptile, or that they learned how to get Smoken on MK II...

TecToy then used a "low" move, it made a lobby to force the government make outrageous taxes (that still exist, the sum of all taxes is 273% according to a deputy that is trying to take this law down) on imported consoles and console games.

Imported things thus became de facto banned. MegaDrive won.

Then Sega launched Dreamcast, while Nintendo N64.

The battle raged on again, Gradiente manufactured here locally N64, and Dreamcast was imported I think (for a bizarrely outrageous price, 1000 USD to be exact, but it was so cool that people actually bought it). Of course, N64 with Mario 64 and cheaper price started to chip-off Dreamcast, but this one was not to be ignored.

While Sega and Nintendo fought for mainstream sucess, playstation was around, but for now, ignored.

Sega suddenly nuked Dreamcast.
Gradiente (for other reasons than game market) went bankrupt.

So, no legal console was avaible on the country.
Playstation was really cheap, and easy to pirate, it started to be smuggled on the country, but its 200 USD games do not took many time to start to be widely pirated, mainly because they were only avaible imported and non-localized (and because TecToy-Gradiente wars, not only we had localized games, but we had even exclusive ported games, like Duke3D for MegaDrive).

Playstation after that spread like wildfire, quickly it surpassed both N64 and Dreamcast, but when this was happened, PS2 was still on verge of be launched, when it was launched it even quicker went to end in nearly everyone homes (in my house there are 4 for example, altough noone are mine), its price started to drop and drop, and now it is sold here for 200 USD (cheaper than a new MegaDrive or Zeebo) legally (not smuggled), but few games got sold here legally (the few ones that did, like a market that offered King of Fighters X or XI I think for 15 USD, sold-out instantly).

The widespread of piracy because Playstation popularity driven people to pirate PC (not the other way around, in fact it is MUCH more easier to find a PS2 pirate dealer than a PC game or software dealer...), and the law made to help national companies only made sure that only Sony and pirated got money, and no national companies (the most succefull national games were widely sold on US or Argentina, but not here, after "certain point").



Thus, we can think that the main reason of piracy here is the lack of legal games, if noone sell them here, noone is buying of course, and telling people to use digital distribution or ask them to import is the most idiotic thing possible, mainly because internet infrastructure here suck, and importing is still subject to the bizarre 273% tax law (thus solving nothing).


The recent hope (for consumers, other companies will be utterly crushed) is that Sony asked permission to build a PS2 factory and a DVD press (both games and movies it seems) on Manaus (if you ask permission from the governmetn and receives it, you can buy raw materials and parts with much less taxes), if Sony manages to do it, we will have 99USD PS2 here, finally legal PS2 games for a buyable price, and Nintendo, Microsoft and TecToy (still selling sega stuff and Zeebo) will be blown to smithreens. But at least piracy will start to diminish, and maybe someday it will be negligible again.





Btw: Ubisoft here is doing a great job selling older PC games (Sands of Time, or Rainbow Six 3) for 7 USD (cheaper than pirates, at 10 USD), and Blizzard also insists in selling their games for low prices too (usually I find them on store for 20 USD or lower), unfortunally this does not drive piracy down, because like I said, what drives piracy here is Playstation, not PC (btw: PS3 are extremely unpopular here, maybe because the console costs 1600 USD and each game 300 USD and there are no easy way to use pirated games on it)


Here console piracy is so high, that a lot of youngsters join the market of eletronics as modship solderers.