Game Developer gets the idea over DRM

[IBBoard]

Having recently had a minor fight with the copy protection on Soulstorm, I found the ideas of one developer to be surprisingly sensible and refreshing.

Basically, he has said that any money that companies put in to stopping piracy is wasted because the pirates aren't really their target audience anyway. It goes against the normal RIAA line of "each pirated copy is a lost sale" but makes far more sense. If you're the target audience for the game then you either a) have the money and would buy a copy or b) don't have the money and so will either wait or pirate it because you can't buy it.

The Soulstorm copyright is a perfect example of why it doesn't work. Legitimate customer buys game, can't run it how they want because of copy protection, has to resort to getting a crack from the people that the copy protection is supposed to stop that took five minutes to find and was available within days of release. As it is then the CD key should catch the people who use pirated keys online, and the number of people like me who never play online are small and almost certainly aren't Relic's target audience.

The other example is Photoshop. I used to use a demo of PS7 for a long time, but there was no way I'd ever have paid the hundreds of pounds that Adobe asked for it. Now I just use Linux and The Gimp and don't really miss any of the Photoshop features, because most of it was overkill anyway.

Insightful, interesting, and if only more studios paid attention to it.