What do all of you/us think of DRM in games?

   DRM stands for Digital Rights Management, and is a way for game publishers to control, notionally anyway, what happens to their creation and to fight piracy. For example, EAGames released a game called ‘Spore’ last month, and users were limited to being able to install the game only 5 times. Ever. If they had a hard drive failure, or had to reformat, or some other catastrophe more than 5 times, then their limit would be reached, and then would have to call EA tech support and plead their case to get the game reactivated.

   Nominally these draconian measures are put in place to stop, or impede, piracy of intellectual property. This is supposed to make it more difficult for people to illegally download the game off of a program like BitTorrent. In reality, the DRM gets cracked either before the actual release of the game, or immediately after. Therefore, the DRM is rendered useless, except for those who decide to follow it.

   Ultimately, the ones who get hosed on this deal are the gamers, like me, who pay good money to be able to play the games. There are games that I have that are 10+ years old that I still play (Dune2). If, in 10 years I want to play my copy of Command & Conquer 3 and I have passed my 3-install limit, and EA is no longer around, what do I do? Maybe EA will still be around, but game developers change on a seemingly constant basis. What happens to the people who paid money to get the game?

   I don’t support illegal downloads. I don’t participate in it. Don’t break the law.

   In this instance, however, I believe I will buy whatever copy of a game that I want, like ‘Spore’, and then download a non-DRM copy to install and then play. Then I am legally playing my game, and can bypass their ineffective and useless DRM. Then I win, and so does the publisher.

   While you may not agree with me, I’d like to know what those of you who read this blog think of DRM and its application.