Amen to that

D'oh, double post.

The sick twisted irony is that a game without copy protection is busting out record sales. It's doing awesome on the sales so far.

I venture to guess that games who use the atrocious new copy protections (like Starforce) are going to have bad numbers.

Yes Starforce definately alienates the informed. Some publishers currently won't use it due to it's bad stigma. Others fully embrace it and other drm simply because they believe it will protect their sales numbers for the first few weeks a game is out on the shelves and/or believe it will prevent the customer from installing on multiple machines in their home. The problem is that drm is about getting you to pay more. Its about trying to get more money out of the market. Its about greed. Its about business. Publishers never seriously consider that harsh drm and drm in general actually only encourages:
1. Flat out piracy. (Stardock has proven TWICE now that no drm actually lowers piracy and improves customer relations)
2. people to circumvent drm for compatibility issues
3. circumvent drm for freedom to install on another machine in their house
4. creates a culture where people feel drm circumvention and piracy is a legitimate practice to get what you paid for
5. Alienates more paying customers year after year as people become more educated on the matter.
6. creates a poorer economic situation by making customers more cautious before buying. So they don't get as many early buyers.
7. Wasted resources that could be spent on other things.
8. harms developers customer relations.
9. Allows publishers to potentially get more revenue from customers.
10. risking harm, hijacking, or controll on users systems all in the name of bringing in a few extra bucks.
11.. to many other things to take the time to list.

Drm is stupid but it will only be realized when it causes the industry to implode over some scandle. With the exception of some maverics out their most of the industry is poised to take even more drastic measures in the future. Ubisoft is in bed with starforce so I'm sure they will love the idea of rootkits in the future as well. It's not about making a product you can enjoy anymore its about making a product that will allow its creators/publishers to control your wallet.

When there's no copy protection to crack, major pirating groups will not make a release.
Ironic isn't it?
Games released recently that do use copy protection have been cracked and distrubuted within a day, GalCiv 2 took a week before there was a whiff of an illegal version floating around.

You know what also decreases piracy? Frequent game updates... Considering how often SD releases patches for the game, it'll be quite impossible for the crackers to keep up...

HoMM just lost another sale due to Starforce.
I quit playing AoWSM a few months ago due to not being able to find a no-CD for the last patch. Civ4 sealed it, as Aow:SM wasn't that good.

The thing is, I don't think DRM costs that many sales either way, it just drains profits that go to the DRM leeches instead of the company.

What's really going to kill the game industry someday is lack of originality- though the PC market won't be as affected due to the abundance of indy developers, it's the PS4/Xbox3 that will suffer.

For me, it's about the sheer ethics of DRM.

Honestly, how many people will really turn down buying a game due to DRM? The same number of people who wouldn't buy DVD's because of the useless region number restriction: very few.

The RIAA has visciously abused the fact that, like games, each title is uniquely valuable. For most corporations, if a DRM solution has no impact on sales and has an impact on piracy, then that's all execs need to hear. The margin gets bigger. This is despite the fact that the DRM solution might be 300% more difficult for end-users and 2% more difficult for hackers and illegal distributors. It's an unethical decision based on numbers that are not concrete.

Back to the ethics of the situation, here is what I find to be etically wrong with current DRM (Included what's been around since before DRM was coined):

1) DRM assumes the customer to be a criminal.
2) Companies that implement DRM don't care how difficult they make the end-user experience, because it doesn't affect thier bottom-line.

There are four audiences to consider when speaking of DRM: the person selling games out of the back of his truck, Peer to Peer file sharing, a single person installing the game on all of his friend's computers, and the honest user. The first two are unavoidable: I don't care how good your DRM is. The third one can be addressed by non-intrusive DRM, such as CD-Key registration.

CG2 will be assimilated into the P2P networks the same way every other game is. DRM only defines how much time it will take before it gets there. Ultimately DRM won't start hurting the bottom line until it starts to violate privacy, which is the direction I see it going (and something Sony has dabbled in). Until then, there's no reason people like EA sports and will stop using intrusive DRM, and we just have to applaud our champions, like Stardock.

Thanks for understanding stardock