Mass Effect DRM Gives Pirates a Big Boost
Posted May 8, 2008, 4:25 PM ET
The war between the suits and the pirates has waged on for decades, with the honest customers always caught in the crossfire. The latest assault from EA's camp, however, could very well obliterate what little is left of its supporters, however. Bound together with the PC version of Mass Effect, last years Xbox 360 hit RPG, is the newest version of the SecuROM copy-protection software. This program forces the user to connect to the internet and authenticate the game before playing and again every 10 days. No internet? No game! On vacation for two weeks? No game!
Want to pirate it anyways? No problem! Pirates, who have handily dismantled every version of SecuROM produced, will no doubt strike once again and cleanse Mas Effect of the taint of DRM.
These forms of DRM are often very detrimental to the game itself. Consider the recently release PC port of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed, which attempts to continually dial-home to authenticate while the user plays the game. The result of constant checking was significant lag while playing the game. The pirated version, on the other hand, doesn't dial home at all, and runs smoothly.
Many forum posters have already posted their outrage at this development, many stating outright that they refuse to buy a game with this sort of DRM on it and would rather pirate it.
The irony is that the big companies are claiming that they are losing more and more PC game sales to piracy, and use this metric to justify putting in harsher and harsher DRM into their games. This, in turn, causes more users to turn to piracy to get software that isn't plagued with hindering DRM. The big companies seem to be shooting themselves in the foot. Or the head, really.
On the other hand, there are some smart PC game companies still out there. Stardock takes the opposite approach: they put no DRM at all in their games. The result? Record high sales as gamers happily buy games that don't try to penalize the legit purchasers.
So why does EA still back SecuROM?
The biggest problem with the companies still putting DRM into their games is that they are stuck in the early '90s with the notion of "copy-protection" and somehow equate "piracy" with "copying" games. I'm sure that programs like SecuROM effectively prevent users from simply copying a CD or DVD and handing the game to their friend or selling it on the street. But actually copying the disk died out well over a decade ago. Now, PC piracy involves downloading the game from bittorent or some other source. Because of a central source (the internet) instead of a distributed source (your friend's copy), it's much easier to alter the code of the game being distributed. Thus, piracy groups often compete to be the first to "crack" a game and release it: the result is that everyone pirating the game pirates their version. Any code added to the game to stop it from being copied is efficiently and effectively stripped away and no one downloading the game has to bother with it.
Because of the central distribution of pirated goods provided by the internet, it is a plain and simple fact that no copy-protection method can work. So why do companies still bother with it? Honestly, I don't know.
I don't think they have any idea why they are either.
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