What do you mean it doesn't fit in the drive like this?

You’ve heard it all before, I’m sure, but the DRM battle still rages on, and Rockstar bring it to a whole new level of illogical thought process. There is plenty of past material to talk about on the subject, but rather than dig into the past(yet) I decided to start with the draconian drama du jour.

Quick aside, I’m sick of the word “draconian,” but it worked too well with that alliteration, don’t expect to see it again this article.

GTA4 is attached to our old friend SecuRom. If you’re hopelessly out of the loop on that, SecuRom is a spyware tool commonly used by game companies to prevent people from using their product. It usually installs irremovable components at the kernel level of your operating system, renders legitimate hardware and software unusable, and sends unspecified information back to Sony and possibly the game publisher. They say it’s used to prevent piracy, but so far, the only people that have been stopped from playing are people that bought the software.

Spyware really is the only thing you can call this stuff. That said, the first anti-virus company that adds DRM schemes like this to it’s definitions will have a lifetime customer in me.

In any case, you can find out all you want about SecuRom in the link I posted above, but here’s what’s special about Rockstar’s latest release. In a stunning act of hubris, someone at Rockstar posted the following challenge to pirates of the 7 Internets:

“Dont bother to beat our protection, guys. Think we spent 200k for you to play our game for free? Think twice!
You really cant crack this game believe me or not. We have done everything to stop you from playing it for free”

There are so many things wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin. The most obvious being that it WAS cracked. Unless there’s some hidden computer destroying piece of code that triggers when you beat the final mission or something, it looks like this guy was wrong.

The big thing to me though, is this $200,000 figure. Even if Rockstar got 100% of the retail price of the game, that’s 4,000 people that would have to buy the game to make up the difference. Considering all the publishers and distributors and retailers that get a piece of the pie, I’d be surprised if Rockstar even saw 10% of the price of the game.

In the grand scheme of how many people buy GTA games, yes, 4,000 or even 10,000 people isn’t that many to convince, but the fact is that this isn’t going to convince a whole lot of people weren’t already considering buying it anyway, and it’s certainly not going to convince the lifetime pirates. In fact, spending a little extra time making the game run on lower end computers would have increased their customer base a lot more than 4,000 people. That combined with not spending nearly a quarter million on a DRM scheme that doesn’t work, and that probably would have doubled the profits.

I’m a marketing genius.

Many people mistake DRM complaints as pirates wanting things easier. Game makers especially. Rockstar themselves have a sarcastic comment about it in this game along the lines of “How dare game makers try to make money off their product?” This really isn’t the case at all. Pirates don’t care about DRM. Plenty of people that make these cracks don’t even play the games, they’re just in it for the challenge. You keep building the wall higher and higher and the pirates keep sailing around. It’s the customers that get the short end of the stick from DRM lockdowns.

What companies like Valve and Stardock have realized, is that you have to make the purchased product more valuable than the pirated one. I don’t have any illusions about Steam not being a DRM scheme, but it actually offers something in return for paying customers. If you buy games from these companies you get competent, full featured online multiplayer, free updates and patches, and as an added bonus, no malware installed on your machine.

There are plenty of people that will complain about Steam just like I complained about SecuRom. It’s a preference thing I suppose, but a whole other topic altogether. Not a bad topic to get to sometime later.

What people like Rockstar and EA need to do is spend money making their games run well instead of making a pirated copy work better than the retail one.