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by Paul_S 3813 days ago
Great read and hopefully a lesson: you can spend time and money and annoy your customers to no end to provide entertainment and a challenge to young programmers or you could save yourself all the hassle and make lots of money by being smart like the good people at GoG and treating your customers better than the pirates.
1 comments
lfowles 3813 days ago
Implying current titles using DRM don't make lots of money? :P If that was the case, then the business case for not implementing would be unignorably strong!
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Paul_S 3813 days ago
Ah, but would they make more money if they didn't have to spend money on DRM? It costs to implement or license. It creates extra work even if you license it. If your DRM causes damage you might get sued. If you're found out that you're installing malware/rootkit you will suffer bad publicity. You have to pay money to upkeep the DRM servers. You have to pay support people to handle calls when DRM causes problems for your customers. Anyone who paid money will have to deal with all these issues knowing that people who downloaded it from pirate bay don't have to. I remember when Morrowind came out and if you downloaded the cracked executable you'd get a few extra FPS because it lacked DRM.
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lfowles 3813 days ago
If everything else was equal, then yes, they would save money by not implementing DRM. However, what if they couldn't get the license for $MOVIE_CONTENT or $PHYSICS_ENGINE without implementing DRM? That's also extra work for them. (I pulled that hypothetical more from a recent Netflix article, so it may not apply equally as well to gaming.)

As it is now, AAA titles with AAA amounts of DRM are still doing incredibly well. It might "cost" more in internal management backlash to suggest not implementing DRM than to keep to a tried and true formula. Internet backlash is more visible than ever, but I can't think of a recent case where a title actually suffered significantly from it (exception being the PC port of Arkham Knight). It's like a form of the 90:9:1 rule, 90% of consumers are perfectly happy with their entertainment, 9% are affected by issues, 1% complain loudly. From an internet perspective, the 1% are heard more strongly. From a business perspective, the 90% are heard more strongly.

</disjointed thoughts>

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