Do Nothing

When we last left off, I suggested that the solution was to do nothing. What does that mean, exactly?

What I’m saying is, forget about copy protection entirely.

DRM costs far more than it protects. It doesn’t prevent piracy—pirates are going to break it anyway. What it does is hurt paying customers, who should be cherished at all costs. After all, these are the people who are actually giving publishers money when they can get something for free. Why make things hard on the good guys? All it does is make them into the bad guys.

Yeah, sure, you say. No copy protection is just asking for people to pirate my game. How will I make any money?

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The Situation

Piracy is the biggest problem facing PC games. Publishers claim it’s so bad that it threatens the very existence of the platform. Since it’s so easy to copy games, it’s no longer profitable to develop for the PC.

To help stave the flow of lost sales, many newer games come with DRM (Digital Rights Management), a kind of software lock designed to prevent unauthorized copying. It sounds okay in theory. I mean, we can generally agree that companies have a right to protect themselves.

But that’s where the game publishers have gone overboard—putting their rights above their customer’s. And so, instead of profiting as they should be, they’ve created a storm of controversy and actually made things much worse for everyone involved.

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