Devil's Advocate: In Defence of Always-On DRM

By any measure, the broadband penetration around world is increasing and is only going to continue to increase. The latest data from the OECD shows this trend increasing over the past 8 years, apart from December 2009, where they stopped counting wireless and satellite connections. There’s also no force at play like a dragon with a vendetta against DSL or optical fibre that goes around breaking broadband connections on a permanent basis. Once you’ve got broadband at your home, you’re not likely to lose it. The presence of games with always online DRM is going to help you get broadband faster . Don’t believe me? It’s a chicken and egg problem. Why would there be reason to give people broadband quicker if there’s nothing that needs it? The more games that use always online DRM and the more services that shift to online only, the more compelling the argument is to get people access to broadband. The more people with broadband, the more likely it is more games will start to use always online DRM. Currently a large publisher has some very rough metrics to measure a game’s success. They use a combination of sales data and Metacritic scores . The only other data they can collect are from achievements and a pinch of general forum ranting and comments. They don’t have the opportunity to collect any information about how many hours on average it gets played, how long it takes to finish, do people get stuck on certain points? With always online DRM, you know that 100% of your customers will be online, which means you can very accurately measure a whole range of different criteria about playing habits and the game itself. This will lead to more games being successful, due to the criteria for success being defined as more than just sales > x in y months and Metacritic score > z% . There could be criteria such as average time played > 10 hours , or average number of players per day over first 3 months > 100,000 . The collection of this data will allow developers the chance to defend their game on grounds beyond just sales or scores. Ultimately the collection of all this data will allow developers and publishers to make more informed decisions about whether or not to keep a studio alive and what needs to be done to make a game or IP more successful. If the developer knows all its customers will be online, it frees them up to try new things.

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