5 Reasons It's Still Not Cool to Admit You're a Gamer

[Halororor]

Well, that small group you mentioned who would pirate regardless is the stem of all the trouble. The developers are trying to stomp them out. If they could design a DRM scheme that was totally uncrackable, not just temporarily, but entirely, as in never, would those pirates stop gaming altogether? No, they'd be forced to pay for games. Piracy is all about human greed, when you get right down to it. People want what they can't have.

 

Hey, I used to pirate. I stopped at some point after IronLore shut their doors due to piracy. I've come to realise that buying games just makes you appreciate them more. You spend more time admiring the finer points of the game, instead of just rushing through to get to the next game. Piracy really doesn't pay off in the long run.

[TheTerminator2004]

Well, that small group of people have been copying media without the publisher's permission, since the invention of the printing press (it was the rich merchants who'd had a monopoly on book-selling up until that point who persuaded parliament to pass the Copyright Act, so they could try and maintain control of distribution), and it hasn't stopped the various media industries from making billions in profits.

 

Besides, it is a fact that local security is never uncrackable. Anything located on the user's PC, even if it has to phone home, can and will be cracked. Physical hardware security (such as what you get in a console) is much more secure, but unless publishers plan to start selling special PCs with their games, on which to play them, that isn't really a feasible option. And it would have to be a totally new PC, with all the DRM hardcoded into a special chip somewhere - any special hardware that the user has to plug into a normal PC (such as the usb dongles used by some high-end software manufacturers) still relies on software drivers to work - and those can be easily cracked. Even a special type of PC would be cracked, given enough time - just like every games console.

 

The only way to guarantee that it is very unlikely a game will be cracked (not impossible), is to store the entire game content on a remote server somewhere, in a system like OnLive. Which needless to say, is inconvenient to the point of being unusable for the majority of people. Theres no way it would work in most of the UK, for example, with our ancient phone network.

 

So yeah, short of completely changing the way the games market works (and I for one can guarantee I will never pay a subscription to access games on a remote server), there is no way to prevent piracy. Even if you were to turn the internet off completely, people will just go straight back to swapping discs in school, or sending games through the post.