Morning Discussion

Piracy/DRM crap:

You know, I'm wondering how much of this piracy EA and other publishers try and prevent has anything to do with torrent sites and cracked exes. I mean, everyone generally assumes that DRM is attempting to prevent a glut of torrent downloads, even then I think a good % of the piraters would never buy half the games they steal even if piracy became impossible. Time and time again, no DRM actually prevents it and I would think that publishers are aware of this.

So, maybe the DRM is largely there to prevent casual pirating by people who hardly even know what a torrent is, but pass their copy of Spore around to friends and family? Draconic install-count/machine-spec limitations would go a long way to halt that kind of piracy.

I'm mostly thinking aloud here and have no factual knowledge to back up my speculations. What do you all think? I was going to post this in the EA DRM article but FP threads rarely have real discussion...