This is not a high minded speech about when piracy is or isn’t ethical. I’m not talking about a possible future either, this is a reality of today. Maybe you’ve heard, but Windows 7, 8 and 10 no longer support Safedisk or SecuRom because they’re not updated by the creators and pose a security risk, and while users can force it to run on window 7 and 8, 10 simply doesn’t run it. Good right? Well, reality is more complicated than that.
By removing support for the DRM they’ve also broken hundreds, or even thousands, of old PC games that relied on it to function, including digital versions on modern stores. While it is legal to circumvent DRM for games that haven’t had support for more than 6 months, companies aren’t required to remove it (and don’t necessarily operate anymore which means even if they were required to remove it there’s nobody there to do so) and actually downlaoding the game without said DRM is still illegal in most cases. As most people don’t have the time to learn how to code in a bunch of different game engines to remove the DRM themselves, Retro gaming on Windows 10 is a wasteland of unplayable games that consumers must pirate (drm free versions of) if they wish to play.
Just imagine if, 10 years from now, the only way to watch Star Wars VII or read Harry Potter was to steal it. If I’m being more dramatic, what if it’s impossible to watch The Godfather or Citizen Kane, impossible to read The Art of War or Othello? That’s basically the situation for gaming right now. Yes current hardware can still run older versions of windows in order to play said games, but not only should it not be necessary but it won’t necessarily stay possible forever. Not to mention that Microsoft doesn’t sell them anymore and so if you don’t already have them you’re still forced to pirate something to play it.
As DRM gets ever more complicated it takes longer and longer to crack. It is a simple matter to get almost any game with SafeDisk or SecuRom, even on release they weren’t very good at stopping anyone who knew what they were doing. That’s not the case anymore, as teams of dedicated hackers throw themselves at modern DRM for months at a time to get through it. We are potentially looking at a future where the level of skill/knowledge/computing power to break such DRM in a reasonable amount of time (as in less than several hundred years) simply isn’t there. What when Windows stops supporting the DRM in those games? If it’s online only DRM, what happens when the publisher stops supporting it? What happens if it’s simply not sold anywhere so you couldn’t buy it legally even if you wanted too?
This situation, with Windows 10 making old games unplayable, is a warning. It’s the tropical storm before a hurricane wipes out a city. Before you herald the piracy free future brought on by super complex DRM, consider what that actually means. A game that cannot ever be pirated is a game doomed to be completely lost to history when the DRM is no longer supported, condemning works in what is unquestionably the biggest new art form since Motion Pictures, to obscurity.
All things come to an end, one way or another support for such DRM will also end. Modern gaming and a large chunk of our cultural history shouldn’t die with it when that happens. Whatever you think or Piracy, DRM is not the answer, and we cannot afford to support it if we want our passion to get the respect and preservation it deserves. If you think otherwise, I hope you enjoy the Library of Alexandria before your blindness and corporate greed burn it down, and then the torch bearers try to sell you another one.
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10 responses to “The DRM Apocalypse”
And I am calling everybody a “he” again.
…I didn’t criticise the argument, I was very, very literally just talking about the sentence and its phrasing. Gee, y’all jumping to conclusions like Mario jumps between platforms.
She doesn’t see it as a leftist bent, more of a “lets not let some companies misguided fear of (mostly imaginary) lost sales destroy broad swaths of cultural history, along with any great works unfortunate enough to be produced by said companies” bent.
How hard would it really be to do as movie rental places and book stores and car dealerships and banks and furniture stores, ect. do and offer a rent to own service? How many people who would otherwise ignore it or pirate it would give it a shot when the price for entry is 5 dollars instead of 60?
Sony already has the infastructure for it with their streaming service, even allowing people to not have to download so trying it that way would be easier and quicker than pirating something. That they’ve chosen to price gouge at every opportunity instead of create a service that’s actually beneficial is kinda sad.
Steam could also do it pretty easily, though you’d still have to download the game atm. On the other hand, if you decided to pay full price and get the game there would be no waiting for it to download. It’s not like they couldn’t afford to get a streaming service set up if they wanted one either.
The way I see it, the only reason not to do it is because they’re so busy trying to scam people out of money with preorders for games that might not even be good that they don’t want to offer people a way to see that they don’t like it before putting up the full price.
Pirate is correct, even if you don’t like the leftist bent of his argument.
Videogames are one of the few remaining consumer products where the customer input has any effect on the resulting product. And even then its not to a large degree anymore.
Other companies just do the bare minimum in order to keep people buying their products, game software producers will be among them.
if you have problems taking the argument seriously based on it’s own merits instead of based on your bias about certain (accurate) terms, no matter how well explained they are, then I can’t help you.
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“Corporate greed” is an expression that never, ever fails to make me cringe. It’s so cliche and easily associated with the “special” part of left-wing that it’s pretty fricking hard to take people who use it seriously.
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…so?
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I agree with the first 2 and think the 3rd is racist and backwards.
The implications for the future of gaming are pretty dire, if it was just a 1 time thing and easy to get around it wouldn’t be worth complaining about. The point was, this is already happening and stands to get a whole lot worse. Because DRM doesn’t force anyone to buy anything. People who would have pirated it just won’t play it, or they’ll go play a friends copy, or they’ll account share with steam or gog, or they’ll spend 2 bucks at a redbox. Big companies don’t seem to get that though, they see all the pirated copies and falsely equate that to lost sales they feel they should be paid for. Hence DRM to lock it away from anyone who doesn’t pay for it.
If/when it actually is a lost sale I agree with them, they should be paid for their effort. But DRM doesn’t make that happen, and if/when it *does* make that happen you’re living in the future I described where the DRM company, publisher, or operating system dropping support makes 10 to 20 years of gaming history unplayable.
I think they should offer rent to own systems. You can rent the game (digitally) for an hour, or 2 hours, or 20 hours, or whatever, on a cost per hour basis. As you do so, they money you spend renting should be credited towards a full purchase, so if you decide to buy it you aren’t paying extra money.
I’d bet my left foot that access to a new game for 2 hours by spending 2 bucks instead of 60 would decrease piracy and get the publishers money out of customers who would normally not have bought it (either pirated it or passed on it all together.) It’s been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that companies can be wildly successful without DRM, so the reason they keep doing it is misguided greed, plain and simple.
Haha, yep. After I saw the garbage that was Windows 10, I moved on to Linux.
Superb article, well written and clearly delineates everything I hate about modern software companies.
The last sentence was too… lefty.
There’s honestly no better way to say it. It’s so left wing, it protests transgenders should have a legal right to cosmetic surgery. It’s so left wing, it supports Bernie Sanders. It’s so left wing, it thinks company should have a minimum amount of black employees.
BTW, jokes aside, you say at the beginning you say you aren’t talking about the future, but the present. And you do that. For the first half of the text.
The rest of the thing was really well written though, I hope you do this more!
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