Capcom Releases DRM For Street Fighter 5, Promptly Rolls It Back When It Screws Legitimate Customers
from the sigh dept
It should be quite clear by now that DRM is a fantastic way for video game makers to keep people from playing their games. Not pirates, though. No, those folks can play games with DRM just fine, because DRM doesn't actually keep piracy from being a thing. No, I'm talking about legitimate buyers of games, who in example after example after example suddenly find that the games they bought are unplayable thanks to DRM tools that work about as well as the American political system. And yet DRM still exists for some reason, as game makers look for some kind of holy grail piece of software that will turn every past pirate into a future dollar sign.
This search for the perfect DRM continues, as we have just the latest story of DRM gone wrong. This story of the Street Fighter V DRM, though, is a special kind of stupid because it was put in place via a software update release, meaning that a game that worked perfectly one day was bricked the next.
The doodad was announced on Thursday shortly before the update rolled out. Capcom called it “an updated anti-crack solution (note: not DRM) that prevents certain users from hacking the executable.”
They continued, “The solution also prevents memory address hack that are commonly used for cheating and illicitly obtaining in-game currency and other entitlements that haven’t been purchased yet.”
This DRM that Capcom insisted wasn't DRM apparently set off anti-virus software for a ton of legitimate customers, triggered warnings from Windows security software, caused PC crashes for others, and even killed one person's new puppy. Okay, that last one didn't actually happen, but the rest did, and it's the exact sort of thing that DRM shouldn't do: screw those who actually bought the game. On top of that, it seems the update gave the game a rather deep level of access into any PC it was installed on, leading some to warn others off from buying it entirely.
As a result of the backlash, Capcom rolled back the DRM via another update pretty quickly, but one has to wonder just how many potential customers were lost in the meantime and how that number compares with the number of potential pirates that were turned into paying customers during that same time period. It would take more imagination than I have to dream up a version of reality in which the latter outnumbered the former, making this attempt at DRM a complete bust.
But, then again, they're all busts, really. So why are we wasting our time with DRM still?
Filed Under: drm, legitimate customers, piracy, street fighter
Companies: campcom
