Paradox CEO Calls DRM a 'Waste of Money'

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/paradox-ceo-calls-drm-a-waste-of-money/

by jconley • 15 years ago

89 44 15 years ago

steve8918• 15 years ago

This is a lesson that was learned back in the 80s, after valiant attempts to protect games from copying. I remember things like having bad disk sectors, which were foiled by the likes of copyiipc, and then it moved on to requiring the manual for specific passcodes, which was foiled by photocopies and people simply hacking the binaries. None of them worked because it was an eternal war of the game providers vs the pirates, but the pirates had a lot more incentive and opportunity to crack the games than the content developers had to protect them.

As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way around it except by having thin clients and running everything off the cloud. As long as the actual machine where the content is being run off is in the hands of the client, it can always be hacked, either through software or hardware. But things like streaming video and Louis CK are showing that people are willing to pay for content, as long as it's convenient enough and cheap enough.

JonLim• 15 years ago

> As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way around it except by having thin clients and running everything off the cloud.

You can protect yourself from piracy by making quality content that people genuinely want to support. You do more good by making it convenient, easy, and affordable to customers than anything else, and having an awesome game makes it even easier to hand over cash.

Convenience and affordability is where a lot of people fail.

phoboslab• 15 years ago

Case in point, Valve/Steam got it right: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe...

wtvanhest2• 15 years ago

In general I agree with you, but sometimes affordability isn't possible due to a limited market size.

Adobe Photoshop is the best example in that even if it was only $50 (instead of $2000), the market size is limited by those who want edit photos.

Adobe's answer to this was to make a student version and sell it for 15%+/- of the original price and allow those that want to edit photos but cannot afford the software still buy it for a lower price.

They further versioned by releasing Light Room.

They realized that they needed to make it affordable, but kept the DRMs in place and worked hard to make PS harder to copy. I'm sure it is still possible, but at $400 (student version) you get a lot of value and it becomes easier than pirating.

chaz• 14 years ago

I've mentioned this before, but World of Goo did everything right: great game, 90 on Metacritic, easy purchase through Steam or direct from their website, no DRM at all, and priced at $19.99. But an estimated 90% of players were on pirated versions of the game: http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/.

Is there something else they could have done?

Scaevolus• 15 years ago

One exception is multiplayer games. You can still pirate them, but you won't be able to play online with the majority of players. This makes the copy significantly worse, so Blizzard doesn't have to worry much about Starcraft 2 piracy.

dlikhten• 14 years ago

Lol, not true. SC2 disabled LAN play because of this. People would just do LAN games via Hamachi.

That's the point. To "protect" themselves, they hurt legitimate consumers.

robryan• 14 years ago

Yeah especially MMO's, there are private wow servers people have setup but they really don't compare to the experience you get on the real ones.

ConstantineXVI• 14 years ago

> As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way around it except by having thin clients and running everything off the cloud.

OnLive does precisely this. It's effectively perfect as far as copy-protection goes; but it's also seamless to the user and (provided you have a decent pipe) actually has a few benefits as things like download time, system specs, or syncing saves are no longer an issue.

stcredzero4• 15 years ago

DRM period isn't a waste of money. DRM as it's commonly practiced is.

DRM always entails a hit to the customer's convenience. If you're not giving the customer more convenience in a different way, then you're fighting an uphill battle.

When you implement DRM, please be aware that you are engaged in an asymmetric conflict, and that you are the underdogs. The subset of the internet community interested in cracking your DRM most likely outnumbers and outguns whatever department in whatever company you're at. But asymmetric conflicts can be won:

    - concentrate on detection, bias to false negatives
    - separate by a significant interval in time the 
      detection and any consequences of detection 
    - never do anything that looks like a bug
    - never fight where you are weak and the enemy is strong

You are strong where functionality depends on a server. If you ever have to keep someone out, do it there. If you can avoid doing that at all and fight in even sneakier ways, then do that instead. Remember, in this conflict you are the guerrillas, and the pirates are the big empire. You can only win if you keep them guessing where you will strike, not the other way around.

nupark2• 14 years ago

> DRM period isn't a waste of money. DRM as it's commonly practiced is.

Not necessarily disagreeing, but DRM would always be a waste of money if it wasn't for the anti-circumvention laws that prevent disseminating DRM work-arounds.

The law serves to raise the bar on just how annoying DRM has to be before most people are willing to work around it.

stcredzero4• 14 years ago

Not necessarily disagreeing

Actually, part of my point is that DRM doesn't have to be very annoying at all. It's just that most companies are short sighted in how they apply it, which is foolish. Those companies are annoying their best customers the most.

finnw• 14 years ago

- separate by a significant interval in time the detection and any consequences of detection

Why?

bad_user• 14 years ago

To reduce false positives.

