It’s not evil. DRM as a concept is not evil. There is actually no real philosophical justification for why it is wrong to use DRM to protect your software. Because if you made it, it is yours and you get to decide how other people use it.
The paranoia that surrounds things like DRM show just how laughably selfish and entitled some gamers are.
Why wouldn’t gamers be entitled? Do you forget that buying games is consumerism and that it’s not an act of charity? Is it not normal to feel entitled to features when you are looking to buy a good or service? What’s with this recent shift in people seeing corporations as friends.
Imagine saying wow people who buy power tools are so entitled for not expecting them to break when they try to use it. Gamers are pretty weird group where at times the reverence they hold for what is at the end a business and requires a checks and balances of consumers and business fighting each other to keep balance instead shifts towards sympathy for companies.
Because you didn’t make it. I’ll grant that western ideas about intellectual property are weird and inconsistent, but I’m taking it as a given that we hold that idea in common. If a writer writes something, that sequence of words in the order they wrote is their “property” and they get to determine who gets to see it.
I am cognizant that in this kind of space a lot of people probably won’t hold this view of intellectual property and there are good arguments as to why it shouldn’t exist at all. I suppose at this moment I’m not really in the mood to go down this rabbit hole, so forgive me if that is where you want to go.
That isn’t how we view writers at all though. Writers can refuse to sell you a physical book if they’ve made that, sure, but they can’t stop someone from selling you a used copy, or one that ended up in the hands of a library from being lent to you. They can’t stop you from sharing your copy of their book with a friend, or reading it to someone, even if they don’t want that someone to see it.
When a rerelease of a Gameboy advance game can’t be launched offline, that’s a problem. (MegaMan battle network collection)
As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service issue. Why would I buy that collection when I can emulate my old copy instead? It’s a few extra steps, so I would rather have had it just work on steam, but Denuvo kept me from doing it. This mattered recently because I went on a vacation with the steam deck and didn’t have internet at a few points.
Sure, DRM isn’t inherently evil, but when it makes the experience worse for paying customers when compared to pirates, it really looks that way.
Also note that in this case, emulation is not piracy, but if I wanted to play the collection edition offline then piracy would have been my only option.
Am I selfish for paying money and wanting to use the software I bought a personal license to on my own, without internet? I think it’s selfish of the company to demand that I play their originally offline-only games online-only. Am I selfish to want to play the Spyro Reignited trilogy without aggreeing to an arbitration clause? I think companies have gotten selfish lately and paying customers have no choice but to either not play modern AAA games, pay and have a potentially worse experience when paying, or pirate and not deal with the technical and legal/privacy garbage surrounding modern AAA releases, including DRM. I didn’t even mention yet how if a game you purchased a Denuvo license to does not get an update to eventually remove the protection, it will become unplayable when they shut the activation server down.
I remember my first awful experience with DRM with the game Spore, where I had a period of time when I moved between or upgraded my computer enough to where I ran out of activations and could not longer play my physical copy of the game despite there not being a single current activation of the game out there. There was nothing I could do about it, because there was no way to deactivate a copy even if you knew you would be changing hardware soon. I didn’t have income then, so it left a very sour taste in my mouth. We came from physical copies we could resell, to this? DRM lets companies manage game licenses on their terms, but their terms suck.
I’ve selected this text as I think it’s the heart of your post, if you disagree then let me know. I don’t agree with this statement, I think that it is a rights issue, and I think I can prove that with a thought experiment.
Suppose for example, game companies took this idea to heart and did not do anything to stop piracy, they only focused on providing the most seamless storefront and gaming experiences possible. They create a store that works perfectly, has all the features you’d want, and has no DRM of any kind - this includes no log in needed, they go by the honor system. They expect people to only download a game that they’ve paid for. Here’s the question: will people pay for the games or not? I have a view of human nature that people generally go along the path of least resistance, and I think this is born out by evidence (but I could be wrong about this). Some people will pay for the games on moral grounds, the vast majority will not. If a developer wants to get paid, they have to make sure people pay for it. And now we have DRM. The goal of DRM is to make piracy annoying enough that the path of least resistance is to just buy the game.
This, to me at least, proves that piracy is only a service issue in a world where DRM exists. Because DRM makes piracy annoying. If people find the DRM more annoying than piracy, it has failed to be effective DRM.
So to get to the heart of things, I agree with you that when DRM is more annoying than piracy something has gone terribly wrong. Denuvo, in my life, for the way I play games, is not and never has even gotten close to being more annoying than piracy.
But at the end of the day, I don’t think it is morally or ethically wrong to put DRM on a game or storefront. I just see it as something to work out on a practical level, case by case. But I made my original comment in the first place because it seems to me like a lot of people have issues with it on a moral level, which I think is silly.
If a developer wants to get paid, they have to make sure people pay for it. And now we have DRM. The goal of DRM is to make piracy annoying enough that the path of least resistance is to just buy the game.
You’re assuming the only options are no DRM and voluntary payment, or DRM and mandatory payment. You can still have a normal storefront and actually ask for money, and still sell games (or software in general) without DRM. GOG does this, for example, and they’re doing fine.
No, you can’t have mandatory payment for DRM-free media. That’s why all bookstores operate on an honour system and let you walk out of the store without paying for the books you take with you.
Haha yeah, never really understood people thinking DRM would cause everything to crash when Cyberpunk 2077 being such a success even with the terrible launch argues against that.
