[shmerl]

I never really understood why publishers are supposed to be brain dead to use DRM, while independent studios are supposed to be smart not to use it.

[unsignedint]

I think it's not necessary because "one is smart and other is not."

Here are some of my thoughts on this:

1) It's probably not a decision of people who understands deep understanding of technology and implication in bigger publisher. It could be some "suit" type of people who don't even know how DRM works, or their legal department.

2) Publishers can actually afford DRM -- I will be honest that I don't know how much DRM solutions actually cost, but activation servers won't run for free. Simply, a lot of independent studios don't have enough resources to maintain DRMs. DRMs would probably increase support case as well (there will be more support inquiries coming in; people will be running out of activation count, or their computer can't talk to activation server) which a lot of smaller studios just don't want to deal with.

[Skoofoo]

It often does more to inconvenience customers than stop pirates.

[shmerl]

Not often - practically always.

[lmm]

Big-name games always get cracked and pirated, DRM or no. Indie not so much.

[shmerl]

So, it means DRM has no relevance anyway. Then why is it used?

[lmm]

By the big publishers? Conservative, herd mentality, existing publishing agreements, misaligned incentives between publishers and distributors.

By indies? I didn't think any of them bothered, but apparently some do?

[shmerl]

I was mostly asking about big publishers. For me it looks like big equals to having no common or even business sense in this case. Which is weird.

[lmm]

Keynes' comment about bankers applies. There's very little incentive for the people who run these big publishers to take risks.

[shmerl]

But this is not about risks. It's about not being dumb punishing their own paying users with DRM which has zero effect on piracy. May be most DRM is driven by side ulterior motives which have nothing to do with piracy.