The Industries Dilemma

Piracy has always been an issue for developers of software, games and all other forms of piracy, but only within the past couple years have developers been able to take a more active role in controlling how their products can be distributed and used. The use of digital rights management (DRM) has I have mentioned before allows companies to put restrictions on the use of a product and allow for authorization of purchased or illegal products. Prior to the use of DRM, companies had to be very smart about how they would release their products to stores or they would have to just simply accept the fact that there would be people that would end up distributing their products in unwanted ways. With physical media it was all but impossible to control what happened to a product after it left a store, except for direct intervention on part of authorities. As computers became more popular in the late 90s, the rapid spread of all physical media into digital form made things even worse, but as mentioned, recently DRM technology has offered a solution to the problems of piracy, whatever the cost may be.


There are many types of methods of using DRM on games and it has become a necessary evil for many games. While it's usually only found in PC games, increasingly so, console games have begun using DRM as well. An interesting example of DRM being used in a non PC game would be the recent release of SOCOM Fireteam Bravo 3 and it's inclusion of an online mode that is accessible only upon activating the game with Sony's Playstation Network, which behaves similar to Apples iTunes, but for games. The strategy here is that only people who have purchased the game will be able to receive a code necessary to enable to online mode and those who have downloaded the game illegally would have no way of obtaining a code. The developers of SOCOM aren't the only ones to take measures like this. Capcom recently released Final Fight for the PS3 and it will only work if the player is connected to the internet at all times so that the game can be authorized as belonging to them. In this case though, Capcom apologized for doing so, because while DRM is becoming more common for games, many still see it as a slight against consumers, especially when it affects those that have purchased it legitimately.

When we see these things happen, we wonder how companies could justify this, but the numbers showing the rate of piracy give us an insight into how bad the problem really is. It is estimated by the Entertainment Software Association that around 10 million people around the world were pirating games in December of 2010 alone. This is also seen as being a very low estimate as it cannot accurately trace all users and other forms of downloading digital content. While most of the piracy was found in countries that have poor regulation against piracy and defending intellectual property, this relates heavily to the United States as well. With this extreme rate of downloading for just video games, developers have every right to be concerned with the amount of revenue that is lost by piracy of their games. So now that is acceptable for DRM to be pushed on to games more so than ever, this also creates a reliance on digital distribution of games, so with everything being digital it ends up being easier for people to pirate games once they have found out how to circumvent the existing DRM. With all of these conflicting issues, it's important that we find a compromise for both parties and find the most pain free solution to the problem.