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Ten Most Annoying DRM Methods
By Joe Keiser
October 1, 2008
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The people caught in the middle—the gamers who are forced to jump through activation hoops and endure limited usage licenses—are made to feel like they are being punished for the virtue of not being a thief.
Digital rights management is the bogeyman of PC gaming. Most publishers demand it to help stave off piracy, yet the pirates seem to hack through it as effortlessly as if it was not there at all. Meanwhile, the people caught in the middle—the gamers who are forced to jump through activation hoops and endure limited usage licenses—are made to feel like they are being punished for the virtue of not being a thief.
Anyone who’s purchased a PC game at any time has experienced the frustration that comes with proving your innocence. But these ten DRM measures could very well be the worst of them.
10. Lenslok
In the days before digital products could also be digitally protected, copy protection was handled by analog technology. More of a precursor to DRM in the strictest sense, these star maps and decoder discs attempted to make the authentication process fun (and immediately rendered the game unusable once the necessary doohickey was lost or stolen by a pirating schoolmate). Lenslok was one that didn’t have to get lost to get under the skin. A foldout series of prisms, Lenslok was designed to be held against a computer screen to unscramble a bit of text. But this text had to fit inside the eye of the Lenslok, which meant each game of Elite was started with a lengthy graphics calibration process that wouldn’t even work if used on a large enough TV. That such a problem seems quaint today is a testament to the gauntlet of modern DRM troubles.
9. Manual-Based Protection
Again this isn’t strictly DRM, but no conversation of gaming copy protection history would be complete reminiscing on the days when it was all about the manual. Any older PC gamer will remember when they had to whip out the documentation every few hours just to get the game to trust them again, and most recall being thwarted by Leisure Suit Larry’s infamous trivia-based age check (an even more difficult task now as the questions were designed for today’s fifty year-olds). Not as annoying as Lenslok, manual-based protection was however significantly more pervasive. There’s no telling how many gaming man-hours were taken from players who had lost their manuals and were instead relegated to guessing the name of the mustachioed man on page 14.
8. Earthbound
Consoles are walled gardens by nature, with the DRM built in so deeply that most gamers don’t even think about it. But that doesn’t mean tactics to prevent copying don’t exist on console—such strategies have existed forever, and some of them were actually downright brilliant. Perhaps the most prominent example of cartridge-based DRM was in the SNES classic Earthbound. Those that had Super Nintendo disc copiers would find that their illegal copy of Earthbound seemed to play fine. What they didn’t know was that the game was spawning way more enemies than normal, making the entire game an endless annoyance. And to those intrepid pirates who slogged their way through anyway, Earthbound had a special treat for them—the game would freeze in the middle of the battle with the final boss, taking the time to instead delete whatever saved games it could find.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with letting someone borrow a game, any more than letting someone borrow a book or a movie (or a cup of sugar).
You just aren't allowed to play it while they have it, and they aren't allowed to play it when they give it back.
Peggle does indeed run in offline mode on Steam, both on my desktop and my laptop. I suspect the reason Belcaw ran into problems is that he played his copy on a different machine previously. The way Steam's offline mode works is simple. Playing the game on a machine while online (you have to be online to download it in the first place) authenticates it for that machine. You can then play the came in offline mode indefinately until you login to your Steam account and play the game on a different machine. Only the most recent machine the game was played on is authenticated for offline mode play. This is actually a rather elegent, and usually invisible precaution. I still prefer Stardock's stance on DRM, but Steam has the only DRM that doesn't piss me off. Period.
I may be too young, or just a console gamer, but what exactly is StarForce? Is this a relatively new thing?
it's a DRM from a few years ago. Splinter Cell - Chaos Theory used it, for example. It would require the disc to be in the drive, and basically seize the computer hostage and make sure nothing fishy was running. As the article says, it would create virtual drives and be near-impossible to remove, and was generally an all-around invasive program. I'm not aware of any titles that use it in the past year, SecuROM seems to be the way to go instead.
I wonder if Starforce has since gone the way of the dodo...
Steam adds value, as far as I can tell, because Valve has unparalleled support for its products; seamlessy adding updates, new content and features to your product. You get bang for your buck, which is why I will always buy a Valve produc. (take TF2 -- the game is more than twice as big since its release a year ago). I also sorely regret buying the hard copy of HL2 -- I don't even know where the disc is anymore. I never needed it! Not to mention the digital version was a better bargain.
