pirates and DRM

Role Playing Games October 1st, 2008

In the U.K a ruling landmark has been seen in the Patent’s Court which ordered Isabela Bawinska to pay ₤16,000 ($34,000 USD) to Topware Interactive, who developed the game dream pinball 3D. In its first two weeks on sale, the game was downloaded illegally 12,000 times. However, in contrast, only 800 copies of the game were legitimately sold at the RRP of ₤19.99 ($34 USD). This is only a small fraction of the trouble.

According to Peerland, a file sharing monitor, a code master’s game, titled Operation Flashpoint, was illegally downloaded 691,324 times in just one week and Assassins creed over 700,000 times. This cost its developers millions of dollars in lost revenue. To add insult to injury, this illegal version of Assassins Creed was extremely buggy, this fact, or so Ubisoft clamed has caused ‘irreparable harm’ to their reputation.

A group of developers and distributors, including Atari, Codemasters and topware, have joined up with Davenport Lyons, a UK law firm, to serve notice on 25,000 people in the UK. This group of lawyers, developers and distributors will be searching for every person on the list to settle out of court of ₤300 ($635 USD) fine or face prosecution. As a partner at the firm, David Gore, said “the damages and costs ordered by the court are significant and should act as a deterrent.”

Piracy is a form of stealing media. It is where someone get hold of an illegal copy of media & selling, buying copied media and downloading illegal copies of digital media are both different forms of piracy. This is bad because for every illegal copy received there is one
less legal copy that is sold. This takes money out of the resellers, distributors and developers pockets. This can add up to millions of dollars lost in revenue.

Capcom, a well known distributor, has claimed that the poor sales of Devil May Cry 4 are a result of pirates. Capcom has decided that rather than chase pirates, they are looking at pushing digital distribution in future. In fact all they are waiting for is Capcom Japan who has yet to allow distribution through this channel.

Another way of curbing piracy is heavy copy protection and when news that Mars Effect would feature SecuROM, a security program that required re-validation via the internet every ten days, fans flew in to frenzy. The relentless opposition from them forced the 10 day requirement to be canned. Spore was also to be released with this feature, but fan pressure led to it being cancelled. Instead revalidation will only take place when new content or patches are downloaded.

This just goes to show the struggle between end user vs. distributor power and the scales are tipping, if only a little, in favour of the consumer. This may have occurred because of the DRM system StarForce. This system makes SecuROM look tame. Users of this system complained of slow system performance, damage to optical devices and a load of other problems that they blamed on StarForce. The reports in the press were met with weird threats from StarForce PR. These included an email to BoingBoing which accused the site of breaking approximately “11 international laws” and claims to have contacted the FBI, citing harassment as their motive.

StarForce were also responsible for an act of sabotage on the makers of Galaxy Civilisations 2, Stardoc. The act in question was when a StarForce forum moderator posted a working torrent link to publicize their lack of DRM on the retail copy of the game. The impact on sales and piracy from this act is unclear.