February 2nd, 2009

Brother None made a comment on the previous post about Gears’ DRM, and it was one I wanted to mention anyway.

Digital Rights Management is a fairly hot-button topic right now. Talking about it in a way that isn’t derogatory is like asking to be spat on by angry internet men. They have this list of things that they consider “totally unacceptable” about DRM, and they will not be silenced!!!

Luckily, I’m a contrary bastard. So I want to talk about how to do DRM right, and by right I mean do it in such a way that the public accepts it. It comes down to a simple understanding of human psychology.

Firstly, people are whiners. Especially on the internet, slight inconveniences get blown out of proportion into issues of life or death. If you can picture the biggest gossip circle of middle aged housewives in the world discussing something absolutely scandalous happening in their neighborhood, combined with the type of filthy gutter mouths found on 14 year old boys, well, you’re starting to come close to understanding the internet community. Add the lack of accountability of anonymous internet persona’s and it is out-of-control silliness at the best of times.

Right, so with that in mind, there is absolutely nothing you can do to introduce some sort of minor inconvenience into gamers lives without a huge amount of bitching. Nothing.

So how do you do it? Simple :

You just have to remember how to catch fish.

Because people are like fish. For all the complexity of the human mind, we still share some of the traits of our scaly friends. We like shiny things.

You see, fishing is essentially about convincing a fish that it wants to stick a sharp, painful hook into it’s mouth. Even though fish are instinctively cautious. You do this by wrapping the hook in something shiny and/or tasty. Fishy is never going to enjoy having a hook through it’s mouth, not ever. But you can convince it to bite anyway.

Right, so you were probably aware we were getting round to Steam, right? As BN pointed out, and as I discussed with a mate the other day, people seem to forget the huge uproar surrounding Steam when it was first released with HL2. A lot of the issues that people declare are “unacceptable” are just as valid concerns with Steam :

- You have to connect online to install. So you’re out of luck if you don’t have a net connection.

- If Steam servers die, you can’t install the game you bought with real money and supposedly own. So what happens when Valve dies as a company?

- Pirated copies of Steam games don’t suffer from this like legit customers do!

Personally, I remember when HL2 was released. I didn’t have a net connection capable of doing the registration/patch thing. So I was highly annoyed and didn’t buy it. A mate who was a HL fan did but had huge problems, the servers simply couldn’t handle the initial load and he couldn’t play the game he was desperate to for a day or so. Steam seemed like a terrible idea, and I wasn’t having any of it. Despite that uproar, the sheer brand power of HL2 made it a hit for Valve.

And time went on, and Valve chipped away at it. Steam got more stable. More games came out on Steam. Net connection speeds increased and line rental got cheaper in SA. I make much more money now. So when the Orange Box came out and I heard about this game called Portal I decided to pick it up. After all, I’d been bitten by the World of Warcraft bug a while back and played that for 8 months before quitting. After 8 months of downloading patches and paying monthly fees to play, a simple initial registration check seemed almost… irrelevant. Turned out there were a few large patches for Steam anyway, but still far less than an MMO. And Portal was wonderful. Wow, what a game, worth the entire cost and effort by itself, short though it was. Team Fortress 2 was neat as well.

And if you pay attention, the tide of public opinion on Steam is changing/has changed. Valve have turned their DRM scheme into an online distribution channel. Convenient browsing, a decent selection of games, cheaper prices. Bandwidth is plentiful for many, so for them digital distribution is super convenient. Steam is a success. And I predict it will simply get better and more accepted. In fact, come back in 10-20 years and I predict we’ll be using a similar model for most of our media consumption, movies, music, etc. We’re simply experiencing the birth pains of the shift to digital distribution as the primary method of media consumption, I reckon.

But let’s not get side-tracked with predictions of the future. The key thing is to analyze the Steam story. It’s launch was fairly unremarkable from any other DRM scheme : It met sheer outrage from the net community. But Valve did two things right, demonstrating their knowledge of how to “fish” for human beings.

First, they wrapped their “hook", their DRM scheme, in a tasty morsel. HL2 was one of the most anticipated titles of the time, and one of the most powerful brands in gaming. Combining the two was like promising a child a sweet treat for swallowing nasty medicine. A lot of people disliked Steam and the hassle, but did it anyway simply to play HL2.

Secondly, they worked to keep layering “bribes” on top of Steam, to keep people biting. If it had remained just a DRM scheme I doubt it would have been as accepted. But they worked to make it into a sales platform and distribution channel. Now there is a real tangible benefit to having this security app installed on your machine. And it provides a double benefit to Valve because they can use it for cheap advertising and promotions.

So, the lesson here is simple. People are never going to like DRM. In fact they will probably loathe it. The trick is to bundle it with something desirable. A bribe for swallowing down that jagged little pill.

(Insert Alanis Morisette music here)

Till next time, this is Gareth, King of the Goldfish, signing off.