Bioshock 2 - DRM Madness @ ActionTrip

JemyM said:

When you begin to blame humanity for lost sales, it's time to close down.

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Yes and no. If everyone behaved properly it wouldn't necessary to pay for burglary insurance. If everyone behaved properly it wouldn't be necessary to remove everything from your car (or at least put it in the trunk where the insurance covers any losses) in case it gets stolen or broken into. If everyone behaved properly it wouldn't be necessary to have to enter a series of letters/numbers displayed in a psychedelic looking picture every time you do something on the internet just to prove that you're not a bot.

I could go on and on, but in short: If you attempt to do ANYTHING in the real world, be it try to run a large business or just hawking your wares (not warez) from a both at the local market without some kind of protection against lowlifes you're going to get screwed. That's human nature for you. I believe you've said as much yourself in many of the numerous religious debates her on the Watch.

fatBastard() said:

Yes and no. If everyone behaved properly it wouldn't necessary to pay for burglary insurance. If everyone behaved properly it wouldn't be necessary to remove everything from your car (or at least put it in the trunk where the insurance covers any losses) in case it gets stolen or broken into. If everyone behaved properly it wouldn't be necessary to have to enter a series of letters/numbers displayed in a psychedelic looking picture every time you do something on the internet just to prove that you're not a bot.

I could go on and on, but in short: If you attempt to do ANYTHING in the real world, be it try to run a large business or just hawking your wares (not warez) from a both at the local market without some kind of protection against lowlifes you're going to get screwed. That's human nature for you. I believe you've said as much yourself in many of the numerous religious debates her on the Watch.

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What I pushed on were the difference between "protection" and "blame".

Theft, burglars, piracy etc is pretty much a force majura, and just like you protect yourself from earthquakes, storms and other disasters, you gain nothing for blaming it's out there. You gain more from spending your effort on building better protection or find new business models. Humans are irrational creatures that never act like intended. The human element is a chaotic part of business, which is something many economists have a really hard time grasping. On the paper it seems to suggest that you will earn a high number of money, and if you confuse that with reality you will run into trouble quickly. If you blame your failure on the people who aren't buying your product you can as well close down.

It can very well be that selling entertainment as a product was a business that was dependant on the current technology at the time. Radio, tape recorders, vcr, cd's and filesharing are new technology that change the market itself so that previous business models simply doesn't work anymore. There are many business that dropped thanks to new technology but that's how the market works and it's unfair. Yes, this may also mean that product quality may drop and many great people and great developers will go out of business. Like death itself I see no escape and no way to circumvent it but accept it.

i don't care what kind of DRM the game got as long as it's not activation limit. really.

one would expect that YOU guys will be the biggest supporters of this. because, if this method of DRM succeed in preventing piracy then the game WILL sell more. which bodes well for more quality games being release on the PC.

anyway, the messes don't care for DRM. Bioshock managed to sell 1 million copies on the pc even with the activation limit DRM and the buzz and gazillion threads around it.

in short, as someone that really love pc gaming (unlike most of you, it seems) i am all up for whatever DRM needed to stop piracy.

gargar said:

i don't care what kind of DRM the game got as long as it's not activation limit. really. one would expect that YOU guys will be the biggest supporters of this. because, if this method of DRM succeed in preventing piracy then the game WILL sell more.

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What evidence can you provide to support this statement?

I am going to say that DRM promotes piracy because it makes less want to buy the official product and grab the pirate copy which is less of a hassle and in many ways easier to use. Now prove me wrong.

I can only stress what Gorath wrote.

I've never visited an "information security" course at university or elsewhere, but I do read security-related articles - it's not really a kind of hobby of mine, but … well, sort of, yes. I just want to be informed, because I do know what ompanies and governments could do with this stuff. "Big Brother is watching you.". It is sad that the stories of "1984" and of "Brave New World" are so much close to reality. Next, it's probably the "Minority Report", with the real possibility to scan brain areas and from that brain area activity deduce what a person might have been thinking about … - Because a lot of certain brain areas are linked to certain kinds of "brain processing" …

And maybe we Germans are much more sensitive for that ... Because we do know what the Nazis did, and the "Stasi" of the GDR ...

JemyM said:

What evidence can you provide to support this statement?

