Has it always been like this?

The term DRM, which has been in gaming news quite often lately, is a relatively new one for gaming.  The concept of DRM, on the other hand, is nothing new at all.  DRM in games has been around as long as I can remember, though it used to go by the far more honest term “copy protection.”

Back then, the concept was simple: the user buys a game, and it’s theirs.  The only thing the company asks in return is that you don’t copy it to give to anyone else.  As many game publishers as there were, that was how many different methods of copy protection you were likely to run into.  Some were clever, some were crap, and almost all of them could be easily circumvented in some way.  Let’s take a look back at how some various games handle the idea of DRM way back when…

PACK INS

The Wasteland: Wasteland, spiritual ancestor of Fallout and one of my first (and favorite) PC RPGs.  Set in the post-apocalyptic deserts of Nevada, you created a team of hearty Desert Rangers to keep the peace and fend off evil (which often came in the shape of mutants or robots.  Possibly mutant robots).  The copy protection system on Wasteland was unique; during the course of your adventures, as you entered new areas or encountered important story scenes, the game would prompt you to check a numbered paragraph (Paragraph 22, for instance).  At this point, the gamer would look in the cleverly titled “Paragraph Book” that came with the game, find the appropriate number, and read.  The paragraphs were usually richly written descriptions of events that would have been far more text than the game could handle, so it served both an story-telling and mechanical purpose.  The paragraphs would often tell you were you were supposed to go next, or contained passwords needed to enter certain areas; if you didn’t own the game, you probably didn’t have the paragraph book, so you were missing out on all the info.  And these were pre-internet days, so there was no hopping online and downloading someone’s text file of the whole thing, either.

Additionally, the paragraph book warned users not to read straight through the whole thing in order not to ruin the story.  But to make it even more devious, their were numerous fake paragraphs that were never actually referenced by the game; reading straight through the book would give you fake locations, fake passwords, and there was even a whole series of paragraphs that told an entire alternate tale to the game.

Ultima VII: While it would seem downright obscene to pirate a game based on upholding virtue, Origin still felt compelled to throw a little ownership check into this seminal RPG.  Early in the game, in order to leave the first town, the mayor decides to check whether you really are the Avatar or not by giving you a quiz on Britannian geography. The questions were simple; just provide the name of a place at certain coordinates, or vice-versa.  The answers to these questions could easily be found using the lovely painted cloth map that came with the game.

The map, and various other little knick-knacks that came with most of the Ultima games were known as “feelies.”  The trend started with Infocom, and continued on with other companies.  Often these were just neat little trinkets for the buyer to enjoy, but in some cases, such as with Ultima’s maps, they served dual purposes.  The maps was a nice piece of the game’s world, but it also served as copy protection as well as just being plain useful for finding out where you were in Britannia.

While Wasteland and Ultima VII are obviously just two games out of countless numbers that came out in the olden days, they do demonstrate what was often a common factor of copy protection schemes from back then: they added something to the game.  Wasteland’s paragraphs added rich description to the game world, and was a fun read in its own right; Ultima’s map was both a nice souvenir as well as a useful in-game aid.  Space Quest IV had a fantastic fake magazine that came with it, and so on with many other games.  Granted, for every one of these old games with clever, fun copy protection methods, there were just as many that had irritating “1st word in paragraph 2 of page 14!” quizzes every time you started the game.  On the up side, at least that meant the game came with an actual manual and not just a PDF you were expected to print out yourself…

SERIAL NUMBERS

Somewhere in the mid-nineties, a new force came on the copy protection scene: Serial numbers and CD Keys. I don’t recall which game I first played that forced me to enter one of these lovely strings of 16 digits (or more!), but I have a vague recollection of it being Command & Conquer.  Pretty soon, almost every game you bought had a serial number either on the back of the CD case or the back of the manual.  Yes, they were annoying to type in, but you only had to put them in one time when you installed the game, and that was that.  Of course, if you wanted to reinstall the game somewhere down the line and lost your serial number, you were out of luck.  Overall, though, it was a pretty simple system that didn’t really add anything to the games, but didn’t really have a negative impact.

MODERN DRM

In the early 2000s, things started to change.  File sharing (mostly of music, at first) was raging, stores were starting to make piles of money off used game sales, and game companies were aiming to fight piracy at every turn.  Somewhere out of all these came the new-fangled term of “DRM,” or Digital Rights Management. Right off the bat, you can see that this was representing a sea change; copy protection was a simple concept: don’t copy the game.  Digital Rights Management is a vast, broad reaching term that implies that you, as the gamer, have certain rights granted to you, but that companies have the power to manage them as they see fit.

Some of the earliest forms of this new realm of DRM were serial numbers that dialed home; that is, instead of just checking internally if a serial was valid, the program would check in with a server somewhere in corporate headquarters and make sure the serial was valid.  This, of course, meant you needed to be online when you installed the game to get it validated.  This also meant that the server needed to be up and running on the other end in order to let you play.  The flaws with this particular method were encapsulated nicely by the launch of Half Life 2 and Valve’s Steam service.  The day the game launched, as thousands of people tried to validate all at once, the servers went down in a flaming heap.  This, as you might imagine, made a lot of gamers quite mad.

Another very popular form of DRM has been the dread SECURom, a form of protection designed to validate that the disc the game is being played from is indeed a proper, non-copied disc.  This sounds good in theory, but in practice SECURom has the rather irrtating habit of sucking up your computer’s memory, as well making itself nigh impossible to remove from your system. Very thoughtful of the companies to inflict that on their paying customers.

The latest pinnacle of DRM in gaming has been with the recently released Spore by EA.  I will not go into the full extent of its crimes against customers, as I’m sure you’ve heard about them quite in-depth already, but the game uses multiple DRM methods, including SECURom, as well as limited user accounts, to more or less make itself a pain for purchasers.

And therein lay the flaw in modern DRM methods: they tend to hurt paying customers.  In the days of old, copy protection methods could be annoying, but as shown, many were novel attempts that actually added to the games.  The methods used these days are designed not only to essentially reduce a paying customer to a renter, but to actually cause aggrivation to those that have shelled out good money on a product.  People who pirate these games will still find ways to do it, and they will run into less trouble than someone who bought it legitimately.

My suggestion is that companies need to take a good long look at finding ways to create incentives to buyers to actually purchase games as opposed to useless methods that hurt customers.   If someone knows that $50 will get them not only the game, but perhaps also a nice pack-in like a “handmade” map or an Encylopedia Frobozzica, they are far more likely to shell out that $50.  And I’m not talking about $100 “Collector Editions,” I’m talking about the regular everyday versions.  I know it’s far easier for the game companies to write off PC gamers as a bunch of liars and theives rather than put any effort into fixing the problem, but that’s my take on it.  The answers they seek lay in their own past; they have simply chosen to forget it.