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Eurogamer’ Rob Fahey posted a grat examination of DRM, with a bit of critics over the recent Riccitiello’s outing about it

Adam Swiderski wrote on his A History of Copy Protection on Next Generation:

And then, there’s the interesting case of Stardock, makers of strategy titles Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire. Stardock has taken the bold stance that it does not plan to take any steps beyond the use of a unique serial number to copy-protect its products, a decision that has endeared it to fans but that famously led a StarForce forum moderator’s posting of a link to a site where an illegal copy of Galactic Civilizations II could be easily downloaded. The game has sold well despite its lack of defense against piracy, but one has to wonder whether such a strategy would work for a larger publisher producing more mainstream titles.

His article is a balanced analysis about how many nuisances copy protection introduced to legitimate users, so I don’t get this paragraph. Copy protection is supposed to help products that don’t have a well perceived niche and adoption by the mainstream so that, on the first opportunity, people prefer to steal them instead of buying them?

If that product would be something non-digital, like a teathaer play, a musical or even a beer, do you really think it will get produced in the first place? I think not. Most of the so-called piracy phenomenon is a mix of majors willing to shift the market on consoles (more profit due to higher prices and first party founding), the inability to innovate and the skewed perception (dropped by the whole entertainment market almost 5 years ago) that there’s a so called mass market for digital entertainment (niches are more resilient and profitable because you have to fill up specific demands instead half-backed of generic needs, that’s why TV series proliferate and movies on TVs don’t fare too well anymore).

You can only spoon-fed the masses so much before them will start to do something else, like renting a €1 serie episode on your gaming platform of choice, instead of playing the same old, pricey rehash of a game that will cost up to 70 times more and won’t scale proportionately in terms of “user time”.

Good News: MS will release a tool to sort out the stupid DRM lock that links XBLA downloads to the HD where the game is downloaded. This also means that all the people screwed by transfer bugs when migrating to the 120GB HD will have their stuff back.

Bad News: these people may not have everything they buought back because MS, to sort out with the shortcomings of the XBLA Marketplace (a long, textual list of titles is not the better way to showcase anything), will start to trim underpreforming games from the XBLA catalog. For underperforming, they mean:

• Games with less than 65 Metacritic Score
• Games with a conversion rate less than 6%

There’s no word if people who bought those games will have their money back, looking at how MS handled the MSN Music fiasco, I bet they will have to bite the bullet or wait for a fix coming in the next few years…

The delisting of games, albeit how mediocre they are, is yet another hit to the approach to games as culture. Publishers can’t see outside the immediate profit and can’t come out with a publishing system that promotes the sales of games on the long run: newer books or DVD sales are not hurt if old classics are still on the shelves at cheap prices. Most of the time the old cheap titles are a great way for publisher and authors to continue to earn money, since despite the lowest price, all production costs have been already recovered and all the publisher has to spend is the cheap printing process (less than 1$/1€ for DVDs, books are still a lot costly) and then let someone else distribute them for prices as low as 5/10€.

Seeing as publishers treat games, I must state that they are the first to think that games doesn’t deserve a standing exposition: the anxiety for the shelf space, the distrust for the second-hand market and for titles that are made to sell over long periods of time, all those symptoms leave few space to the hope for a durable media that won’t have the memories and traditions of a goldfish.

At least, thanks to the greed of most publishers, today old classics are re-released just to avoid that they will become public domain due to copyright expiration…

Well, sooner or later  someone should have to cope with an online music store closing its doors, including the DRM authorization servers.

According to Boing Boing, the first one will be the MSN Music store.

So users will see their music files completely unlocked? No way! People will lose the rights to listen to their music, wasting all the moneys spent! That’s the real problem of DRM and Digital Delivery in general: you pay at street price the rights to use something you don’t own and that is highly dependent on the seller’s economic health or future business plans. If they decide to ditch the music distribution (as for MS), you are basically screwed.

Let’s hope that the foreseeable class action resulting from this outrage will sort out the DRM war forever.