"DRM methods aren't even designed to prevent piracy, but to prevent secondary markets of said games".
You are completely right. DRM for stopping piracy is just an excuse. It hasn't worked before and I bet they knew for sure that it won't work with Spore either. What publishers and producers are actually trying to do is to get rid of the secondary market by any means necessary. A lot of people from major players in gaming business have been bitching and moaning about how much the secondary market hurts their sales figures. Let me give you just a couple of examples: Epic Games and Atari. You can find many more similar articles if you look hard enough.
And DRM is not their only way of attack on the second hand market. They also plan to move more towards online gaming (EA, Ubisoft) or digital distribution (Atari), thus eviscerating the second hand market. There is some talk around the water cooler that Valve has already gained more from digital distribution than through physical sales (Valve sales).
DRM will ultimately fail in face of public outrage and boycott. Nevertheless, I think that the drive towards online gaming and digital distribution, if successful, will drastically diminish and maybe even kill the second hand game sales. If nothing happens to change this trend, in 10 year's time we will probably be unable to buy an games in a real life store. One implication is that single player gaming could die off, which would be even more tragic than the death of the secondary market. Another implication is that the power of the developers, producers and publishers over the client would increase by tighter control on the way the games are experienced. That is obvious in the case of online games, but it is just as true in the case of digitally distributed content. We are already seeing this in the case of present day games which require online activation in order to work at all.
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Re:
"DRM methods aren't even designed to prevent piracy, but to prevent secondary markets of said games".
You are completely right. DRM for stopping piracy is just an excuse. It hasn't worked before and I bet they knew for sure that it won't work with Spore either. What publishers and producers are actually trying to do is to get rid of the secondary market by any means necessary. A lot of people from major players in gaming business have been bitching and moaning about how much the secondary market hurts their sales figures. Let me give you just a couple of examples: Epic Games and Atari. You can find many more similar articles if you look hard enough.
And DRM is not their only way of attack on the second hand market. They also plan to move more towards online gaming (EA, Ubisoft) or digital distribution (Atari), thus eviscerating the second hand market. There is some talk around the water cooler that Valve has already gained more from digital distribution than through physical sales (Valve sales).
DRM will ultimately fail in face of public outrage and boycott. Nevertheless, I think that the drive towards online gaming and digital distribution, if successful, will drastically diminish and maybe even kill the second hand game sales. If nothing happens to change this trend, in 10 year's time we will probably be unable to buy an games in a real life store. One implication is that single player gaming could die off, which would be even more tragic than the death of the secondary market. Another implication is that the power of the developers, producers and publishers over the client would increase by tighter control on the way the games are experienced. That is obvious in the case of online games, but it is just as true in the case of digitally distributed content. We are already seeing this in the case of present day games which require online activation in order to work at all.