For legit gamers, its' win-win as far as I can tell.
SecuROM, though, that I don't get. It's the same story everytime a game comes out -- people complain, and the protection is relaxed. In the meantime, pirates are unphased with their always-working, never-limited cracks (cracks that, really, legit consumers may as well download to get around the nuisance of SecuROM). DRM really is a failure in this case.
I totally agree that Steam adds value, but that's the service, not the DRM. Those two can be disconnected. For example, Microsoft had Windows Update without validation for the first eight years of its life. That added value with no DRM.
Oh lord.
I remember the days of SSI's Dungeons & Dragons decoder discs. You'd have like five decoder discs in a pile, and then they'd start falling apart and you couldn't remember which top went with which bottom.
Aside from the par-for-the-course instruction manual info, DRM from the game The Colonel's Bequest sticks in my mind, where you had to use a magnifying glass with a piece of clear, red plastic to see fingerprints on a plastic sheet, then match them up on screen. There were three fingerprints that looked very much alike and I was always screwing it up.
And the strategy of fade and Earthbound just seems, on its face, retarded. If the people aren't aware of the piracy protection, they're going to tell everyone they know how terrible the game is, and be right in saying so. And any chance you had of the pirate buying the real game is huzzed out the window because they think it's broken.
And Steam is a good example of what poor consumers in the Video/Music on Demand world have been dealing with for years. When you buy music that requires communication with a DRM server, you're screwed. Wal*Mart, Yahoo!, Microsoft, they have all screwed consumers, who bought legitimate music from them, when they shut down the DRM system.
Good ol' Lenslok... It stopped me playing my own game—Cascade Games' 1986 flight simulator, ACE.
I still have that goddamn piece of useless Lenslok plastic for some reason; maybe to remind me how bad copy protection can be to legitimate consumers.
How exactly does Steam add value to the product? If anything, it cripples the customer's ability to sell the game later on. Even lending a Steam game to a friend has its fair share of issues.
Which is exactly why DRM exists. Not to stop the organized piracy or commercial bootleggers. DRM stops normal people from reselling a game or lending it to a friend. Limited activations are not an issue when you initially buy the game, but when a friend ask you if he can have it for a week.
DRM does not add to the game, it takes from it, in an effort based on the belief that a friend not able to lend the game is a friend buying the game. I said it before, DRM methods working on the internet should not be used to overly protect the original copy. Those DRM methods should be used to bring friends into the game for a limited amount of time. If a group of pals has fun together in the game at the same time they might see the reason to own more than one copy in their group. DRM added value by providing that ability without the developers having to create a dedicated demo version.
I am not a fan of DRM at all, but I think anyone with half a brain would not think anything tied to a gameplay account would be resalable. Much like your WoW or EQ, if you want to sell the game, you have to sell your whole account.
Speaking of which, isn't that pretty much the ultimate DRM? Subscription based gaming. Steam is basically free subscription based gaming as far as I am concerned.
Brian
www.brianwoods.com
I completely agree. By preventing me from being able to share my game with friends and family, they are actually hurting their sales because now there is a whole group of people who can no longer get a short taste for a game unless they come over to my house and dedicate some time. And that's not going to happen because when I have friends and family over, we're doing other things and talking about games and such. If I can't let them borrow the game, they'll never take the next step to purchasing. And no, I will not share my login even with family or friends.
And Steam just ticks me off. I've tried it a couple times because they had a special price on something I was going to buy anyway. Not only do I no longer play those games I purchased; but I've vowed to never use their service again. What kind of BS is it that I buy an offline single player game (Peggle) to use on my laptop while on the train and road trips only to be refused the ability to play it because I'm not online? I don't want to be tethered to the internet in order to play my single player games. I like to bring games on camp trips and travel a lot to places that I have no ability to connect to the internet; but with Steam, I'm locked out. They screwed me and now I tell everyone exactly what my experience was and recommend they get their game from the store instead.
Not that I particularly like Steam, but technically you're not supposed to loan your games to your friends. So Valve is probably happy that your friends can't borrow your games. If they're actually concerned that this hurts their sales, they'd release demos.
By the way, you can play most Steam games offline. I'd be amazed if Peggle is an exception.
Can Steam not be launched in an offline mode?
Mostly, I agree.
How does Steam's DRM add value? I've only every been annoyed by it.