Posted December 02, 2014
tomimt: DRM has and always will be only an obstacle, not a permanent stop for anything. As such I do get why companies want to use it, but in the end DRM itself is based on the wrong assumption of that if 1000 people download something illegally that is 1000 lost sales.
The companies look at the numbers and they think how it would be nice to get those 1000 lost sales, so they enforce their rights by using DRM, hoping that the next game would sell better, but in the end it sells about the same and again they notice that there's 1000 illegal copies, but they assure themselves that without the DRM it would be 10000 illegal copies, so it must be working.
I don't recall I've never read about a game that would have had a sales boost because of DRM. I've heard lots about games that got DRM and didn't gain any more sales. Less piracy perhaps, at least for a day or two, but no impact on sales. I recently reaad about some soccer manager game, that had huge amounts of pirated copies around. The new version had strict DRM, but they didn't get that many new customers because of it, their sales were pretty much the same with their previous version.
And you know the sad thing is?, some people actually do pirate said games just because the market isn't as involved in a countries economy, look at japan, look at Latin America, or at least at Mexico, Venezuela, Peru and Puerto Rico, they don't have much of a market in the whole videogame industry, yet the reach of said companies makes them sell their consoles in said territory, but there is never any software available (or there isn't any supplies or that much demand) to sustain said consoles for the duration of their market, and instead some companies go mobile or just go the FUCK away from that country's market. The companies look at the numbers and they think how it would be nice to get those 1000 lost sales, so they enforce their rights by using DRM, hoping that the next game would sell better, but in the end it sells about the same and again they notice that there's 1000 illegal copies, but they assure themselves that without the DRM it would be 10000 illegal copies, so it must be working.
I don't recall I've never read about a game that would have had a sales boost because of DRM. I've heard lots about games that got DRM and didn't gain any more sales. Less piracy perhaps, at least for a day or two, but no impact on sales. I recently reaad about some soccer manager game, that had huge amounts of pirated copies around. The new version had strict DRM, but they didn't get that many new customers because of it, their sales were pretty much the same with their previous version.
If they wanted to end piracy, they should branch on already economy-stabilized countries so they flourish, fill their supplies and then expand with an international law that protects their property from future vandalization or any mishaps, but they just expand with no point of view of what actually is profit and what is not when they move into a certain location, especially if there weren't being any interested buyers or investors from the very beggining, since well, they don't cater to the market or they don't see profit on it as well.