That's a valid point but it dodges the thrust of the post, which is that piracy is pushing the industry in this direction --- this is a mainstream title from a mainstream vendor that is making a clear and visible usability concession to protect the new release window from pirates.

Most users probably won't care (remember that we're a disproportionately vocal minority --- or, you are; my job is to make these titles worse for you, and I don't ever play video games), and vendors are going to get users to adapt to concessions like this.

You're right, many users won't care about the DRM. What they will care about is a game freezing up and crashing. They won't even realize it's from DRM issues.

I also wouldn't underestimate the tech chops of gamers. These are the guys who overclock hardware, do case mods... just because they're not hardcore hackers doesn't mean they don't understand or care about these issues.

There's going to be someone with the knowledge and ties to the gaming world who's going to try and win acclaim by applying that knowledge.

Agreed - I don't care at all and would buy this game if it was my style. Am I going to give up on having an internet connection at my place, ever? No. So how would this negatively affect me? A little bit of downtime? We all need bathroom breaks.

I understand the resentment at these anti-hacking measures given that this is a hacker community but not all companies choose to make their products in the open-source tradition, and that's a perfectly valid choice for them to make.

You'd put up with the game crashing and losing your save data when your internet gets a little bit wonky? I have fiber to my house within the city, and my connection still gets flaky at times.

And you're right, it is a valid choice. Doesn't mean their choice won't be criticized. This also has nothing to do with open source, and everything to do with treating your paying users like criminals. This pic from the other day is perfect: http://t1.xavimg.com/2010/02/piratelegal.jpg

I think that criticism is just too easy to make, and suggests a lack of empathy for the realities of the gaming marketplace.

Everyone thinks pirates are fun and romantic until it's their stuff that gets robbed.

What's funny is that they're making it more convenient to play the pirated version than the legit version. The more invasive DRM you force on your legit users, the more they're going to look for workarounds online and fuel piracy.

Titles can offload more and more of their game content into code paths that depend on the Internet, and if those titles generate more revenue (because they're harder to pirate effectively), it's not unlikely that the market will move that way.

Why is more pervasive DRM necessarily more of an inconvenience for the user? It will be an inconvenience for an unfortunate minority, but a well designed and executed system could well be unnoticed by most.

I only notice Apple's DRM in iTunes when I have to de-authorize an old computer or authorize a new one, which is only once or twice a year at most.

It depends on how common the minority is, yeah. In the days where DRM required you to insert the original game disc to verify it, a lot of legitimate purchasers of games got cracked copies too just to avoid the hassle of having to swap CDs. With the internet-based DRM, I think it depends on how many gamers have flaky internet connections, or play on laptops at places where there's no internet (e.g. on most trains, buses, and planes).

A lot of that can be addressed by making the connection a bit more "robust." A lot of people who play on trains and buses can could be accommodated by having 24 hours to authenticate.

Piracy isn't pushing anyone anywhere.

Publishers have it in their head that piracy equals lost sales. It's this belief, that DRM can recapture those sales, that is pushing them in this direction.

Sales of PC games, which are dead-easy to steal, dropped off sharply at right around the dawn of the Internet. Meanwhile, the market for console games, which have a much higher barrier to entry to pirate, is booming:

http://origin.arstechnica.com/news.media/video-game-sales-1....

Rightly or not, PC game makers have it in their heads that piracy is killing their business. I can see it both ways: On one hand, I find it hard to believe that not even a small fraction of computer game pirates would purchase more games if they couldn't easily steal them. But I also wonder if declining PC sales aren't just a byproduct of the "serious" gamers' shift towards preferring console games.

Regardless, the market for PC game sales has flatlined, and Ubisoft is trying desperately to jumpstart it by enacting a system that makes piracy significantly more difficult, at least for a little while. I'm sure they'll use the 3-4 months of nearly-zero piracy rates as a yardstick with which to measure the potential of the industry sans piracy. It will be interesting to see if you're right.

> a byproduct of the "serious" gamers' shift towards preferring console games.

Or maybe the complete opposite: Casual gamer's are a much bigger audience than serious gamers. And PC games tend to be more serious. So the shift could be explained in this way, too.

(Just a hypothesis. Your argument has more going for it.)

There are plenty of other data points besides 'dawn of the internet'. Complexity of PC games shot up. Prices shot up. Consoles began to get titles in genres that were traditionally 'PC only'. Also, PC games have always been dead-easy to pirate. It's thoroughly unconvincing to wave your hand at an aggregate sales graph and note a single data point.

And, frankly, none of that matters. All that matters is that publishers believe DRM can turn would-be pirates into customers. It's a belief that's never been borne out by the data. But still they try.

Whether their cause is noble, or reasonable, or justified is irrelevant. It's their belief that DRM is worth-while that causes DRM. Not piracy. Not sales.

That's hardly a solution. There is no way, short of a massive letter-writing campaign, for a software publisher to look at flagging sales and know that it was due to onerous DRM. More likely, they'd blame it on piracy and go looking for even more restrictive DRM.

And so the cycle would continue until sales fall enough that the company goes under. At the same time, assuming people will stop buying DRM'd products, the companies not using DRM on their games will see their sales rise.

This seems like a great solution.

And if it doesn't work that way, would you concede that this model of the world needs to be amended?

(I would prefer that reality works this way. I am a big fan of 2D Boy for one.)

How about the DRM on the Xbox and PS 3 version of the game? 'Same' game, but it is instead a vote for locked-down 'computing'. For those who do need to buy ACII.

Alternatively stop stealing games and pay the game companies for their product and they wouldn't need to go to such great lengths to save their IP.

I do. It somehow doesn't save me from dealing with the DRM and jumping through the hoops that people who don't just bypass.

As the restrictions get more onerous and the hoops get higher, smaller, and set aflame, piracy will not go down.

Sadly, this is true. I ran into this recently with the DVD for the movie Transformers 2. I normally rip all of my movies onto my Boxee system (NOTE: I do this after I purchase the legitimate physical DVD copy of the movie, which I then keep!) It's not only more convenient to pick the movies from a menu, but more importantly for me, with two pre-teen kids in the house DVD's get scratched up fast if don't.

Normally, this is a pretty easy process, but Tranformers 2 apparently has a rather aggressive copy prevention scheme that seems to defeat most DVD rippers. I finally found a ripper that would rip it successfully, but not until after I came very close to returning the damn DVD to the store after a friend at work showed me that the Pirates Bay had not only the full DVD version of Transformers 2 available for download, but the god damn Blue Ray version as well! It would have been easier for me to pirate the damn movie than to format-shift my legitimately purchased copy.

This is why Hulu, NetFlix, and such have an opportunity - they make it at least as easy to watch a streamed movie as to pirate it.

Many people seem to want to use legitimate channels; the industry needs to realize that discouraging them is not the answer.

What about dropping the price of games? Perhaps if they weren't as expensive people wouldn't feel so inclined to pirate them. After all I assume that's why people pirate. No one wants to pay.

However, even if it did cost less, I guess most people would still rather try to get it for free, rather than having to pay anything at all.