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Comment by henning | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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