The point is that the longer it takes for someone to crack DRM, the better. The analogy there is between 0-day releases of cracked games, versus a week after.
If the DRM protection is good enough to keep the game off of torrents for say, a couple days after release (or at least until after the game is released), then it's better for sales.
It's not about keeping people cracks unusable permanently, it's about keeping cracks unavailable for enough days/weeks after the release date to encourage more people to buy instead of pirating.
Understandable, I just feel that total sales are only marginally affected by piracy. The thing is, DRM can hurt sales through negative publicity. Spore is a perfect example (even mentioned in the article). People don't want install limits (which, perhaps unfairly gets lumped into the DRM category). That was destructive to spore's sales. It doesn't matter what you or I think about DRM, the fact is, a strong DRM generates negative publicity which can really harm the sales of any game.
Yeah, while it's true that one pirated game does not equal one lost sale, that doesn't mean that there aren't a ton of people pirating a game that would've bought it otherwise. For example, he gave an example of World of Goo. That game was really cheap, but it had a 90% piracy rate. A large number of people would've shelled out the $15 for that game if they couldn't pirate it.
Um.. And you accuse me of not reading the article. World of Goo was NEVER mentioned in it... I don't know if "a large number" is accurate. I do believe that there where/are lost sales, but I don't believe it to the extent that DRM manufactures are proclaiming.
The game got negative reviews because there were problems with playing online, which happened because 100,000 pirates (out of 120,000 users, leaving only 20,000 legit users) hammered the servers.
No, you didn't do your research on this one. Demigod is peer-to-peer based networking, meaning, no centralized servers. So there is no "hammering the servers". More players = more servers.
http://pc.ign.com/articles/974/974110p2.html Demigod suffered from poorly written netcode.
Overall though, you seem to not have properly read any of that article, but just looked for random tidbits without knowing a damn thing about what you're talking about.
Given the fact that you don't even know what is in the article you posted, I find it ironic that you accuse me of not knowing what I'm talking about.
I don't know how I'm coming off, but I actually don't have a lot of contempt for most DRM systems. So long as they are unobtrusive, I could care less what they are doing. However, the DRM that I can't stand is install limits (I think I've been pretty clear on that). Piracy is the industry scape goat to put whatever crap they like into a game.
I'm a bit more skeptical about online verification, I'm not a huge fan of it, but its at least tolerable (the biggest downside being that servers don't last forever, again, putting an artificial shelf life on something that has no shelf life). I look at a game like starcraft, which I still will play every so often (and yes, it is legitimate), if it conformed to today's DRM standards, there is no way that I would be playing it today. I've installed it on all my new computer build (and I've had several), and I doubt blizzard would run starcraft activation servers when they release starcraft 2. Its almost as if manufactures are saying "Hey, we don't really want our games to be classics."
