Software DRM and its ability to drive customers away

PC games, since the dawn of time, have been pirated. This is obviously not a good thing, so several approaches to securing games have been made. It started with floppy disks which couldn't be copied through standard means, moved on to CD keys, Authorising CD keys, Requiring the CD to play, Requiring BOTH CD key and the CD to play all the way to the now dizzying heights of Requiring the Media, Media Key, Internet Authorisation, Limited Installs, Regular "CallBacks" to reauthorise and the ability to remotely disable your game should any of this go wrong.

Now, again, I do not pirate games, or copy or in any other way break copyright law when it comes to them (unlike music, which I've already explained). I've heard all the arguments for such restrictive DRM and most of them boil down to "If you've got nothing to hide, then what's the issue?" The issue I'm afraid is several.

I don't have an issue with requiring a CD key to play, and maybe even limiting that CD key to one "online" at any time. By online, I literally mean online - actually playing the game in online mode not just being connected to the net. My issues start with the more complex forms of DRM, as I see this as treating me more and more like the criminal whereas I'm actually the poor sap who spent £49 on the game.

Requiring the actual media to be in the drive so that I can play the game. Now this may not seem like a major issue, and for many casual gamers it never will be. But I'm no casual gamer. My games catalogue easily breaks into the hundreds, and that's before you count downloads. Now hundreds of DVD's and CD's take up quite a lot of room, in fact, there is no way for me to keep that many games within reaching distance of my PC. Instead, as with many who share my addiction, I store my boxed copies of games in an upstairs room along with my books and other collections. This means that if I want to play a game which is protected by "media present" type DRM, I literally have to move - and walk (!) - to get the media before I can play. This may sound a bit sarcastic, but really it isn't. If I have to invest 10Gb of my hard-drive to a game, only to have to insert the CD to play (so that it can read a small >1MB file) I'm going to be annoyed, so much so that I simply wont play that game. Now I know me not playing a game doesn't hurt anyone - but it would make me think twice about buying from that publisher in the future. Put it like this, I may just want a quick 10 minute frag fest, I don't want to spend half my time looking for the CD first. It really goes wrong though the day you scratch a 10 year old game disc, which is required to boot the game, what are you meant to do then?

My main gripe though is with more modern type DRM. Physical DRM has its pitfalls, but more recent Digital DRM is in a league to its self. Needing to authorise your key on the internet is all fine and good, and in my mind not a bad DRM, but let's look at the 10 year old game example again. What if I want to install and play this on a second PC 10 years after purchase. What are the actual chances of the authorisation servers still being live? After what happened with Plays For Sure, what's the chances any game over 5 years old still has working authorisation servers? And if they are offline, what do I do, I've purchased a game for near on £40 (10 years ago) and now can't play it - surely this just means that I've rented the game, and that's not the deal I signed up for. Sure, BigFatGamesCo may have released a patch to allow me to play authorisation free, but if they don't care enough to keep the servers up - who's to say they will.

Limited installs also annoy the hell out of me. I have 2 main computers, an XPS M1710 gaming laptop for work and a self built games monster at home. I like to have my games installed on both, it's easier to play on the monster - unless I'm out of the country in which case the laptop is just fine. Most limited licenses allow you to install like this so you'd think that I'm OK. Well, not so. What if I rebuild my monster machine once a year, which is probably accurate. I like to keep all my hardware cutting edge, and a lot of the time I change so much hardware that I need to reauthorise windows (which isn't as much of a pain here as in the US). Problem I have now though is that I have a new Windows Key, and significantly different hardware so my games see the machine as another - a third install. Again, this is within usual limits - but when I hit fourth install the problems start. Because I like to keep up to date with my hardware, much to my wife's dismay I must add, my games stop working. And getting new authorisation keys is a lot harder than it is with windows, because after 2 or 3 years most games become unsupported and I'm sorry buddy, but you just aint playing.

Regular Callbacks, 4 words, month long business trips. I'm a pirate because I go away on business. That's just wrong.

Remotely disabling my game if something goes wrong. Sounds fair enough, but (and this isn't my idea, the guys from PCGamer podcast get credit here) what happens if I'm playing all nice and legal, CD in the drive, CD Key registered, Callbacks all made nice and ontime, and BOOM some bastard uses a keygen and luckily (for them) comes up with my key. Suddenly I'm a pirate because my Key was guessed? Don't think so, and also just because it is unlikely doesn't mean it wont happen - and with some of the newer DRM companies logging all bans, you could find yourself banned from all their protected games.

So what's the solution? Just now the best thing to do is just Download all your games, and use a decent service to do it with - or at least a DRM decent service.

Steam is pretty good, it does use DRM, but in a more responsible manner. Sure you need to register with their service, and the games like to call home every now and then, but if you set yourself up for offline play you can literally go off on business for a month and not ever be pestered - I've done it, so know.
Direct2Drive, now again it needs an initial activation and can only be activated on one machine at a time, but from what I can tell (having only used the US version, and even then not recently) it's a one time thing and doesn't need a net connection for every time you play.

The long and the short is don't treat all your PC customers as pirates, because we aren't. Treating us as so will just piss us off and send us to consoles, or bittorrent. Neither of which we'd really like to do. Just keep your DRM as inobtrusive as possible and we wont cry too loudly.

Oh, and that EA/Spore news, they've decided to relax the callbacks and requirments after looking at it closer, nothing to do with that 115 page thread complaining (honest!)

Just to explain a little this post is from my personal site and is an edited (to make sense without referencing myself too much) continuation of a theme I'm running on DRM. I have to apologise also for the complete lack of imagery, but as I totally suck at created pic's and a google search found me no sexy way to illustrate DRM and not go all goatse I thought it best to post naked.