What forms of digital rights management are effective-ish for games? I don’t mean 100% effective because hardly anything is 100% effective.
I also realize that the answer will likely have a speculative element to it because it may be difficult to tell apart people who 1) torrented it and then bought it, 2) torrented it and never would have bought it 3) torrented it and never bought it but would have bought the game if they’d had to or the DRM was enough of a pain to nudge them in that direction.
This is probably not what you’re asking about, but games that require an online presence, like WoW, probably have the closest to 100% ratio of authorised purchases to players. Of course, as Simcity showed, it’s not a model that can be adopted without trouble.
As for conversions to sales, my guess is it’s not DRM at all that does the job, because pirates typically strip away the DRM before redistributing games anyway. I’d suspect making great games that people can become passionate about, and a smart strategy around asking people to support the developers probably does more than DRM, even if it doesn’t do much. DRM tends to piss people off. What you need is to make people feel guilty/happy.
You’re asking the wrong question, although you’re hardly alone in that. Ineffective DRM does not transform customers into pirates, it transforms customers into non-customers. Somebody who doesn’t buy your game because they hate your DRM is just as much of a lost sale as somebody who doesn’t buy your game because they can get it for free.
Cynical answer: Grumman is right, DRM is an anti-consumer measure. Pirates don’t GET games that have DRM. By the time someone who is pirating a game receives it, the DRM is already gone.
It’s important to note that even with this model, the value may well be less than 100%. Continuing with WoW as the example, there are third-party servers that can be played on without Blizzard being involved at any point.
Of course, the experience is not the same, as a good server-based model adds value not just with its content, but in its support and player base, but it looks like the OP’s criteria is simply “playing without paying”.
In my not-insignificant experience with piracy communities, the most effective “DRM”, in terms of converting unauthorized players into paying players, is exactly what you’d expect it to be: making good games with good value. “Free-to-play” isn’t a new concept.
I suspect that most actual DRM schemes add negative value to their products’ bottom line. They cost money to implement, they cost money to support, they turn away a non-negligible portion of customers (see any Steam forum for a GfWL game) and they’re utterly ineffectual at preventing even casual piracy.
The ubiquity of extremely cheap games is the most effective replacement for DRM. There are still dicks out there who won’t pay a cent no matter what, but then you’re not losing them as customers. As for everyone else, the temptation to pirate things plummets when you’re swimming in incredibly cheap gaming.
Having to log into steam is, I suppose, a form of DRM, but it’s one that adds value to the games, not detracts from it, and has dramatically lowered the cost of gaming so that you could buy enough games to last you the rest of your life what it would cost to buy a few retail games.
Yeah, multiplayer/online games do pretty well in that regard. Back on the day everyone I knew was playing 0.6 or whatever using the same two CD-keys since WON.net wasn’t enforcing the check for them. As soon as that changed, everyone went out and bought a copy of Half-life. Ditto for Diablo 2, 1942, and all the other big multiplayer titles.
It isn’t a perfect system though, since sometimes games are popular enough that people setup their own multiplayer servers just to allow pirated copies of the game to interact with each other. The most notable of which is probably the third-party services for Warcraft III, which (largely thanks to Dota All-stars) probably had 100x more users than Blizzard’s legitimate servers.