Today Citizens I come to you with a bold new idea, a brave and seemingly alien concept but one that I can assure you is sound. Hold tight, bear with me, because I don’t think you’re going to like it.

Ready? I believe Digital Rights Management (DRM), that wonderfully cumbersome term applied to any form of copy protection we see packaged with the games of today, is our last, best hope for the future of this medium we enjoy so much. Its ubiquity and ever more visible presence in the titles we love is not only to be welcomed, but actively encouraged.

Now, the use of DRM has generated a lot of bad press in the last few years, and with good reason. DRM is designed to be a countermeasure in the war against piracy, making it as difficult as possible for people to copy the games they possess and distribute them via the Internet. In this regard it has failed completely in whatever form it has been used. Piracy is flourishing, particularly in the PC market, and there is currently no form of DRM in existence that has not been overcome by enterprising young men and women keen to share what they have in their possession.

Withough DRM, would (or could) Valve support its games as much?

Ubisoft, one of the largest publishers in the world, thought it had the pirates licked when it debuted a new DRM system with the PC versions of Assassin’s Creed 2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction. To play these games one was required to maintain a constant internet connection at all times, so the game you were playing could continuously talk to Ubisoft’s servers. Loose the connection, or try to communicate with the server on a less than legitimate copy of the game and you wouldn’t be able to play. At least, that was the goal. In reality, in the initial stages of the rollout of this new system, people who’d purchased copies of those games were unable to play them as Ubisoft’s servers collapsed under the demand and repeated attacks from disgruntled hackers. Paying customers couldn’t play the game they’d shelled out for, and pirates eventually found a work around as they always seem to do.

Traditional DRM, which I’d categorise as a measure designed solely to prevent someone who hasn’t paid for a copy of a game from playing it, doesn’t work and often inadvertently punishes paying customers. But I think we’ve seen the growth of a new form of DRM in the last few years, even if we haven’t called it by such a name. It’s based on an attitude of increased reward for the paying customer, rather than prioritising punitive measures against would-be pirates.

Take Steam, Valve Corporation’s massive digital game store, as an example. It’s a unified form of DRM. Games bought on Steam generally can only be played through Steam and the service requires a user account. But, in addition to these restrictions, Steam provides benefits to paying customers that the realm of piracy does not. Among the most important of these benefits is the ability to download your game to any internet-connected PC in the world just by logging into your account. You’re also guaranteed the latest version of a particular title too, as Steam has an auto-update feature. And that’s before we even begin to talk about all the community and communication features built into the service too. Steam fights copy protection, but it does it without inconveniencing paying customers. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Does day-one purchase content alleviate piracy?

We’re even seeing new measures on the consoles that I’m very interested in, which could also help resolve the publisher/retailer conflict over used games sales. New copies of Battlefield Bad Company 2 shipped with a VIP code that gamers could register in order to get access to additional downloadable content, specifically map packs. If you didn’t buy the game you didn’t get the code, so paying customers got an additional benefit simply by virtue of having put up their money. Further, if you bought the game used, you could buy a VIP code after the fact and still be able to get in on the content, and this allowed the publisher to make money off a used game sale where they’d traditionally lose out. On the face of it publisher, retailer and consumer all come out winners.

There are other examples in recent memory, such as the Cerberus Network content available to owners of legitimate copies of Mass Effect 2, but I haven’t the space here to dissect them in more detail. Ultimately, while there will always be publishers and developers like Ubisoft who will flail about with inflexible and silly DRM systems that hurt consumers more than pirates, we’re seeing a move towards new systems that offer additional reward to legitimate users at no additional cost. When it’s done right, DRM can be as much about adding value to a product as it can be about protecting a publisher’s interests. In the past gamers have been very hard done by with such measures but that seems to be changing, and we should be cheering with every step in the right direction.

Barry White

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