Paradox Interactive: DRM is “terrible”, “doesn’t make sense”, “a waste of money”

25 January 2012

DRM is pretty awful. This is a thing that gamers understand, but game developers and publishers… maybe not so much.

Some of them get it, though, including Magicka publisher Paradox Interactive.

“I’m so surprised that people still use DRM. We haven’t done that for seven or eight years, and the reason is that it doesn’t make sense,” CEO Fred Wester told GameSpy.

“It doesn’t make sense from a gamer perspective – I hated it. I bought Civilization III when it first came out, and for the first three days I couldn’t play it. It installed some other software, and it just shut down. I had to contact Atari support three times before I even got help. And that experience is terrible.”

He also pointed out that “people who purchase a game should have just as easy a time as those who pirate the game, otherwise it’s a negative incentive to buy a legal copy”, a simple concept that continues to elude companies like Ubisoft.

“I know this for a fact, because we tried it eight years ago, and it never worked for us,” he added. “Two major reasons: it costs money and it makes you lose money, and the other is that it’s so inconvenient to customers.”

It does, it will, and it is. That’s why I play games on console instead. ^____^

Source: GameSpy
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