"All other things being equal" makes no logical sense in this context. If the piracy rate is reduced with "all else being equal", it means "all else other than the things which affect the piracy rate", otherwise how could the piracy rate change? Thus the statement "all other things being equal", by definition, excludes the "a" & "b" as stated earlier (those being the number of pirated copies and the units sold).

Maybe start by telling us what pro-DRM company you work for, and are being paid to post on forums.

What other motive would someone have to create a thread posting pro-DRM articles on the forum of an intentionally no-DRM store, and with the time and energy to try to convince its users to become more favourable to DRM... paid much?

All other things, like the total number of copies a+b, but that's beside the point. I agree with you about there not being a 1:1 piracy to lost sales ratio, so please calm down. It is entirely different though to say that there is not a substantial market for sales in pirates, as seen by the HADOPI paper for instance, which you've yet to adress, and the dozen papers or so that conclude piracy does displace sales (see the Danaher et al 2013 book chapter)

Hadopi study for all:
http://glt13-programm.linuxtage.at/attachments/106_2012-01-01_HADOPI-IFPI-Study_1.pdf

I mean as an extreme example, you would think there would be some lost sales in the absence of piracy, no? The question is of course how many, which is currently unknown, but we have some similar studies on music piracy.

Also, I suppose it was just a matter of time before people would ignore the arguments in the discussion and wonder about the motives. All I can say is that no, I am not an employee (hardly as most of my examples are anti-DRM) of...whatever central bureau of DRM you'd like me to be. Just a gamer, who one day realised he not only questioned why DRM existed and its effects, but also had access to academic publication and spent a couple hours writing a lazily referenced literary review on a Steam gaming forum. Ohh. I said Steam. I see pitchforks already. Does it help if I say own some awesome M and M games on GoG. Please don't burn me.

In any case, let's try to keep this civil, please, I've yet to insult you. If you do not want to read the linked critically peer-reviewed, published-in-reputable-journals-non-industry-funded papers then that's fine, I certainly don't care that you remain anti-DRM, on the GOG platform. I am more interested in finding the truth, if there is such a thing in this complex matter and would think people on GOG would have the most thought-out anti-DRM arguments, instead of shouting 'Yarr matey!' at the most opportune time, something RPS forum members like to do especially xd. And many Steam members too surprisingly.

So please, let's all enjoy some discussion, and I might even change my viewpoints and get some more material to my lit review (which I should really start to reference better at some point when I'm not playing games and responding to shill accusations). Chill the shill stuff, yo. Dude. Yeah. Yo.

rojimboo definitely seems a copyright troll. He cites a study about crap like HADOPI to state his meaningless bubble about DRM.

You know what are the final results of HADOPI? A single, 150-euros worth fine and a single user disconnected from the Internet. Wow, what a feat.

http://kingofgng.com/eng/2013/10/03/the-dirty-war-against-file-sharing/

Flagged to the GOG.com as a copyright troll.

So yeah. DRM and PC software industry. Please stay on topic. Thanks.

Since this is supposedly a thread about "DRM", it's funny that you bring up the HADOPI report which looked only at iTunes sales, which is DRM-free like GOG. In no way does it demonstrate the merits of DRM. People can download those MP3's from iTunes, and do whatever they want with it. They never have to authenticate with a DRM server (i.e. getting permission) to play their music, and they don't have to run a client to be able to listen to their music.

Hm, interesting. I doubt there were many that were unaware of iTunes in 2013 France, or that it did not have DRM. Rather, the price of piracy went up due to HADOPI as now, if they wanted to continue pirating they would have to setup a VPN, proxy and protocol encryption and start stalking usenet groups. All hurdles and hassles, some actually costing money. What it does show is that if the inequity between the pirated good vs the legit good is lowered, people will convert to a legit purchase. As it is dealing with the demand of piracy, like DRM, there are some parallels in terms of its economic mechanism too.

You are troll, stop bubbling about DRM and go away.

Maybe the starting point to preventing piracy is by understanding why people pirate games.

One reason used to be lack of availability of the physical product. Trying to get a hold of Freespace 2 is how I came across GOG and which resulted in my first digital purchase. Now that digital stores are the norm, they have an unlimited supply of product and so the shelves won't run dry. What could scupper this though is regional pricing, governmental censoring of games and technical issues such as publishers running out of product keys.

