There have been plenty of discussions about intrusive DRM, and how they aren’t beneficial to the anyone – gamers and publishers in the long run, but that doesn’t mean companies like Ubisoft will learn.
These companies use aggressive DRM to prevent people from pirating their games, but the problem is, it does not work.
There are companies that do get it though – like say, Valve. Or in this case, Naughty Dog. Jason Rubin, who founded Naughty Dog in 1984, shared his thoughts about piracy in an interview with Vivid Gamer, and I can pretty much say that, “he gets it”.
Naughty Dog has lost a lot of money to piracy, and he also mentioned an interesting thing he saw at a bazaar in Bangkok.
“I remember buying a $1 CD with all three Crash games at a bazaar in Bangkok, and I probably could have negotiated the price down if I had tried,” he revealed.
Now, it’s pretty disheartening for a developer to see his work cheapened like that, and available for anyone at that cost. It must have been a shocking moment for Rubin when he saw the amazing Crash games being sold for that cheap.
But what’s the point? He can’t stop it. No one can. And he realises that. “I think time will solve this problem for the industry,” he explained.
“Intrusive DRM is not the solution. It didn’t work for the music industry, it didn’t work for the movie industry, and it won’t work for the game industry. Luckily, it doesn’t have to,” he added.
“In the long run, digital distribution, servers, and cloud storage of data solve this problem. World of Warcraft has an extremely small piracy rate.
“There is no reason, in the long run, that games like CoD can’t be the same.”
These are pretty good analysis of what can be done to counter piracy. Ubisoft’s way is definitely not the solution here, but it will take a lot of time for such companies to understand.
If you’re wondering why Naughty Dog and Sony aren’t making Crash games any more, it’s because they unfortunately sold the IP to Activision (and also realize their mistake).
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