How the fight to stop piracy can backfire

With EA's new game, SimCity coming out relatively soon everyone is talking about DRM, or "data rights management". DRM is an attempt by software developers to keep piracy rates low, by restricting how/when you can play or install the game. Most games with DRM require you to be online, with your internet connected and logged into a special account linked to the game to play or install the game, making it so you can't take the disk you just bought and install it over on a friend's computer so he can play too. Obviously, this can have some pretty negative effects on your gaming experience even if you are playing the game completely legitimately. For instance, if you don't have any access to the internet you can't even play the single player versions of the games, or if your internet dies you can lose all your saved data, which can be extremely frustrating.

Well, this inconvenience is obviously just something that we need to put up with, otherwise piracy rates would just skyrocket, right? Wrong.

It turns out that almost every time a company has enacted strict DRM it's had almost the opposite effect. EA is one of the companies that best known for their restrictive DRM, and their games consistently take the record for the most pirated games ever. Spore, Mass effect 3, Dragon age 2, etc. All these games have had 100,000 + pirated copies downloaded off of sites like bittorrent and thepiratesbay.

The problem is that it's relatively easy for a computer savvy pirate to go into a game and disable the restrictive DRM . What this means is that the copy you can download off of piratesbay doesn't have any of the annoying problems you get with the legal copy, you can play it offline, you don't lose your saved game if your internet runs out, and you don't need to sign into extra accounts so it will generally run even faster than the original copies. Basically, the version of the game that you can get for free is even better and way more convenient than the version that EA expects you to pay 60$ for, so when that is taken into consideration it's no surprise that so many people choose to pirate the game.

You would expect EA to have learned their lesson by now. Most other game developers like Valve, Ubisoft, and Bethesda that used to enforce strict DRM quickly learned that it does more harm than good, and are either making it much less invasive or scrapping it altogether. Oddly enough, EA seems to have taken the opposite approach with their new version of SimCity coming out in March, with even more restrictive DRM than we're used to seeing from EA. Hopefully they'll listen to everyone and scrap the DRM before the release date, because it seems to me like it's a losing situation for everyone.