Then there are those who can't afford to buy games. It doesn't matter how much DRM gets added...those types of pirates are not going to pay for games. Maybe publishers feel better adding DRM just to spite such pirates at the cost of losing customers who don't tolerate excessive DRM (such as me), but I think those types of pirates should be pitied... being poor is punishment enough.

Which beings us to a 3rd category which may be what everyone calls "casual pirates": people who have the financial means to pay for games, but for reasons I don't fully understand, are reluctant to do so. Perhaps they only put value on physical goods. They won't steal a car, but they'd think nothing of pirating a game, a movie, a song, etc. So how do we get these types of pirates to understand that what they are doing is wrong, and that they need to pay for digital goods? Adding DRM may not be a good idea as all it does is make games appear to have even less value, and all the more reason for these types of pirates not to want to pay for them.

Personally, I don't mind a light version of DRM being used to discourage the 3rd category of pirates, such as registering once with the publisher via email (& hoping I don't get spam in return), providing them my name, and being sent a permanent activation key that when combined with the serial number and my name, can be reused to reactivate the game offline whenever I want to reinstall it. Publishers may feel this isn't enough to discourage casual piracy, as this method won't physically prevent games from being shared, but it would discourage piracy to a degree. For example, if your friends see you playing a game that's been registered to someone else, they're going to know you're a cheapskate. And you're less likely to want to share your own activation key with your friends, as then your name is going to appear on all their copies, giving you notoriety as someone who has no scruples... which is not something that contributes to one forging lasting relationships with people since you're clearly demonstrating that you don't appreciate the works of others, and you're not someone that can be trusted.

You know what's funny? If you google 'bubbling'. Images. Definitely images.

You see DRM as the enemy, but you don't wish to know about your enemy. You should strive to know as much about your enemy, unless you are willing to risk defeat.

One thing I miss most these days are demos. Some people first download pirate versions to try out a game and if they like it too buy them. Thus avoiding paying a lot for a game they won't like. DRM is actually annoying only for paying customers, this is why I stay away from anything ubisoft related or read for days about drm when buying a game. I really wanted for example the C&C collection but the always online drm scared me away. Also you can't compare games with music. Musicians usually can make a good living from concerts whilst game developers have no such options. On the other hand I haven't bought any music in the last 10 years because I consider the new stuff crap and listen to things which are several decades old.

The fanciest DRM should get is a mere cd key or cd key like protocol (non online authentication based). Anything past that and there is a good chance the game won't install proper or it interferes with networking abilities of the game (Anna and Neverwinter Nights come to mind). DRM does not stop piracy. It might stop an average PC user from merely installing the game on his buddies PC, but it won't stop torrent sites, hackers, and people with no cash who wouldn't buy the game anyway. This is my opinion, but I think if someone builds a compelling enough game, people will buy it in such quantities, the publisher wouldn't feel the loss of pirated games. More guessing on my part but I think there are more legitimate copies of GOG games out in the wild than there are torrented copies of GOG games.

One suggestion how to maybe make things a bit more transparent for the publisher when releasing a game with little to no DRM. There should be a method for putting in a unique identifier for each executable of the game that is distributed from a publisher and tied to a store distributer account (the end user would need some kind of store account to get the game no matter what), that way when a legitimate copy of the game does show up on a torrent site, the executable can be reverse engineered and then the unique identifier found which would then lead to the users account (from the store). Now keep in mind this method isn't full proof as it doesn't explain what happened to get the exe on a torrent site (it could have been someones computer hacked, stolen, misused by someone else).

Stop discussing piracy in a thread about DRM. DRM and piracy are irrelevant to each other. DRM doesn't stop piracy, so it's not a meassure against piracy. It doesn't matter how often companies repeat the "We need to DRM our games to protect us from piracy" bullshit. It's just a sorry excuse of a justification, because an honest "GTFO, we just don't want to see our games on second hand sales" would create very bad publicity.

DRM won't stop piracy. It never did. The only thing that'll stop piracy, is streaming. And no one wants that...

Offline mode with increased server-side content seem to work ok for some business models, like say Anno 2070.

Dare I mention always-online DRM of the currently fastest selling PC game of all time. You know what I'm talking about. Down, Baal, down boy.

Dude, you're classier than Winston Churchill's bowtie.