Last weekend, I attended a "
Die Ärzte" concert in Linz. Much to my surprise, they had a very neat offer there: for 20 Euros, you could obtain a
USB-storage stick with the live recording of the concert, plus a voucher code to download the encore the next day.
Now what really struck me was the vendor who told me upon purchasing the strick that the music didn't have any copy protection, so I could copy it to as many computers as I wanted. Even the band announced the stick, and added: "Or you can download the songs on piratebay tomorrow."
Of course they won't offer them there themselves, but still, not trying to prevent that, and even encouraging it, was an epiphany for me.
It actually works. The DRM on music is a last struggle of the dying music industry, but the artists themselves have other means of generating income: live concerts and merchandise. The internet basically made buying CDs obsolete, and most people know that only a tiny portion of the CD revenues land in the hands of the artists. Thus, you don't neccessarily have to feel bad about downloading music rather than buying it. Also, you can't download the live experience, so go and support the bands you like by going to their concerts.
I know this sounds rather like a pro-piracy article for now, but here's the turn that also connects the topic to gaming: while free distribution does work for music, it can't for games. There are no live concert like events to substitute for less bought copies. Thus I can understand the industry's try to rescue itself by copy protection systems. The problem is though, that they cannot possibly work.
Not only are many protection systems very intrusive on the systems, they're all breakable. In fact, most games are cracked and available for download before the actual release date. Also, you don't have to register accounts, always have the DVD in the drive or other inconvenients associated with legitly buying a game.
So basically, using protection to fight piracy is a battle that can't be won. It costs money, and I guess not little, to use SecuRom and the likes of publishers. And they don't achieve what they're meant to, they can't stop pirates. The only thing they do achieve is alienate people who would want to buy, but don't want to open their computer to protecting and possibly data mining (*cough* The Sims 3 *cough*) applications.
So I for one think that the publishers should skip the whole DRM business and give the customers incentive to buy their games rather than suspiciously eyeing at them like everyone was a pirate.
Incentives could be a comeback of gimmicks going with the game, like cloth maps, novels, soundtracks, or pretty much anything else that comes with collectors editions nowadays. Or online systems you can't live without (even though that might need registering).
On a sidenote, I'd also like to see the price of downloaded games via Steam or other means to be reduced. I think it's ridiculous that a game costs more on steam than in a store, especially since I can play the latter outright and have a printed manual to read. I don't think that servers cost as much as a world wide physical distribution.
