The Escapist Bulletin: The Sims 3, piracy, and the dread DRM

The Sims 3 turned up on torrent sites recently, a couple of weeks before its official release, and quickly hit 180,000 downloads. Some of you are no doubt incensed at the scurvy dogs who illicitly made it available, while others are cheering the pirates as they strike a blow against the evil superpower of EA. Some of you probably have the game lurking on your hard drive already.

Whenever the issue of piracy comes up, the discussion turns nasty. It's such a polarising topic that compromise or concession becomes almost impossible once the two camps draw lines in the sand and the invectives start to fly. One thing that both sides can agree on, however, is that piracy has had a profound effect on the games industry.

It's not just the gaming that's getting bitten by illegal downloads, of course: more than 40 per cent of all software is pirated. But the gaming industry seems to be taking it rather personally.

Last year EA created controversy by using SecuROM to protect Will Wright’s long-awaited Spore. The company’s stake in the title was huge, and so it’s difficult to begrudge its effort to protect its investment. In fact, on the face of it it’s remarkable that more publishers don’t follow EA’s example. Surely putting a game out without protection is, to put it kindly, naive.

But perhaps the 'no-DRM' crew has the right idea. Spore has the dubious distinction of being the fastest pirated game to date, so all the time and money EA sank into DRM, and all the bad feeling it subsequently generated, was for nothing. If even the best efforts of the biggest players come to nothing - or, worse, prove invidious - it’s clearly a lost cause.

The industry needs to do something, and soon. If publishers and developers can't learn to adapt to Web 2.0 society, then the situation can only get worse, with small developers forced out of business and larger ones unwilling to spend money on anything other than guaranteed multi-million selling titles.

An optimist might characterise this chapter as gaming’s own 'Empire Strikes Back'. Everything seems hopeless, but the Return of the Jedi is just around the corner, and once the Ewoks get involved everything will work out fine. In this particularly tortured analogy, the Ewoks are digital distribution and the Jedi are massive sales infrastructure changes.

Valve's Steam service has already shown that the internet is a viable alternative to bricks-and-mortar retail when it comes to content delivery, and Steam has the added bonus of significantly cutting down on piracy.

Services like the ambitious OnLive are taking things even further, aiming to stream entire games over the internet, with all the computing power handled by OnLive's servers. Of course, OnLive's no-show at this year's E3 suggests that the service probably won't be on anyone's Christmas list.

No publisher is going to dump its retail partners overnight - if you want proof, just two retailers account for 28 per cent of EA's total sales - but a shift towards digital distribution for PC titles would solve a lot of problems. It's almost ironic, but with a little lateral thinking, the thing that might just save PC gaming from the dread internet will be the dread internet itself.