DRM = Dumb, Rude, and Mean

Posted by Stropp on September 15, 2008

Some of you might be old enough to remember back to the 80’s when computer games weren’t released on massively spacious DVDs, but came on one or more 1.4MB floppy disks. In fact the first FPS I ever played, System Shock, came on twelve (iirc) floppies. I might even still have them somewhere.

At the time, piracy was as much a problem as it was today. It was pretty easy to copy a floppy since everyone had a floppy drive. Games were routinely uploaded to bulletin board systems (BBS) for anyone with an account to download and play.

So the game publishers decided to put in some of the very early DRM features. When the game booted up, it asked a question that could only be answered by using the manual. What’s the third word in the second paragraph on the fifth page? That sort of thing.

It was fairly inconvenient. Even more so if you had lost the manual.

When pirates started photocopying and distributing manuals, the questions asked were about colors in the manual. Nice if you were colorblind.

In the end, most publishers ended up dropping these sorts of schemes because they hurt the customer more than they solved the problem. (Uncopyable — at the time — CDROMs also helped a bit.)

Jump forward to a few days ago.

EA release Spore with a DRM that only allows players to install the game three times, and despite what is actually written in the manual, only allows players to make one account per purchased copy.

So to game publishers, I’m looking at you EA, here’s a possible new meaning for the DRM acronym.

• Dumb because it doesn’t work. Sure a little copy protection will prevent a customer from innocently breaking copyright. But the level of DRM in modern games is akin to forcing your wife or daughter to wear a chastity belt when they are just going down to the corner store to buy milk, it has no point. And besides if your spousal unit were going to play up, they’d find a way out of the thing. That’s exactly what happens with DRM. The real pirates break it in a minute. Your customers are left suffering the inconvenience.
• Rude because you are accusing your customers of being thieves. There’s no other way to say this. Your paying customers are not stealing your games even if they are installing on multiple computers. They are not stealing your games if they are allowing their significant other, or brother, or child to create a separate account. They are not stealing your game anymore than letting a family member borrow a book is stealing.
• Mean because you are showing that you could care less about your customers. You don’t care about ruining the game experience, or even about just taking their cash and leaving them in the lurch. This Securom, as I understand it, is about as close to being a rootkit as can be without actually being one. So yeah, take the cash, make life difficult, and while we’re at it potentially compromise your customers computers.

The ironic thing is that EA might have actually shot themselves in the foot over the Spore DRM. Over at Amazon the majority of reviews (2133/2369) for Spore are rated 1 out of 5. This isn’t because the game is bad, on the contrary I’ve heard only good things about Spore. Most of the reviews are citing the DRM as the reason, saying that they’ve been burned by draconian DRM before, and won’t be again.

Is this the start of a consumer backlash against draconian DRM schemes?

I hope so. Abusing legitimate customers didn’t work in the eighties. It isn’t going to work now. At some point, they just won’t take the abuse anymore.

The crazy thing is that EA have probably lost more Amazon sales because of this than they have lost sales due to piracy. Dumb.

Will Wright would have to be really pissed at what EA has done to his game.

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