I often described the ruckus generated by DRM for games (see Game and DRM or Spore and the DRM fury). Yesterday, I discussed with some French game editors. Their position was rather negative. According to them, game protections are today too weak. The result is that soon patches are available on P2P to defeat the protections. The paradoxical outcome is that honest customers who purchased games suffer of the constraints imposed by the game protection (for instance, checking the presence of a physical disc in the drive…) whereas dishonest users have the game without the constraints.
Using game theory (see the DRM game)), the winning strategy would be to steal the game! Thus, to change the winning strategy, there seems to be two possible solutions:
- Make more robust DRM
- Make DRM that are transparent to the customers but not to the dishonest users
Currently, I do not see this trend.