EA To Use Controversial Internet-Required DRM On New Games (Phones Home Every 10 days) | Hacker News Reader

EA To Use Controversial Internet-Required DRM On New Games (Phones Home Every 10 days)

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10 pointschaostheory13 comments

Time to play devil's advocate: can you blame them? On paper, Crysis was a near flop, but when it comes to actual installs it's close to the game of the year!

Crysis has been on Pirates Bay since last November and still has over 600 seeders. For most of Dec and Jan it was the top game! (http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3883491/Crysis-Razor1911) The stats were impressive enough to drive Crytek towards console development.

PC gaming is a tricky business. The counter-argument going around today is that MMO's are a billion+ business. Granted, but they phone home every time you sign on.

They are free to make any choices they want, and in return I'm free to stop buying from them.

It's pretty safe to assume that any good game will be cracked whatever they do. They might manage to make it so that only one twisted genius can figure it out - but one is all it takes. Once the crack is on bit torrent every one else only needs moderate intelligence to use it.

At that point the free version is superior to the version you can buy, not just because of the price but because you don't have to deal with the DRM system. Not a good way to encourage people to pay up. I'm generally against piracy but I have sympathy with people who just want their game to work without the CD or when they are away from the internet for a while.

Mind you I was never likely to buy their game in the first place - the last game I played was NWN and I only bought that because I wanted to support Linux game developers.

I wonder how many of the downloaders were simply kicking the tires to see how well it would run on their paltry 2007 vintage hardware.

Seriously though, to play god's advocate: check out this article from the CEO of Stardock games: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080320-pc-game-develo... (Ignore the Pirates)

Back to devil's advocate: Stardock has a good reputation among gamers for being a scrappy independent publisher, so they get some respect from would-be pirates. I don't know that a faceless megacorp like EA could play the same hand.

This just in: EA dropping dial-a-DRM.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/05/09/update-mass-effect-for-...

On paper, Crysis was a near flop, but when it comes to actual installs it's close to the game of the year!

When did selling over a million copies of a game in the PC market make it a "flop"? I'm not saying piracy didn't reduce sales, I'm just not sure why people see a million copies being sold and infer that those are low numbers being greatly reduced by piracy.

Let me correct myself: it wasn't a flop. But it certainly followed an unorthodox path, bombing for the first few weeks then picking up in the coming months (absolutely absurd for a PC game).

Interestingly, this supports the "kicking the tires hypothesis" above. But I'd venture it more supports an influencer model: hard core gamers were the only consistently aware group, and their piracy adoption probably exposed those on the edge to a game that practically sells itself once you get in front of it.

But it certainly followed an unorthodox path, bombing for the first few weeks then picking up in the coming months (absolutely absurd for a PC game).

This may be related to Crysis' significant system requirements, too. People may have put off upgrading their systems until they heard whether or not it was a good game or how well it would run on specific hardware.

(Given that users can "kick the tires" just as well with the Crysis downloadable demo, I suspect that wasn't the motivation for most of the game's piracy.)

DRM and other crap is already common in gaming.

For instance, Valve's Steam service is quite successful (it has major titles like Team Fortress 2, the Half-Life franchise, Call of Duty 4, etc.) and won't let you run any games without phoning home to it (and running a packet sniffer shows that it's sending some kind of packets home once every 15-45 seconds). You can't even play single-player gamers without it connecting over the Internet.

Also, the Need for Speed games have advertisements in them, when you've already bought the game. Like, you crash into an SUV and you see a big car insurance company logo on the side, and every time you get a call on your phone from one of the NPCs, you see a Verizon logo. If that isn't enough ammo to help people rationalize copyright infringement I don't know what is.

DRM is common, and it never works. Valve's single player games are as easy to pirate as anything else. Has there ever been a single player game where DRM succeeded?

It is possible to prove, mathematically, that DRM cannot work when an attacker has physical possession of the machine. It is simply impossible - unless the CPU can execute encrypted code where the decryption key is a galactic secret and cannot be found using an electron microscope.

When the code executes on a remote server, however, you have a completely different kettle of fish.

Stop giving them ideas.

The game companies know that DRM doesn't work in the long term. But they believe it can work in the short term. Many games make the bulk of their money in a few weeks or months. To be effective, DRM only needs to keep the hackers busy for this period -- or so says the advertising of the DRM creators.

After this period, however, the DRM serves no purpose other than to frustrate legitimate buyers. Ideally, the game creators would disable the DRM after it has served its purpose, thereby eliminating problems for their customers as well as freeing up server resources and support call costs. Unfortunately, there are few companies willing to do this.

Given this theory, a recent example makes even less sense: I bought Company of Heroes shortly after it was released, and it had no copy protection other than a serial key for playing online.

The expansion pack added a phone-home "feature" or alternatively DVD checks with a message box you had to click away every time you start a game or return to the menu. (if you don't have an internet connection or block its attempts to connect)

A recent patch has made this even more annoying by alternating which disc it wants and under certain circumstances appears to completely stop working if it can't phone home. Great when their servers go down.

Ugh. I'm sorry, that kind of user experience just doesn't cut it.

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