Gamasutra just got thru publishing an article about DRM and how it’s implemented on PC games. The 3 page report mostly shares views from Ron Carmel, co-founder of 2D Boy as well as Brad Wardell, president and CEO of Stardock. These two discuss how DRM is in-effective for PC gaming, with their thoughts on Spore’s DRM outlash and more.
As a result, both 2D Boy and Stardock intend to ship without DRM and they suspect the rest of the industry won’t be too far behind them.
“DRM is a waste of time and money for us,” says Carmel. “It takes time to wrap the game in DRM and you have to pay the DRM provider a percentage of your revenue. Not only doesn’t it work but, ironically, if your game gets cracked, then the person with the cracked version has a better gaming experience than the person with a legit version who has to enter a registration code to play.”
And so, when 2D Boy shipped its first game, “World of Goo,” in October, there was no DRM aboard.
“People have actually written to tell us how much they appreciate that,” Carmel recalls. “Even though they hadn’t intended to buy the game, they bought it just to support us. So there’s an element of good will involved in not using DRM too.”
