

DRM drives gamers to piracy - pwg
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2011/04/11/gog-drm-drives-gamers-piracy/1

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Groxx
Has certainly been true for me. No-CD cracks have been wonderful, they let you
play the game without inserting a CD which does nothing but eat up your CD
slot and make noise (once you do the "complete" install option). Similarly, a
few binary patches have made old games work again, new games start faster, and
buggy network behaviors smooth as silk (by removing them entirely).

I'll put this plainly: pirated software is often more user-friendly. Even when
it involves a zip within a rar within a tar with a batch file that runs for an
hour to extract a dozen .cab files. Because once it's in, it _works_ \- DRM
frequently means it doesn't.

The flip-side of this is what Steam has become, with essentially _proper_ DRM:
_easier_ than pirating. And I've spent more money through Steam than all other
game purchases combined. Not to imply Steam hasn't had / doesn't have its
issues, of course - it used to be an absolute nightmare, and there are still
people getting things locked out for no good reason.

~~~
_delirium
> I'll put this plainly: pirated software is often more user-friendly.

I'm not sure to what extent it's still done, but I was fairly impressed by
some of the improvements warez groups would make to stuff in the 90s. The
Radium audiowarez group used to actually add features to their versions of
audio software, e.g. the ability to import/export more formats than the
official version. Many groups also found ways to make games much smaller in
size than the official version, e.g. reencoding all the wav audio as mp3 and
embedding an mp3 decoder, which was a nice win in the days when I would
sometimes have to uninstall a game in order to fit a new install on my hard
drive.

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davesmylie
This is fairly obvious to any one that has had to put up with invasive and/or
painful DRM.

I would rather buy my software legitimately (if only for the support and feel
good factor), but at times it seems like they're going out of their way to
make it as painful as possible for the users that have paid for the product
whilst the pirates who dont pay end up with a much nicer user experience!

This is nothing new though . . . even going back to the 90's where you had to
keep game manuals handy so that you could flip thru to page 27 and find the
38th word in the 4th paragraph. (Very frustrating when the manual eventually
got lost!!)

I don't think there's a good answer to this though - clearly the producers
need to put some effort into stopping people from stealing their content, but
eventually the copy protection will be broken (usually sooner rather than
later), and any effort they require on the part of the user is there after
only going to be impacting on those users that have actually given them their
money.

(This is similar to the anti-piracy warnings that you see at the start of
DVD's that only people that have paid for the movie ever get forced to sit
through)

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TillE
It certainly drives me to not buy certain games. Assassin's Creed 2 sounds
quite nice, but I don't own a console, and I'll never buy the PC version as
long as there's any form of the Ubisoft DRM attached.

It's also a not-so-covert vehicle to prevent or otherwise cripple resale,
which I'm sure every industry would love to do, but only video games are able
to realistically implement with online activation.

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__david__
It's interesting, the same thing drives people to piracy of other media too.
Just yesterday I was discussing with a family member who just bought a Blu-Ray
movie and then got the 1080p torrent rather than messing around with watching
the actual disk. This way he can put it up on his Mac's 30" display which
would never happen with the actual DRMed disc he bought.

I nearly came to that myself when I went to watch a Blu-Ray at my parents
house and their playstation refused (or was unabled) to play it until we'd
updated the system software which took 1/2 an hour. Grrrr...

Media companies need to learn that the more they push consumer unfriendly DRM,
the more consumers stop feeling guilty about pirating stuff. Just from my
small anecdotal sample size of people that I know, approximately 100% have no
moral/ethical qualms about pirating something they already own on some other
media.

~~~
aerique
Another thing I hoped they would have dropped from Blu-Ray is the minutes of
unskippable content. I've already paid for the disc and now I have to sit
through minutes of advertisements? It infuriates me even writing about it.

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kemayo
Anecdotally, I've only actually been driven to piracy by DRM once. I bought
"The Great Adventure Bundle 2010" from Telltale games, and one of the included
games had a weird conflict between its DRM and something about many people's
systems that rendered it unplayable. So I downloaded a cracked .exe and was
able to play the game I had paid for.

Definitely feels wrong when the pirates get to have the _better_ user
experience.

------
bluedanieru
On a related note, embedded advertisements with audio drive me to close a
window and its article before finishing it.

~~~
nitrogen
There are few things that will drive me away from a site faster than an auto-
playing Flash or video ad with audio, or really any sort of auto-playing
audio. It really sucks to open up a bunch of tabs for later reading and not
know which one has just started intruding on my speakers.

