Paradox CEO Calls DRM a 'Waste of Money'

This is a lesson that was learned back in the 80s, after valiant attempts to protect games from copying. I remember things like having bad disk sectors, which were foiled by the likes of copyiipc, and then it moved on to requiring the manual for specific passcodes, which was foiled by photocopies and people simply hacking the binaries. None of them worked because it was an eternal war of the game providers vs the pirates, but the pirates had a lot more incentive and opportunity to crack the games than the content developers had to protect them.<p>As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way around it except by having thin clients and running everything off the cloud. As long as the actual machine where the content is being run off is in the hands of the client, it can always be hacked, either through software or hardware. But things like streaming video and Louis CK are showing that people are willing to pay for content, as long as it's convenient enough and cheap enough.

DRM period isn't a waste of money. DRM as it's commonly practiced is.<p>DRM always entails a hit to the customer's convenience. If you're not giving the customer more convenience in a different way, then you're fighting an uphill battle.<p>When you implement DRM, please be aware that you are engaged in an asymmetric conflict, and that <i>you are the underdogs</i>. The subset of the internet community interested in cracking your DRM most likely outnumbers and outguns whatever department in whatever company you're at. But asymmetric conflicts can be won:<p><pre><code> - concentrate on detection, bias to false negatives - separate by a significant interval in time the detection and any consequences of detection - never do anything that looks like a bug - never fight where you are weak and the enemy is strong </code></pre> You are strong where functionality depends on a server. If you ever have to keep someone out, do it there. If you can avoid doing that at all and fight in even sneakier ways, then do that instead. Remember, in this conflict you are the guerrillas, and the pirates are the big empire. You can only win if you keep <i>them</i> guessing where you will strike, not the other way around.

I pirated Paradox's Europa Universalis II when I was a poor student. I later pirated the first version of Europa Universalis III and Victoria, both of which I didn't much enjoy at the time, because they sucked at the time from a technical/gameplay and gameplay perspective respectively.<p>Since then I purchased, because I initially pirated them, For The Glory (effectively an EU2 final edition) and EUIII Complete and its two expansion packs, including one for twenty dollars. I also purchased Victoria II.<p>DRM doesn't work, and because Paradox put all the effort that they'd put into DRM into their game engines instead, I'm buying their products and am utterly addicted to EU3 in particular.<p>For every seed and peer on BitTorrent of a Paradox game, I'm happy, because it means that the community will grow larger and that there will be more paying customers in the future. It helps that the parts of the forum with Technical Support, Patches and Mods are only available to registered customers :)<p>There's only a few things that bother me with Paradox, and they are that Victoria II is not much fun, because one has as much control over that game as a leaf in the wind, that EU3 needs another dozen expansion packs and that not everything is available for Steam on Mac when it should be...<p>If EU3 had three-time install only DRM, I'd have pirated it, and so would have most others. Instead, Paradox seems to be a publisher that loves its community, as the forums alone prove.

"But people who purchase a game should have just as easy a time as those who pirate the game, otherwise it’s a negative incentive to buy a legal copy."<p>I thought this was a key point in the article and one that has been lurking below the surface in the SOPA/PIPA discussion. In order to 'prevent piracy', technical solutions are worthless compared to providing a quality service where your customers' willingness to buy is on par with your price. As noted by the author, DRM decreases the quality of a service, and often carries an increased price [at least for company in production/support/etc].<p>For some industries, the price does not align with expectations. I can think of retail Blu-ray for instance [the price is too high].<p>For others, the DRM encourages piracy to some degree. Often with Windows this is the case. While I own legitimate copies, often a pirate copy is easier to install [no key/activation] or find [no cd to track]. This is especially true for quick n' dirty VM builds.<p>Finally, I believe in expressly Anti-DRM approaches, ya know.../trusting/ users with content. Encouraging users to purchase in order to support their favorite [movie, game, software, comedy special] is the way forward. Piracy will not go away, the game is converting pirates to customers by convincing them that your product is worth their money.

iPhone store is DRM. It helps the customer in a way by preventing apps from breaking the phone. I don't like it personally but I have a higher knowledge level of technology than most people.<p>DRM is useful mostly to people who can't figure out anything in a technology product. They are more likely to break their products without it than with it. The big thing though is I wished companies offered an option to those who are willing to risk it all vs fighting them.