Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been a vein of contention for many years now.  Apple for instance has recently bowed to public pressure and removed all DRM from its downloaded tracks.  Sony recently reviewed it’s DRM policy after receiving a huge amount of negative publicity when it released a new audio CD DRM system that covertly installed itself on your computer, then opened it up for any hacker with half a brain.

But this post is not about CD DRM nor MP3 DRM.  It is about PC Games and Their Digital Rights Management Systems and WHY they are wrong.

Yesterday for instance I felt aq little nostalgic and went to play Rise of Legends.  I inserted the CD, pressed play and for my troubles was greeted with… nothing.

Three hours of browing support forums later I found that there was a fairly simple solution to my problem.  I merely had to reinstall windows and refrain from using any anti-virus software.  And the worst part is that the error I received was not caused by any part of the game itself, merely by its anti piracy measures.

And I am not the only person suffering, nor am is it the only game causing problems.  A Huge amount of Microsoft and Electronic Arts (EA) have become so obsessed with combating piracy that they are causing serious problems for gamers, causing a huge amount of them to boycott The games made by these manufacturers (I too am boycotting them, especially when they announced that two of EAs latest games would require you to insert the DVD every ten days and do an online authorisation or your account would be disabled, the fact they have even considered this is enough to make me stop buying their products)

So why do computer game manufacturers use these methods?

They think they are combating piracy.

To any computer games manufacturer out there let me point out several things.

Firstly, Anti-Piracy measures, inconvenience and annoy your regular gamer, in fact your CUSTOMER who you should be trying to please.

Secondly, Despite all your claims anti piracy measures are cracked within days of game release, so those that you are trying to prevent are actually suffering from less inconvenience than your customers.

Thirdly, As much as you like to, including money spent on DRM (USually tens of millions) should not be counted in the lost profits due to piracy scenarios.

Let me sum it up for you guys, more people are being driven to piracy by your measures than are drawn to it.  Hell the only way to get your games working sometimes is to download NO CD cracks, and once someone is introduced to this then downloading games is only a stones throw away.

Online Authorization for games is a mere inconvenience to gamers and easily circumnavigated by crackers.  It was something first used wide scale by Microsoft and was touted as making Windows XP uncrackable.  I think we all know how that turned out for them, Cracked before release i think the headlines stated.  Genius.

So what is my point?

I think DRM and anti piracy measures should be removed.

They hurt the customer base.

They cause next to no problems for Software Pirates.

They cause huge amounts of game errors.

They give companies huge amounts of bad publicity.
Sorry for the ramble but I am ever so slightly annoyed because I still want to play Rise of Legends but still cant due to a windows re-install and getting all my old programs back likely to take around one week.