Every Monday the LeftStickRight team will take on a different topic surrounding news or interesting topics about games or the gaming industry and open it up for discussion. Our three editors will give their perspective and you are welcome to give your own. Agree? Disagree?

The topic this week is: Has Digital Rights Management gone too far in games?

Ian H’s Take

Intellectual property is such a tricky subject. When you have something that you’ve created you want to protect that as best you can. With all the time, effort and money that is sunk into game development, we can’t fault publishers and developers from wanting a return on their investment. Sure, there is a certain nobility associated with the open source community in the gaming world, as well, but people do have to eat.

As of this moment I don’t believe that DRM has gone past any line. It dances on it at times, especially with the advent of the “you must always be online all the time” piracy protection method that is becoming more prevalent in the PC gaming market. The problem I see is that it is not really a “are you online?” check but “are you a pirate yet?” check, assuming that anyone who has not pinged their servers with valid information in the last few minutes must be stealing. It’s a retail equivalent of having escorts for every customer follow you around the store, continuously asking you to empty your pockets. Should you take to long to comply, you will be asked to leave the store. Obviously, that’s not a totally realistic metaphor, but that is how I perceive it at times.

The real measure of whether or not it has gone too far is not really for the target faithful to decide but rather the consumer at large. When measures are in place that cause enough of an outcry of frustration for those outside of the so-called “hardcore” markets is when this will end up becoming front page news and a serious concern for publishers. In the case of persistent internet connections, they must do checks and balances to determine that those without internet connections do not make up enough of a market to warrant any changes to that structure. If it were any different, it would be a bad business move. Perhaps it is in some cases, but no class action lawsuits have popped up yet.

When I buy a game, I’d like to believe that ten years down the road I’d still be able to throw it in and play it. It’s the case with all my games from 5 years ago or older. I must have installed some of my PC games on half a dozen computers a dozen or more times and I am still able to play them all. Given the scenario where that may not happen, I would likely shy away very quickly. Others perhaps not so much.

Ian Y’s Take

I don’t think DRM in games have gone too far yet. At the moment there is a happy medium between the interests of publisher and consumers. There are enough DRM measures to prevent rampant piracy and yet, for the most part when you buy a game you can do whatever you want with it. You can still lend it to friends, play it on different consoles and sell and buy used games.

The protection of intellectual property is an important issue and most people, including myself, will forgive any reasonable measures to do so. I also support some of the interesting initiatives to encourage the purchase of legitimate factory fresh games that we’ve seen recently such as time sensitive DLC bonuses. But I ‘m weary of the possible abuse of DRM to maximize revenue (primarily measures to thwart the sale of used games) as opposed to enforcing copyright law. I think that publishers will have crossed the line once their actions begin to infringe on someone’s ability to fully utilize their purchase. The moment I can’t take a game to a friend’s house or, under certain circumstances, access to some parts of a game could be restricted or unavailable; DRM has gone to far.

But all this talk about protecting intellectual property has given me an idea. Perhaps, for my own interests, I should embed some DRM in the features and reviews I write for the site. So from now on, any attempts to steal the content I generate will cause it to transform into meaningless ramblings about fries and references to obscure Canadian television shows. Oh wait, too late…

Tim’s Take

DRM is the price companies try to pay for operating on media that is moving faster than they are. Formerly, in the days of fewer connections and a slower spreading of information, all you had to do to prove you owned a PC game was enter the second green word in paragraph four of page 32 of the instruction booklet. The birth of RTFM.

However, as the Internet grew and the means and methods of pirating quickened, companies have tried to stem the flow of hacked code with increasingly complicated and imposing DRM. The fatal flaw, however, is that it’s a sucker’s bet. Companies don’t have to prevent millions of people from copying their code; they have to prevent just one. And when that one person does it — and they always will — the code is unleashable upon millions who don’t need to know how to beat DRM; they just need to know the right places to look. DRM through online servers may be a more successful, but they’re simultaneously denying products to consumers who can’t access those servers. Steam doesn’t work on dial-up. Believe me; I and my brick copy of Portal have tried.

Copyright protection needs to be considered from a different angle. Companies trying to stop pirating are like people trying to nail Jell-O to a tree; only when it doesn’t work they think all they need to do is invest in bigger hammers.