Krypsyn, I don't think you missed the point completely, but you are having some arguments that don't take all the facts into account.

There's a fundamental difference between physical goods and digital information, which means that many, if not most, of the laws that have been applied to the former for centuries, make no sense for the latter. No matter what the industry might make you want to believe, software piracy isn't stealing, never was and never will be, and is a completely uncompareable act. Do both stealing and software piracy have the potential to create a monetary loss? Sure. But there are substantial differences to the crimes you compared it to; software piracy is copyright infringement, and you can much rather compare it to threatening or stalking. These are factually impreventable without severely cutting into the civil rights and freedoms of the population. As long as people have freedom of speech and the liberty to make phone calls, you cannot prevent threatening phone calls. As long as every person has the right to personal freedom, you cannot prevent stalking. That doesn't mean that they should not be prosecuted and penalised, but the matter is completely different. Likewise, the only way to effectively combat piracy would be one that severly restricts the freedom of speech and information for everyone - not just those who want to abuse it.

Which game (that anyone was bothered enough to crack, anyway) do you know that was not cracked within a few days after release? The longest I remember is GTA IV which was somewhere around 60 hours I think. Many titles are even cracked before release. I know that the games business is one where the majority of sales is extremely concentrated near the release date, and levels out soon, but I doubt that those couple of hours have a real impact.

I completely agree with you on this. But what I wanted to point out is that DRM does at least as much damage, and for what reason? The weakness of the PC platform, compared with consoles, especially regarding the growing audience of videogames, was always that it was so darn hard to get your games to work. That got a lot better over the years, from hacking your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to more modern Windows games where you could mostly get by with a simple software installation. This was the direction it should have taken, make it so that regular folks without much computer experience don't need help to play the game they bought. Today? Forget it! With all the additional shit you have to install, the online activations and such? Regardless of the state and trend for the PC platform, DRM is one of the main factors of how the industry makes things even worse, by restricting their target audience further.

Sure, that happens, but consider this: if I pirated the game, my net loss is maybe an hour of my time for unsuccessfully trying to get the game to run. If I bought it in the store, I threw out $50 because I can't play the game and I can't return it because the box is open. And good luck getting customer support for DRM-related problems. I have friends who tried that. Ran out of limited activations for a $60 game due to reinstalls and exchanged hardware, and had to call the hotline for a renewal. In the end, via his phone bill he practically paid for the game a second time, so in fact they just could have sold him a new copy. Way to treat your customers. It's exactly the same thing again. Harassing the people who actually paid for your product, while the pirates are care-free, or at least haven't lost any money.

I take a different standpoint there. Whether it's a one-time or session-wise connection, doesn't really matter to me. The line is where an Internet connection is required for single-player in the first place. The reason being that I rarely play games when they are really new, and even if I do I like to come back to them after several years. Internet requirements make that impossible.

To sum up, I don't disagree with that. I don't know if you just chose my post for the quotes and replied more generally, or whether you have misunderstood my standpoint. I never wanted to defend piracy. I am just annoyed at the fact that the way publishers handle it, they clearly make things even worse. The reasons for which I can only speculate about. But it's pretty much a fact.

I said the question of the functionality of DRM is moot because games will be copied anyway. That wasn't trying to justify piracy, it was trying to state a simple fact: all it takes for DRM to be broken is one person to do it, then it is cracked for everyone else, and no pirate will usually have problems with the game again. $200,000 seems to me to be an awful lot of money to spend on delaying some teenager's crack for 2 days. Second thing that I am pretty sure about: people pirate games because it means they get them for free. Sounds pretty obvious, but what I mean is that the focus is on the "free" part. Meaning that, even if a DRM would work and prevent the game from being illegally copied, do you really think these pirates would then go out to buy the game? Or would they just download another game that they can get for free. Take these two thoughts together and I ask myself: why do publishers spend so much money on a futile task and get frustrated, rather than spend it on trying to make a game that people simply MUST have in their collection? That they will want their own, real copy of, and not sell it to Gamestop after 2 weeks, simply because it is a great game to have? Or else they could just pocket the extra money, which I think would still be the better choice.

I remember an interview with Infocom in the 80s, where they said that they found their special packaging, with all the feelies and extras inside, was a much more effective copy protection system than technical, disk-based ones - because everyone wanted to have that cool stuff for themselves, not just a floppy! It might seem that this is a bad example since Infocom went out of business, but this was in their heydays when their games sold like crazy, and Infocom titles used to constantly make up at least half of the Top 10 sales charts every month. Quoting Wikipedia: "Whereas most computer games of the era would achieve initial success and then suffer a significant drop-off in sales, Infocom titles continued to sell for years and years. Employee Tim Anderson said of their situation, 'It was phenomenal—we had a basement that just printed money.'". That's because their games and products were so good, they continued to intrigue customers, while those that relied on technical features and lacked replayability, were replaced by the next batch of titles within months.

I want to repeat an example I have brought up a million times, because it illustrates my point so well (copied from another board, sorry for laziness): there is this professional mathematics software toolkit that is used everywhere in education, science, and research. It's ridiculously expensive. Luckily, as a student, you can get it for free becasue they offer licenses in cooperation with universities. But: you have to be permanently connected to the license server in order for it to work. I tried that once, and once only. I was working a while, until the program notified me that it lost contact to the license server, and that I should finish and save my work immediately because it was going to quit automatically in 15 minutes. Goddamn it, I had exams where I had to use that program! How cool would it have been for it to happen then? The result is: most every student I know opts to ignore the legal copy they are offered, and downloads a DVD image and serial number of the retail copy from a warez site. So the effect of the DRM is that potential customers, even if they could get the legal copy for free, prefer the pirated one because it is of higher quality. It doesn't take a lot to figure out that something's seriously messed up in the publisher's business concept there. That's what I was referring to all along. I don't know if publishers actually believe that DRM helps them in their fight against piracy. But they have to realise that the more annoying these schemes get, the more reason they give people to turn to piracy even if they didn't plan to.