Quoting Clawdius_Talonious, reply 102They have tried to do that with the console industry, a hardware method of DRM. You can see how well it works when you can go out and buy an Xbox with an upgraded HDD and a ton of games and a mod-chip at the flea market. They're getting the PS3 to run pirated stuff according to reports I've read. Where there's a will there's a way, and unfortunately a lot of people have the will to play software they haven't purchased.
The PS3 was only cracked recently, and they still haven't got games running on it easily.
I think that's a rather successful story to be honest...how many years did it take?
I didn't say it wasn't effective, it's clearly effective. The fact is that, despite people who want the entire industry to migrate to consoles, there are always going to be PC gamers. The PC gaming market moves units in the tens of millions, consoles with an installed base of 3 million can hardly move 12 million units. And with consoles, the ultimate in hardware DRM technology, the publishers are still red in the face and complaining about projected losses. Because people buy used games. Ask Cory Ledesma, that's "cheating". And you'd better believe THQ is serious about punishing these cheaters by penalizing them in their ability to play the software they've legally purchased online.
And unfortunately with people like that in the industry, saying idiotic things, pirates don't just have their cake and eat it too. They feel morally superior while doing so because of the things on the other side of the isle.
My point wasn't simply that pirates will eventually crack anything for the same reason people climb mountains, it was more that there's already an entire industry built around finding the pinnacle of hardware DRM. How much time and money has been spent on DRM, if you could find me these figures I could probably find that the amount spent on DRM well exceeds the potential sales increases it may have offered. I can absolutely find examples of games that did poorly because of the DRM or anti-piracy techniques they implemented. How much better off would some games be if the publishers had dumped that money into the games themselves instead of DRM? How many QA workers could the cost of licensing DRM software hire? We'll never have the chance to find out, because we don't live in that world.
Of course, there are some who've seen the light and instead of trying to take vengeance on their customer base because of the perceived potential for wrongdoing amongst a subset that is largely comprised of young people who don't have any money, realize that they would really only be hurting customers, as they're the only ones honest enough to run unadulterated code. Thankfully Stardock is one such company, offering me rewards for being a good customer, and not punishing me for something someone else did.