Comments on: DRM Ruining the PC Gaming Industry

By: Jan Martin Mathiassen

Jan Martin Mathiassen — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 08:58:29 +0000

I am in wholehearted agreement, and I have literally just had enough. I’ve stopped buying games from now on, and I’ve written an open letter to the gaming industry (or more specifically the games publishers) so that if there are anyone accusing me of not buying games, that I’m just a pirate.

http://invasive_drm.mindriot.as/open_letter_to_the_gaming_industry.html

I don’t expect this to have any effect whatsoever, but I suggest that we all do this if we seriously do not appreciate having drivers installed into our OSes behind our backs, limits put upon how we can use our legally purchased software etc. Otherwise they’ll just keep on making it worse and worse to be a legal customer.

By: Øyvind Hauge

Øyvind Hauge — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 12:00:08 +0000

I suspect the commet by Christian Olsson to be spam but I let it pass to allow anyone to read about ByteShields plans to take over the copy protection world.

Personally I think copy protection is a waste of money and I wish companies like ByteShield didn’t have to exist. I prefer making the customers wanting to pay for something rather than preventing them from using it. I am maybe naive but at least try to provide the customers with some bang for their bucks,

I do not hope the future involves copy protection which needs more CPU and GPU power than the games themselves. However, I do not encourage piracy, so stop that download right away and give them game developers which make great games their hard earned money.

By: Øyvind Hauge

Øyvind Hauge — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 18:37:47 +0000

I found this article which discusses some of the same things as I do. Unfortunately it is in Norwegian. The bottom line is however that DRM is bad for the business because piracy provides 'better' products (not infected with DRM).

By: Christian Olsson, ByteShield, Inc.

Christian Olsson, ByteShield, Inc. — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:36:40 +0000

Thank you (takk) Øyvind for a great blog article on DRM/Copy Protection.
My name is Christian Olsson and I work for ByteShield, Inc., a PC game/PC application software copy protection company.

Would you have a different view if copy protection didn’t negatively impact honest users and actually gave them more benefits?

The main issue is that current DRM/Copy Protection solutions for PC games and PC applications lock the game/software to one computer and make it difficult to move it. End users should be able to install the game/software on an unlimited number of computers and keep on adding installations, as hardware changes or system crashes etc. occur. The real item to control is not the number of installations; it is how many of these installations can be used, at the same time.

For more information see the whitepaper ”Is Anti-Piracy/DRM the Cure or the Disease for PC Games?” which can be downloaded at http://www.byteshield.net/byteshield_whitepaper_0005.pdf.