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DRM phobia and its impact on gamesJun-1-07, 10:49 pm by HanfordFile under: Video games, consoles, game design I'm worried that DRM phobia is going to have a negative impact on gaming. Specifically indie games and casual games. Because contrary to what a lot of popular consumer-friendly websites want you to believe, not all DRM is bad.  I'm talking about DRM that enables try-before-you-buy, pay-as-you-go, and rental models. Try before you buy is an absolute boon to the user. Things absolutely sucked for games before it. TBYB allows a person to actually play a game (or a tool, or a service) without having to shell out money for it, to see if they like it. I remember a time when all games were marketed to you a lot like movies: a ton of marketing would be spent before the game came out. Previews that never said anything bad about it would appear in all the game rags. Gamers would be whipped up into a frenzy by the hype, and when the game was released we all rushed out and bought it on faith, without ever trying it, hoping that the game would actually, you know, be fun. It was a business model that required a lot of money being spent up front for marketing, and minimizes the damage a sucky game could do by selling a ton of copies before the reviews hit. It trained customers to rely on marketing to ease their feeling of risk. Which means smaller developers with less marketing dollars lose. But try-before-you-buy has leveled the playing field for indie developers. It has slowly retrained gamers to expect a risk-free experience up front that wears its heart on its sleeve. And as more gamers expect the trial, it means purchases are based more on game quality over marketing dollars. It takes the risk out of buying a game, and it means indie developers without a reputation and big marketing dollars can get a fair shake from gamers. This is the way it should be. In hindsight I actually cringe at the fact that I was dropping between 30 and 60 bucks on games without ever playing them first. The try-before-you-buy experience is the way software should work. Period. And DRM is what makes try-before-you-buy possible. But DRM phobia is at an all-time high. We're told "DRM is bad!!!" again and again and again. We're told that if you can't do what you want with your media, then Reject! It! (or, more likely, pirate it). We're told that artificial limitations are an old-world way of thinking. But I disagree. Artificially saying "you pay before you can even try it" when a trial method could easily be applied to it is a cop out (the console gamers still have to suffer through a lot, unfortunately) I hope that DRM phobia does not get to a point where indie developers are shamed into removing trial wrappers and other try-before-you-buy mechanisms due to uninformed panic. Now before the hate mail starts coming I want to make something perfectly clear: I am not saying that all DRM is good, only that not all DRM is bad. Clearly DRM has been abused recently and it's these egregious misuses that have been targeted, as opposed to game-trial-wrappers. But the anti-DRM campaigns I've seen waged haven't really bothered to let people know that sometimes DRM can enable some business models that really do benefit the consumer. The result is more people are flat out rejecting anything with a notion of DRM without thinking through the benefits vs. the drawbacks. On a side noteI saw that Apple is finally selling DRM-free music on iTunes -- something that a lot of people have been requesting for a long time now. However, Apple is taking some heat for not using encryption when embedding the purchaser's name and email address into these songs. I find it funny that now that they've dropped DRM from these songs, they're getting shamed for not DRMing the owner identification. I guess DRM is bad only when it's not protecting something you personally find valuable.  Feedback - 2 responsesDisplayed newest to oldest. Leave a comment.John Dowdell wrote: Jun-2-07, 5:45 am You're right -- there are lots of different motivations in those conversations. Some people warn against intrusive, misleading, or faulty rights-management. Others warn against any pricing structure at all, and insist that they should have access to the labor of others. Oddly, the "Google Maps shouldn't photograph my cat!" issue played up in BoingBoing, which has some of the strongest anti-DRM positions -- privacy is good for me, but not for thee, I guess. jd This post is closed to new comments. |
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Your DRM post just reminds me of the larger issue, allowing copyright owners to control their content.
I agree, without DRM, the TBYB model fall apart.
To me the DRM issue is irrelevant *as long as the restrictions are clear*. A great example of this to me at least is Windows XP and MS's authorization system for it. People were used to buying a single copy of windows and sticking it on whatever machines they had, but XP changed things around.
But even compared to that, TBYB is even cleary about your rights during the trail period, well usually, as they aren't buried inside a EULA.
Itns has DRM on their music yes, but again Apple's very clear about what you can do with music you buy from their store.
On the other hand, you have things like StarForce (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starforce) which, while it is effect in protecting the content, it appears to do so in devious ways.
I guess in closing, DRM isn't the real issue, and the abuse imo really comes from misinforming customers about what they are buying. And when their software starts misbehaving, its really no different than having a virus.