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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Considering it rarely takes a week for a popular games DRM to be broken the window between copy protection and the lack there of does not necessarily mean much. What many people forget is there will always be leechers out there but there are also people who will make the moral choice and buy the content.

PS: I will torrent a show I my DVR fills up or something. But, I don't cancel cable and download everything and I still pay to see movies in the theater. Why? Because there is no penalty for downloading it just becomes a moral choice and that's where I draw the line.

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> Considering it rarely takes a week for a popular games DRM to be broken the window between copy protection and the lack there of does not necessarily mean much.

It means a lot because the majority of a game's total sales will be in the first 3 weeks. After one month, you're more or less done. Very few games have any sort of tail, let alone a long one. [EDIT: I'm speaking in general for high-profile retail games]

Assuming that even a small percentage (say 1%) of pirates will try piracy first but will resort to paying if the piracy option fails, then having DRM that is unbroken for the first week could mean the difference of $millions in revenue.

Based on my understanding of the market from friends who work in this space, this is exactly correct.

I can point to games that I did not buy specifically because they had horrible DRM. Most notably Crisis 2 and Spore which I had reordered and then canceled after I read how bad the DRM was. Granted the fact they both got many poor reviews also helped that decision. But, DRM costs company's significant amounts of money to deploy and also costs them sales.

Now done well or even just unobtrusively DRM clearly can work, most notably with consoles, phones, and Steam. My point is simply buying 48, hours which is considered a success in many DRM circles, does not mean you actually benefit monetarily you need to look beyond time to crack in expectations that it will be cracked and how enticing you can make the guided cage. It's possible to make always on DRM orders of magnitude harder to crack but doing so will cost you many upfront sales some of whom will wait for that first crack unless being online is already inherent to game play.

> But, DRM costs company's significant amounts of money to deploy and also costs them sales.

Not necessarily true on either count.

Equating the downloading of a file with "morals" is silly.

Morals aren’t just for when you decide that killing people is a bad idea.

I think it’s morally right to not jaywalk when there are children around. That’s even less harmless than downloading files, but it’s still a moral question.

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