I am going to say that DRM promotes piracy because it makes less want to buy the official product and grab the pirate copy which is less of a hassle and in many ways easier to use. Now prove me wrong.

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It's a shame that pirated games are actually easier to install and play than the real deal. At least when it comes to games like Grand Theft Auto IV and maybe Bioshock 2 from the sounds of it. My brother, who isn't very tech-savvy, bought GTAIV but never played it because of all the junk you had to install. Plus he had some kind of activation error that made the whole experience too annoying to bother. Now it sits on his shelf and he plays other games that are actually customer friendly. Way to scare off the casual PC-gamer there Rockstar...

Call me lazy but I do not want to have the DVD package near my desktop while playing a long game. I rather have it stuffed away in the bookshelf. For that reason I usually crack games I bought to remove the CD protection. I got that habit when some games were actually slowed down by a bad copy protection which the crack fixed.

That said, I couldn't buy "bioware points" for Dragon Age and I couldn't access the DLC. http://social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/58/index/530024/2#721525

JemyM said:

What I pushed on were the difference between "protection" and "blame".

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*EXACTLY*

Piracy will *always* exist, so the two questions publishers need to ask are:
- Can we make it inconvenient to pirate
WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY
- Maximizing the experience so that 'marginal' people will WANT to pay for the product.

Right now the gaming industry isn't looking at things that way - well, some are, using simple DVD checks and so on. But mot use this model:
- Can we make it impossible or at least extremely difficult to pirate
WITHOUT REGARD IF
- We are annoying folks who would normally buy our product into delaying purchase and/or pirating when it inevitably becomes available.

Look at music - 8 years ago when the iTunes Store opened, piracy was rampant, but the industry was obsessed with DRM, Apple gave in to DRM but made the price and convenience such that overnight digital music sales took off. Now we are at the point where there is no more DRM on digital music. All that time folks were pirating music, to be sure, but they found a way to make money regardless.

I bought Bioshock on the day of release since it was supposed to be the successor to one of my favorite games, System Shock. I didn't find out about the DRM until I had already purchased it. I ran up against the install limit the first day. I installed it on my PC which surpassed the minimum specs but it ran very slow and choppy. My son had a newer PC so I installed it on his under my user account and it ran fine. When he wanted to play it later, he logged on to his user account on the same PC and it wanted another activation. All 3 of my activations were used, 2 on the same PC with no way to revoke them at that time. I was just hoping that I wouldn't have any hardware issue that would require another activation since I was out.

This time I have been forewarned so they have lost a certain sale.

Thanks for the warning. Didn't they learn from the DRM disaster with BS1 ?

I haven't read the entire thread, but I believe one of the DRM "reasons" is to prevent or discourage reselling of games - which isn't desirable for developers/publishers.

I don't see the piracy thing being the biggest factor, because obviously it doesn't help at all - and in fact, it probably encourages piracy.

Maybe it helps to prevent the 0day wares factor, but even so - I'd imagine a lot of people being pissed over any restriction of this kind.

Personally, I don't plan to buy it unless I hear it's AT LEAST as good as Bioshock, which was already a disappointment for me.

Well, DLC can - as with Bioware/Ea pointed out recently - used as some kind of copy protection.

But - who helps the customer to copy-protect his/her OWN works ?

No-one does. Because the industry doesn't want it.

Some are more equal than others.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Well, DLC can - as with Bioware/Ea pointed out recently - used as some kind of copy protection.

But - who helps the customer to copy-protect his/her OWN works ?

No-one does. Because the industry doesn't want it.

Some are more equal than others.

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Are you selling this work? If so, you can make use of the same methods as the rest of the industry is using. If not, then why would you need to copy-protect it?

Some methods may be more suited for big businesses than others but so are thousands of other things for sale in the world today.

What has this got to do with equality rights?

fatBastard() said:

What has this got to do with equality rights?

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Is the EULA for Bioshock 2 distinctly different from, say, Fallout 3? Because unless it says "your ability to use this software is subject to our ability to determine your ownership, and if our servers fail / we go out of business then your rights evaporate", then there *is* an issue. Personally I don't know.

Hmm, I may have misinterpreted the use of the word "OWN". I took it to mean the fruit of someone's own creative powers (i.e. a new product) rather than the ownership of a product bought from someone else (e.g. a game from EA).

If that is the case, please ignore my previous post.