I don't post inflammatory topics often, so please stay with me on this. I have just been thinking about what I'd do if I owned EA.

First thing I'd do would be to wipe our DRM. Hurrah, the world is saved. There's no more of the nastiness, no more feeling that you are a problem because you bought their product. All the DRM hells are gone.

I thought to myself, at this point, I'd love to believe in society, but at this point, piracy would just go fscking mad.

The trend would flow, suddenly games are for free (as people perceive it), and it's a free for all. I think simply removing DRM would be very destructive. It's a bit like the London riots, where people didn't care about the rioting, they just saw "free stuff".

THE QUESTION:
So I wonder, how should the industry go about disarming the DRM culture, without simply justifying it.

Don't know about UK, but as far as I know, people do that ANYWAY, and only those who do care about games or industry, or simply know how much work is it to make one, pay for games.

I do not doubt that. I'm not refering to the few, I'm referring to the masses. This is more a social engineering thread of how to cope with the bigger problem.

It's all very well to say DRM is bad. However what's not so clear is what will happen if DRM is removed. I worry that the results would appear to prove DRM successful.

Regardless of what you'd do, there'll always be self entitled knobs with a slew of excuses ready to help themselves.

Maybe put the initial effort into lowering game prices, since in this alternate universe you own EA and wouldn't have to answer to any pesky shareholders ☺

This is NOT a piracy thread in itself. We've had those. I want to focus on the original question. How do you remove DRM without justifiying it?

I think a lot of the problem is that the cost of new games to many is higher then their "perceived value". Sixty dollars is a high investment for a game that you may or may not enjoy. I know that steam itself is a form of drm, but in my opinion it's drm done as well as I see possible right now.

GOG and cdproject go a long way in fixing the "perceived value" of games. The witcher 2 being drm free is just icing on the cake. When I bought it from target, I was astounded at all the extras that were offered. (making of videos, music cd, etc...) Cdproject red knew the drm would be cracked so they offered incentives to make consumers want to buy the game and not pirate it.

I commend cd project red and GOG for their efforts in keeping customers first.

Information, education, marketing. Just in the same way as informing/educating people about the bad effects of alcohol works better than trying to prohibit it. Bring the bad effects of piracy into the user's conscience, short-term (risk of malware) as well as long-term (deprivation of the games one likes to play because no one wants to finance them any more). Reward legitimate customers with loyalty bonuses. Use social media to create a movement of people who advocate buying products instead of pirating them. Make it fun to be a part of this community, there are lots of possibilities.

I actually believe that this would be a more efficient method for combating poracy than the current strategy. But the problem is that the main goal of the game producers is not reducing piracy, but maximizing profit. For that goal, increasing control over one's product is extremely helpful. The fact that increased control may also reduce piracy a little is just a welcome alibi.

Start sponsoring Jersey Shore..? Maybe have one of those guys start a fight after someone pirates something. Brainwashing complete.

/edit: Therefore in a world without DRM there would be little piracy because the people who'd think no-DRM is equivalent with free had heard a person they admire/can relate to say that it's not cool. :p

Perhaps if we took the format of ending the posts:

Therefore in a world without DRM there would be little piracy because...

You are correct, however that is not reason to stand still. I disagree with your answer -it might help to make my own personal protest, however I feel that we need to be more united in this fight. It's ironic that the fight against DRM is also the fight against piracy.

The reason I created this thread was from a simple realisation that as much as we might chastise a company for having DRM, we give them no financial justification to remove it.

There wouldn't be little piracy. Piracy would pretty much remain as it is, but customers wouldn't get harassed. In the world of far lower prices for digital distribution and slightly higher prices for boxed copies with physical goodies, as it should be by the way, well that might reduce piracy.

In a world without DRM, there'd probably be just as much piracy, but a lot less pissed off customers. Or if you want to put a positive spin on it: happier, and maybe even more numerous, customers.

In a world without drm, the amount of piracy would remain relatively constant.

DRM providers would market hard to show how their product, and its cost, would maximize shareholder return, and managers would go through the cyclic motions of their predecessors, implementing and removing various schemes.

Corporations chase the holy grail, and waste tons of money, tying to maximize profit, instead of just taking a reasonable return on investment, and moving forward with it.

Why would there be little piracy in a DRM-free world? I would assume it would remain the same, maybe some minor change.
-goes to pirate site- Yep, all those DRMed-up games are available. Weird that people are willing to pay for things that are available for free.

What piracy may increase would be casual piracy, there may be more people copy-pasting the game files onto their friends computers than there are now. That's about it.
On the other side, I think we all know there are people who wont buy games with DRM. So now those people would be buying games that they otherwise wouldn't be. In addition to that, the "Rental game, rental price" people who only buy games when they reach <$10 or so, they may now be willing to pay a higher price.

Anyway, whether piracy would increase or decrease is irrelevant. If piracy were to increase 100X in a DRM-free world, but profits increase by 10X I'd consider that a good thing, even if there are more pirates.