Consider the case in which an app has to connect to an online server for authorization. Well, what if the Internet connection is down? What if your server is unreachable for some reason? What if your server malfunctions?

In such a case, triggering an error right away may punish legitimate users. And this is the biggest problem with DRM and why I think it is fundamentally flawed, making piracy totally justified - any draconian DRM scheme that's effective against piracy will also punish legitimate users.

awj• 14 years ago

The consequences of detection are also the validation step for people cracking your DRM. They won't release something until they can confirm they've broken it.

It's much harder to work through removing DRM if you have to play the game for half an hour each time you want to test a partial solution. Games that dump you before even showing the title screen are actually making this confirmation activity easier.

DanBC• 14 years ago

See also an early scheme by Microsoft. "The Tree of Evil Bears Bitter Fruit" - there are differing versions of what was actually happening.

(http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=OC8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA8&#...)

diminium• 14 years ago

iPhone store is DRM. It helps the customer in a way by preventing apps from breaking the phone. I don't like it personally but I have a higher knowledge level of technology than most people.

DRM is useful mostly to people who can't figure out anything in a technology product. They are more likely to break their products without it than with it. The big thing though is I wished companies offered an option to those who are willing to risk it all vs fighting them.

iamandrus• 14 years ago

You are confusing DRM for the locking down of a product or platform. Apple locks down iOS for the benefit of the user (most of the time), but adds DRM to apps to prevent unauthorized code from being executed on the device and to prevent apps from being pirated (which Installous has proved futile).

masenf• 14 years ago

"But people who purchase a game should have just as easy a time as those who pirate the game, otherwise it’s a negative incentive to buy a legal copy."

I thought this was a key point in the article and one that has been lurking below the surface in the SOPA/PIPA discussion. In order to 'prevent piracy', technical solutions are worthless compared to providing a quality service where your customers' willingness to buy is on par with your price. As noted by the author, DRM decreases the quality of a service, and often carries an increased price [at least for company in production/support/etc].

For some industries, the price does not align with expectations. I can think of retail Blu-ray for instance [the price is too high].

For others, the DRM encourages piracy to some degree. Often with Windows this is the case. While I own legitimate copies, often a pirate copy is easier to install [no key/activation] or find [no cd to track]. This is especially true for quick n' dirty VM builds.

Finally, I believe in expressly Anti-DRM approaches, ya know.../trusting/ users with content. Encouraging users to purchase in order to support their favorite [movie, game, software, comedy special] is the way forward. Piracy will not go away, the game is converting pirates to customers by convincing them that your product is worth their money.

dattaway• 14 years ago

I no longer play games, because of DRM hassles in the past.

rcfox• 14 years ago

DRM-free games are becoming more and more popular these days. Look at the Humble Indie Bundles, for example. You get 3-6 indie games which are completely free from DRM (and in some cases are open source!) for as much or as little as you care to play. Heck, you don't even have time to finish all of the games in one bundle before another one comes out.

If you want to play games, there's really no reason not to.

quink• 14 years ago

I pirated Paradox's Europa Universalis II when I was a poor student. I later pirated the first version of Europa Universalis III and Victoria, both of which I didn't much enjoy at the time, because they sucked at the time from a technical/gameplay and gameplay perspective respectively.

Since then I purchased, because I initially pirated them, For The Glory (effectively an EU2 final edition) and EUIII Complete and its two expansion packs, including one for twenty dollars. I also purchased Victoria II.

DRM doesn't work, and because Paradox put all the effort that they'd put into DRM into their game engines instead, I'm buying their products and am utterly addicted to EU3 in particular.

For every seed and peer on BitTorrent of a Paradox game, I'm happy, because it means that the community will grow larger and that there will be more paying customers in the future. It helps that the parts of the forum with Technical Support, Patches and Mods are only available to registered customers :)

There's only a few things that bother me with Paradox, and they are that Victoria II is not much fun, because one has as much control over that game as a leaf in the wind, that EU3 needs another dozen expansion packs and that not everything is available for Steam on Mac when it should be...

If EU3 had three-time install only DRM, I'd have pirated it, and so would have most others. Instead, Paradox seems to be a publisher that loves its community, as the forums alone prove.

ericd• 14 years ago

Yeah, EU3: Complete is fantastic (I heard it was substantially worse before the In Nomine expansion). I really, really wish Steam would offer the other expansions currently available for the Mac, I'm always puzzled why they only have the PC version up when they have the Mac versions of some of the other expansions.

m_myers• 14 years ago

Indeed. We never seriously considered DRM as an option for For the Glory, nor will I again in the foreseeable future. If I would hate something as a gamer, it's a good bet I won't be doing it as a developer.

Paradox CEO Calls DRM a 'Waste of Money'

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