DRM News
There were a couple of DRM (Digital Restrictions Rights Management) related news items in the news today. The first is related to the game Spore
EA added some draconian DRM to the game, but even if your willing to live with the restrictions it appears there’s still a problem getting the game to work in some cases. Originally EA had designed the DRM to check-in with the DRM servers every 10-days for validation. This meant when the servers went away your game would stop working, in effect you rented the game. They relented and the DRM only checks in during install/first launch and patches and online access. But a game built around “community” and online features could be annoying if it checks DRM every time you use some features. EA seem to be under the assumption that DRM always works.
The low customer ratings at Amazon may be the result of a coordinated effort to raise awareness, rather than actual DRM problems preventing the game from working. Still, the people who buy at Amazon are probably the type who only care about DRM when it affects them. They’re going to go to Amazon and see the low ratings. Will they see what looks like problems and decide not to buy?
Perhaps EA should take a page from StarDock’s playbook:
What we think people who publish games and music need to remember is this: The goal is not to eliminate piracy. The goal is to increase sales. People who are dedicated to stealing your product will steal it.
The focus should be making sure it’s more convenient to buy your product than to steal it. It can be a delicate balance. But as the story linked below shows, too many publishers are obsessed at eliminating piracy rather than reducing sales lost to piracy.
The DRM also limits you to three installations.
In general if I buy something with DRM I consider it a rental and a throw away item. At $50 and the type of game intended to be fun for the family, as opposed to hard-core gamers, and played again and again over a long time the DRM seems counter-productive.
Next up is RealDVD from the folks who bring us Real Player. They’re also the ones who cracked Apple’s FairPlay DRM so their RealPlayer music store files could play on the iPod. At least until Apple disabled their files. This time they’ve tweaked the MPAA by creating software that rips a DVD to disk. The files still have their DRM and Real apparently adds another level of DRM so the files can only be played through their player and on a limited number of PCs. You also need to buy a RealDVD license for each PC. Ars Technica reports the current price of RealDVD as $30 currently with an eventual price of $50. There’s a free 30-day trial available.
I grew to hate Real long ago with older version of their Real Player software so I won’t even be giving the trial a try. But I would think anybody who wants DVDs copied to disk has already figured out how to do it. The limitation of requiring the ripped files to be played in the Real software further limits the usefullness of this software.
It appears some vendors still haven’t learned that DRM creates pirates out of people who’d be willing to pay for their product.
Tags: DRM