Counting Rupees: Digital Rights Madness

Each week Jeff Engel and Geoff Brooks contribute Counting Rupees, a column on the business behind gaming:

When EA announced that Spore and Mass Effect (PC) would have a DRM program that did performed online verification every 10 days, it generated a massive backlash amongst the gaming community. Many people, who were originally excited about Spore and Mass Effect, now claimed that they would not purchase the games, solely because of the DRM. To be honest, I'm no fan of DRM either. It basically treats all legal customers as potential criminals, and seems futile anyway, as anyone with an internet connection can typically find ways around the DRM. The only people it probably deters are those with little technical savvy and who just want to share a game they bought with their friends and family. The amount of actual sales that would be lost to this is probably pretty limited. With all that said, I'm glad that EA has backed off this new DRM and scaled it back to just an initial online verification. Given the current state of PC gaming as well as the traditionally more "accepted" versions of DRM (like the initial online verification), however, I didn't find this new DRM to be all THAT much worse, particularly with some slight improvements to it, such as allowing a manual verification and extending the timeframe for re-verification slightly (say, to 30-60 days instead of every 10).

The reason for this has a lot to do with what's been going on with PC gaming in the last few years. While the "death" of PC gaming has been talked about for years, it isn't quite here. The landscape is just shifting. While the total NPD sales for each year has been decreasing, other avenues of making money have been developed. For instance, subscription-based games (mostly MMOs, but also games available on GameTap), cheaper more casual downloadable games (eg, PopCap Games), and even free, ad- or feature-driven games (eg, Dungeon Runners, Battlefield Heroes, Quake Zero) make up an ever increasing portion of PC-based revenue. Thus, the actual retail sales are taken up mostly by a few casual games, MMO starter kits or expansions, and maybe the occasional shooter or RTS game. Take, for example, the most recent NPD PC numbers for the week of May 4-10:

1. The Sims 2 Kitchen & Bath Interior Design Stuff
2. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe
3. World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest
4. The Sims 2: FreeTime
5. World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade
6. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
7. World Of Warcraft
8. Sins Of A Solar Empire
9. Hoyle Card Games 2008
10. Warcraft III Battle Chest

Seven of the top ten games on the list could probably be classified as either "casual" or as an MMO. The other thre games include an FPS that's also available on consoles (and sold far more on them), an old RTS associated with the extremely popular World of Warcraft, and a new, positively reviewed RTS. While FPS and RTS games will probably always maintain some popularity on the PC, particularly when hugely popular developers like Valve and Blizzard continue to make them, the MMOs and casual games have begun to dominate the PC arena. Outside of The Sims, which will continue to do well (and basically uses several retail expansion packs as its "subscription" model), it seems like most PC gaming requires some kind of online component now. That's not to say that every game has some sort of multiplayer component to it, but playing an MMO, browsing over to Desktop Tower Defense, or maybe just downloading the latest game from PopCap Games, all require internet connections.

Which is why, when I saw the newest DRM-scheme, it didn't seem like such a massive extra burden to me. When a publisher's game doesn't have a centralized multiplayer component that could help prevent piracy (like an MMO), it's bound to try and find a scheme that reduces it as much as possible. In an ever-increasingly online, connected world that can support 10 million WoW players (as well as players of other MMOs), it probably just seemed like it made sense to use that online component to try and keep people honest for their own more single-player oriented games. Sure, there is going to be a subset of people that probably couldn't play the game without a hassle, but for the seeming majority of the current PC gaming public, it probably wouldn't be that much bigger of a deal than, say, Steam having to register and unlock my retail copy of The Orange Box. That being said, the less obtrusive and more transparent DRM is to the end user, the happier I'll be.

As co-editors of A Link To The Future, Geoff and Jeff like to discuss, among many other topics, the business aspects of gaming. Game companies often make decisions that on their face appear baffling, or even infuriating, to many gamers. Yet when you think hard about them from the company's perspective, many other decisions are eminently sensible, or at least appeared to be so based on the conditions at the time those choices were made. Our goal with this column is to start a conversation about just those topics. While neither Geoff nor Jeff are employed in the game industry, they do have professional backgrounds that are relevant to the discussion. More to the point, they don't claim to have all the answers -- but this is a conversation worth having. You can reach them at