Client-Server != DRM

by kapowaz, Friday, March 22, 2013, 10:27 (4273 days ago) @ Cody Miller

I do not think you are understanding the point. First of all, we are talking about running game code and playing a game you have purchased. I don't think anything up there on your list is a game, nor do you purchase it.

No; I understand it perfectly well — the examples given just serve as analogies; you might not be able to buy ‘email’, but you could buy an email client (or more accurately, license an email client), and when you ‘purchase’ a copy of a game which operates in a client-server fashion, that's exactly what you're doing: purchasing a software license.

Notice how Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 - games which are all but useless offline, can be played online without any input from ID / Epic? If for whatever reason ID didn't want me playing Quake 3, they could do nothing about it since I already own the game, and I can just connect to whatever server I want, host my own, or run a LAN.

As I recall, this wasn't the case when Quake 3 was first released; in order to play online you needed a valid serial number, and the game would check if your serial number was valid when you attempted to connect to the server browser. Maybe that's changed subsequently (it's a pretty archaic system, after all) but even this doesn't constitute DRM — it's a pretty basic anti-piracy check.

Again, DRM is anything that the publisher or developer puts in place which gives them control over how folks can play the game, and / or gives them control over who can play their game, or otherwise prevents someone from playing the game on a system otherwise capable of executing the game code.

I agree with this. But I completely refute the suggestion that the design decision to go for a client-server architecture with Destiny was one led by the desire to implement any kind of DRM controls. When they sat down to decide what kind of game they wanted to make, ideas like making it use a persistent world, with seamless drift-in-drift-out cooperative multiplayer would have been on the whiteboard way before anything along the lines of ‘prevent people from playing the game for some reason’.

What reasons are you even envisaging that they'd have for preventing people from playing? It seems like a recurrent theme with you and DRM that it's about piracy, but I really don't think they think that's as big a deal as you think they do.

2. If you have something capable of executing the game code, and you need something, or need permission from the developer /publisher, then there is DRM.

‘Capable of executing the game code’ means what exactly in the context of a client-server based game? Are you including working connectivity to the server portion of the system in that equation? Or just the local client code itself? Because if the server ain't running, you ain't playing, and that ain't DRM.