It’s not evil. DRM as a concept is not evil. There is actually no real philosophical justification for why it is wrong to use DRM to protect your software. Because if you made it, it is yours and you get to decide how other people use it.
The paranoia that surrounds things like DRM show just how laughably selfish and entitled some gamers are.
Why wouldn’t gamers be entitled? Do you forget that buying games is consumerism and that it’s not an act of charity? Is it not normal to feel entitled to features when you are looking to buy a good or service? What’s with this recent shift in people seeing corporations as friends.
Imagine saying wow people who buy power tools are so entitled for not expecting them to break when they try to use it. Gamers are pretty weird group where at times the reverence they hold for what is at the end a business and requires a checks and balances of consumers and business fighting each other to keep balance instead shifts towards sympathy for companies.
“Because if you made it, it is yours and you get to decide how other people use it.” why shouldn’t people be allowed to use software how they want?
Because you didn’t make it. I’ll grant that western ideas about intellectual property are weird and inconsistent, but I’m taking it as a given that we hold that idea in common. If a writer writes something, that sequence of words in the order they wrote is their “property” and they get to determine who gets to see it.
I am cognizant that in this kind of space a lot of people probably won’t hold this view of intellectual property and there are good arguments as to why it shouldn’t exist at all. I suppose at this moment I’m not really in the mood to go down this rabbit hole, so forgive me if that is where you want to go.
That isn’t how we view writers at all though. Writers can refuse to sell you a physical book if they’ve made that, sure, but they can’t stop someone from selling you a used copy, or one that ended up in the hands of a library from being lent to you. They can’t stop you from sharing your copy of their book with a friend, or reading it to someone, even if they don’t want that someone to see it.
When a rerelease of a Gameboy advance game can’t be launched offline, that’s a problem. (MegaMan battle network collection)
As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service issue. Why would I buy that collection when I can emulate my old copy instead? It’s a few extra steps, so I would rather have had it just work on steam, but Denuvo kept me from doing it. This mattered recently because I went on a vacation with the steam deck and didn’t have internet at a few points.
Sure, DRM isn’t inherently evil, but when it makes the experience worse for paying customers when compared to pirates, it really looks that way.
Also note that in this case, emulation is not piracy, but if I wanted to play the collection edition offline then piracy would have been my only option.
Am I selfish for paying money and wanting to use the software I bought a personal license to on my own, without internet? I think it’s selfish of the company to demand that I play their originally offline-only games online-only. Am I selfish to want to play the Spyro Reignited trilogy without aggreeing to an arbitration clause? I think companies have gotten selfish lately and paying customers have no choice but to either not play modern AAA games, pay and have a potentially worse experience when paying, or pirate and not deal with the technical and legal/privacy garbage surrounding modern AAA releases, including DRM. I didn’t even mention yet how if a game you purchased a Denuvo license to does not get an update to eventually remove the protection, it will become unplayable when they shut the activation server down.
I remember my first awful experience with DRM with the game Spore, where I had a period of time when I moved between or upgraded my computer enough to where I ran out of activations and could not longer play my physical copy of the game despite there not being a single current activation of the game out there. There was nothing I could do about it, because there was no way to deactivate a copy even if you knew you would be changing hardware soon. I didn’t have income then, so it left a very sour taste in my mouth. We came from physical copies we could resell, to this? DRM lets companies manage game licenses on their terms, but their terms suck.
I’ve selected this text as I think it’s the heart of your post, if you disagree then let me know. I don’t agree with this statement, I think that it is a rights issue, and I think I can prove that with a thought experiment.
Suppose for example, game companies took this idea to heart and did not do anything to stop piracy, they only focused on providing the most seamless storefront and gaming experiences possible. They create a store that works perfectly, has all the features you’d want, and has no DRM of any kind - this includes no log in needed, they go by the honor system. They expect people to only download a game that they’ve paid for. Here’s the question: will people pay for the games or not? I have a view of human nature that people generally go along the path of least resistance, and I think this is born out by evidence (but I could be wrong about this). Some people will pay for the games on moral grounds, the vast majority will not. If a developer wants to get paid, they have to make sure people pay for it. And now we have DRM. The goal of DRM is to make piracy annoying enough that the path of least resistance is to just buy the game.
This, to me at least, proves that piracy is only a service issue in a world where DRM exists. Because DRM makes piracy annoying. If people find the DRM more annoying than piracy, it has failed to be effective DRM.
So to get to the heart of things, I agree with you that when DRM is more annoying than piracy something has gone terribly wrong. Denuvo, in my life, for the way I play games, is not and never has even gotten close to being more annoying than piracy.
But at the end of the day, I don’t think it is morally or ethically wrong to put DRM on a game or storefront. I just see it as something to work out on a practical level, case by case. But I made my original comment in the first place because it seems to me like a lot of people have issues with it on a moral level, which I think is silly.
You’re assuming the only options are no DRM and voluntary payment, or DRM and mandatory payment. You can still have a normal storefront and actually ask for money, and still sell games (or software in general) without DRM. GOG does this, for example, and they’re doing fine.
No, you can’t have mandatory payment for DRM-free media. That’s why all bookstores operate on an honour system and let you walk out of the store without paying for the books you take with you.
Haha yeah, never really understood people thinking DRM would cause everything to crash when Cyberpunk 2077 being such a success even with the terrible launch argues against that.