Games with DRM: Are They Worth the Hassle?

Posted by Scott Foley on
Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 1:55 pm

It’s a great time to be a gamer. There have never been so many different ways to indulge in fun. Gamers now include everyone from soccer moms to celebrities, and this broadening audience has helped create new genres and gameplay options. While the gaming community has grown over the past three decades, so have the pirates; the Internet has made it easy to make unauthorized copies of games and share them with others. To prevent piracy, many game publishers have introduced steadily more rigorous copy protection mechanisms called DRM, which stands for Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management depending on your perspective.

DRM in games has evolved over time. In the 1980s, you might be asked to type in a word from a random page in the game manual to verify that you owned a legitimate copy. In more recent years, DRM required that you insert the original CD every time you started a game, activate the game online before you could play, or install verification software. None of these measures really worked, though, and so the focus of copy protection has gradually shifted from preventing casual copying to making the game tamper-proof. Last month, Ubisoft upped the ante with the introduction of several PC games (Assassin’s Creed 2, in particular) that require a constant connection to its company servers while you play. Because there is no benefit to players to being connected, the requirement met with a lot of skepticism before the games’ releases.

The Ubisoft case illustrates one of the biggest problems with DRM: locking your games down tends to inconvenience actual customers more than the pirates. Ubisoft’s gamble brought the company bad press. First, the DRM on Assassin’s Creed 2 was partially cracked with two days of its release, suggesting the new restrictions were ineffective. Then  the company’s online authentication servers went offline during the first week, leaving many legitimate users unable to play. After initially claiming that the outage was due to “exceptional demand,” Ubisoft blamed the downtime on a denial-of-service attack. Because there are so many different ways to mitigate those attacks, the downtime suggests that Ubisoft did not want to bother with investing in a robust infrastructure to maintain its game authentication service. The company is sticking to its guns, however, and showed no contrition on either its Twitter feed or any of the posts on its official forums.

Outside of the obvious suggestion—don’t patronize companies who treat customers like this—it’s hard to see real solutions. Buying the game and then downloading a pirated copy to support the company but avoid personal inconvenience doesn’t tell the company you object to its protection mechanisms. Similarly, pirating the game only gives the company further grounds on which to claim the need for more restrictions. So, what’s a gamer to do?