Does DRM Prevent Piracy?
by Paolo on Dec.05, 2008, under Piracy
The creators of the “World of Goo” released their game without any DRM and it seems that their piracy rates were the same as another indie game “Ricochet.” The creators of Ricochet spent lots of time trying to crack down on Piracy by fixing exploits in their DRM system. What they found was that for every 1000 stolen copies they prevented, they generated 1 additional sale. This brings up the question of whether or not the additional man-power to create security (and inconvenience to honest customers) is worth the additional sales.
The only two approaches I think that are viable to combat piracy is to have no DRM with a considerably low price, thus increasing the number of sales, and creating content that is only accessible by having an Internet account such as access to patches and downloadable content accesible to legitimate accounts.
January 28th, 2009 on 3:26 pm
This is a good point. I once read that the CEO of Symantec said that piracy doesn’t really affect his company. He said something to the effect of: ‘The customers who want to buy our products are going to buy them, those who don’t want to aren’t our target customers.’
From a marketing standpoint, I wonder how many of those 1000 pirated copies of the game would have been purchased. And, how do you factor in customers you don’t target?