Five Minute Rant: DRM

DRM has come up in the news yet again, so this is my next five minute rant topic.

There’ll be less obvious ones, I promise. But until then, I’ll fire at the easy targets. The rules are, as before, five minutes of typing. I can only remove, re-word, fix typos, and add links.

DRM is an absolute joke. Digital Rights Management is software that is supposed to help stop piracy while allowing the end-user to have an easy ride on using the product. it was originally used on music, mostly through iTunes and other stores, but the iTunes application itself had a way around it that could be used quite easily. Hell, someone developed a specific application to work around it. The music industry has since wised up and allowed most music to be without DRM. They seem to have realised that some people just aren’t going to buy music; they are going to find it illegally and they are not going to be convinced otherwise.

But the game industry, despite being so much more recent in it’s inception, have still not wised up to the idea at all. They are using what some would call draconic DRM to get the job done. Ubisoft have started to use something that I see as a direct affront to our rights to use our product as we see fit. They’ve put a line of code into their games which forces the user to stayed connected to the internet at all times while they are playing the game. It’s a freaking joke, and I’m sure it started out as an april fools joke before becoming real. Apparently, “The system is made by guys who love PC games. They play PC games. They are your friends”, but I don’t buy that for a moment. What’s worse is that some other games from companies like electronic arts are going to be implementing the same method, and it’s just going to make people pirate the games even more.

Remember Spore, and it’s limited installation count? That was pirated like crazy because people didn’t want to have to put up with jumping through all the hoops that the company had put in place. Most games went back to a disc key at this point, and rightly so. Ubisoft have an excuse for it being their first time, but EA have tried this before and failed. Why do they think that the outcome will be any different this time?

DRM is wrong, and does nothing but hinder the consumer while the pirate downloads a ‘clean’ copy, free of protection and any method of checking. This is wrong, without a doubt, and until the game companies realise that and follow principles set out by companies like good old games, then the DRM nightmare will continue for consumers, while pirates continue to get the good stuff, and the games industry will be sent into the ground.