Yup, it’s another RPS link, this time about a studio head reiterating that DRM doesn’t really accomplish much.  However, the comments thread sums it up even better, mentioning how it comes down to a simple principle: in an industry with almost entirely up-front costs and little to no manufacturing or distribution costs, the only thing that matters to the bottom line is sales volume (specifically, enough volume to offset your development costs and make a decent profit).  You can prevent a hundred thousand pirates from copying your software, but that won’t get you a single cent more in revenue (and unlike in a physical products business, companies can’t write off theoretical product losses, so there is no benefit to your books that I can see from cracking down on piracy – it’s an additional development cost with no obvious compensatory attractiveness that would lead to more sales and profits).  The only way for your game to bring in more revenue is to get more people to buy it – and that means putting your corporate focus on making excellent games and giving your customers reasons to like your company rather than hate it.  The only profitable conversion would be from pirate to paying customer, and DRM will rarely motivate that kind of behavior – in fact, what few pirates it might convert would doubtfully even offset the loss in revenue from customers turned off by DRM and denying what would otherwise be very likely sales (I can attest to this: Ubisoft, for instance, would probably have at least $50 more revenue had they not taken games I wanted and hobbled them with their nonsense DRM).  The point is, including more DRM and hassles for legitimate customers simply isn’t a sound business decision, and may actually detract from strategies that could bring in more customers and higher revenue.  I’ve discussed that ad nauseum in previous posts, though, so I’ll leave it at that.

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