Do the death throes of music DRM mean anything for games?
It's not exactly been the loudest revolution of all time - in fact,
it's been so quiet that you might have missed it - but there has been a
genuine revolution in the music industry in the last fortnight. The old
order has been overthrown, and it isn't happy; a new, upstart approach,
widely lauded by the public and the grass-roots, is taking its place.
So far, it's been a bloodless coup, although it's hard to say how long
that will last once the financial results start filtering through in
the coming quarters.
Actually, it's not entirely true to say that this coup has been
bloodless. There's one head rolling in the basket beneath the
guillotine blade; it's ugly, unloved, and it's called DRM.
DRM, of course, is something most people in the videogames market will
be familiar with at this stage. At its most basic level, DRM is just a
concept - it's the idea of using encryption software to control what a
user can do with a piece of media they've bought from you.
For companies treading out into the great unknown of downloadable
content, DRM is a comforting safety blanket to clutch at; without it,
you're giving someone a file which they could easily just pass on to
one of their friends.
Needless to say, that scares companies involved in digital downloads
witless - and a plethora of DRM solutions have popped up to reassure
them that they're not just handing their whole business over to
pirates. That's the first problem; none of those DRM solutions actually
work with one another properly. You can't download music from the
iTunes store and play it on a Microsoft-compatible music player, or
vice versa.
That feeds into the second problem - a great, whopping, huge problem
with DRM and indeed, with a lot of ham-fisted copyright protection
efforts in general. Quite simply, DRM takes rights away from consumers
which they are used to having with other products.
A CD has no DRM; you can sell it to someone else, you can copy it to
your PC and play it on any media playing software, you can rip it to
any portable music device, you can copy tracks from it to make a mix-CD
for a friend.
Now, some of those uses aren't legal, and some of them even the courts
seem unsure about in some jurisdictions, but that doesn't actually
matter. From a real-world, grass-roots user perspective, those are the
things you can do, and do easily, with a CD. You can do the same
things, of course, with pirate MP3s which you download illegally.
Herein lies the rub - you can't do those things with legal,
DRM-protected music. Which means that, in a bizarre twist, legal music
has less actual value to consumers than illegal music.
Which is why, to a large extent, this old order had to fall. EMI was
the first of the big four music companies to buckle; it's launching its
music catalogue, without DRM, on stores like iTunes in the near future.
Now Universal looks like it's falling in line, with a deal with Amazon
to do likewise. The remaining firms, Sony and Warner, simply cannot
resist the trend which their two competitors have started. Music DRM
will inevitably collapse like a row of dominoes.
Why? Because eventually, it had to sink in that DRM wasn't just
angering geeks with blogs - it was hurting customers, and it was
providing them with a clear, logical and genuinely sensible reason not
to buy legal music. All of the threats of legal action and cajoling
appeals to people's better nature are meaningless if, at the end of the
day, your legal product is significantly crippled compared to the
illegal (but easily obtainable) alternative.
And as to the relevance of this decision to the videogames market?
Well, it's both more and less relevant than it appears at first glance.
A number of commentators - mostly out in the blogosphere - have opined
that this decision must, logically, have a knock-on effect on games and
movies. That's not necessarily true, because those mediums (and games
especially) actually come with very different consumer expectations to
music.
The average consumer is very used to the idea of being able to rip his
music, listen to it on multiple devices, copy it between formats and
even shuffle it around to create personal playlists. Those
expectations, however, don't exist for games, and only exist for a very
small (but growing) number of movie consumers.
Games, in particular, are seen as products which only work on one
device, which cannot be copied and cannot be modified. Under those
circumstances, DRM is far less of an issue than it is with music, and
the same pressures which have forced the hands of EMI and Universal
simply don't exist.
However, the revolution in music DRM still has important lessons for
the videogames market. All too often, videogames companies have
displayed a willingness to impose copy protection measures on their
software which actually seriously disadvantage or inconvenience
legitimate purchasers of the product.
On the PC, in particular, copy protection has often been mismanaged to
the point where playing a pirate version of a game can sometimes be a
better experience - and the advent of networked consoles opens up the
potential for similar mistakes to be made.
The core lesson to take away from the failure of music DRM is simple.
Copy protection should inconvenience pirates - but never, ever at the
expense of also inconveniencing legitimate, paying customers.
Failing at that key test is what drove the groundswell of dislike
against music DRM and the companies who imposed it. Their failures
should be foremost in the mind of games industry professionals as the
market pushes increasingly into digital downloads and concerns over IP
protection grow louder than ever.
(Gamesindustry.biz)
Mstation Games Review
Fri, 04 May 2007