I’ve not posted about DRM but after reading some items the past few days I decided to make a few comments.  I was looking at an article at Ars and what I’d like to hear someone ask these executives is how is this incredible protection allowing someone to break it and upload copies of  Mass Effect, Spore and now Crysis: Warhead to filesharing/torrent searches and sites with “patches” around DRM.  Why is this never a question to these executives?  I want to know if their intention is to prevent Bob and Cathy Gamer from being able to use the same copy because it certainly can’t be them attempting to stop massive torrent/filesharing piracy.

At the end of the Ars article I was most amused with the comment:

“Without the ability to protect our work from piracy, developers across the entire game industry will eventually stop investing time and money in PC titles,” Gibeau stated.

As I had already pointed out that with the torrents available for all 3 titles it looks like PC titles are going to disappear.  I guess the conspiracy side of me makes me wonder if they’re just looking for an excuse to dump PC games.  After all EA has been outspoken in the past about how the console is really the only way to go with gaming.

I’m really not well versed in all the protection schemes but it seems to me that they are wasting money by continuing development of new methods.  I understand they have no intention of removing DRM but a quote from Vegas Vacation comes to mind…

“You don’t know when to quit, do ya Griswold?… Here’s an idea: Why don’t you give me half the money you were gonna bet, then we’ll go out back, I’ll kick you in the nuts, and we’ll call it a day”

I personally like the Valve method of installing the game and using their launcher.  If you want to protect your product, tie it to an account/email and whatever else you need for my registration.  I have no problem using this method and I’m not sure why other companies haven’t signed on to do this or maybe it’s just that no one has been able to implement it as well as Valve.  I was actually close to buying Warhead from Steam until I saw the same limited activation exists on Steam as does buying the game (and it was $7 more w/o media).  I’m not sure if it also includes SECUROM since I believe that is part of how it maintains it’s licensing.  Regardless I think there are ways to go about this without being intrusive on a user’s system.