When will the video gaming companies learn that DRM really only pisses off your legitimate customers? Despite having seen this happen over and over and over and over, it’s happening again. With the release of Bioshock 2, the decision was made to include annoying SecuROM DRM. Did it do any good? Nope, on the day of release there’s a cracked version available immediately (thanks AJ, for sending this story in). Oddly, that writeup uses this to suggest that the use of DRM made sense, but I can’t see how you get from there to here. The DRM didn’t stop it from getting cracked and being made available to anyone who wanted it. It didn’t stop any unauthorized access whatsoever. If they hadn’t put the DRM on it (which cost money both in licensing the technology and in additional Q&A and customer support issues) they would be in exactly the same position today with the app being available for unauthorized download (except they’d have a bit more money). Oh yeah, they also wouldn’t have pissed off a bunch of customers. So what good did the DRM do exactly?
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