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DRM 'A Waste of Time,' Says World of Goo Dev
by Chris Faylor, Mar 23, 2009 3:00pm PDTUtilizing digital rights management as a means to prevent piracy is "a waste of time," according to 2D Boy co-founder and World of Goo co-creator Ron Caramel.
"Don't bother with DRM," he said during a GDC 09 talk attended by GameSpot. "You just end up giving the DRM provider money. Anything that is of interest gets cracked, and the cracked version ends up having a better user experience than the legit version because you don't have to input in some 32-character serial number."
The topic of digital rights management has become increasingly controversial, as publishers feel they must make some effort to prevent piracy while protesters complain that DRM punishes legitimate buyers with install limits and online activations.
"We don't see the point in having DRM," he added. "Anybody who wants the game is likely to find it on BitTorrent sites. It's going to get cracked even with DRM, it's going to be available very quickly."
Comments
You have to have some DRM, however mild, because otherwise people will pirate like crazy.
Yes they will. They really will.
People, by and large, believe that anything they are not supposed to do they will be prevented from doing. They will teeter on the edge of a subway stop because they believe that if they're not supposed to then someone would have put up a rail (which is why a few people every year die because they fell in front of a subway).
They believe that if they are not supposed to pirate a game then it would have some sort of copy protection. I've literally been told by people "yeah go ahead and borrow this game and install it - it doesn't have a disc check or anything"
Yes, Stardock has a lot of sales for their non-DRM titles. Kudos. Their sales are a fraction of AAA titles because they exist in a niche. And their sales would not be much more with DRM because they exist in a niche. They are, I'm sorry, not indicative of the rest of the industry.
Mild DRM works. Excessive DRM doesn't. Make a disc check or a CD key the standard, as it has been, and leave it alone. Steam as DRM works well. But over the top activation shemes just don't work, and neither will a lack of copy protection.
The proper reaction to the over-the-top SecuROM protection is to ratchet away the activation check and go back to the standard disc checks like we've always had.
But if you think stripping away DRM entirely will work you're fooling yourself.
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