Bohemia Games aims for positive sampling effect through friendly DRM

In their attempts to discourage pirates, most computer game designers feel the need to engage in quite drastic measures to prevent their work from being copied, or their games from being played by free riders. The downside of these measures, called digital rights management (DRM), is that sometimes legitimate users find themselves restricted in the use of their product and, meanwhile, pirates will try their best to find a way around these restrictions. Once they succeed, they're free to play and share the game.

This is why Bohemia Interactive has a different strategy. Bohemia's games have long used a copy protection system called FADE, which is partly a security device and partly a whistleblower. FADE lets pirates download a game and start playing, initially without any problems. But, after a while, things start to go a little wrong.

In Bohemia's ArmA, for example, your aim starts to get a little wonky, according to kotaku.com. “You'll notice the AI getting erratic. These glitches start to slowly increase in size and occurrence.” Eventually, the gameplay fails completely.

Some of the gamers recognize this, and simply quit playing their illegal version of the game. But many times, gamers take their gameplay issues to official forums to complain, where they're revealed as pirates. By allowing pirates some quality game time, Bohemia hopes they've developed a taste for the game by the time it crashes, and they will go on to buy an authorised copy.

According to kotaku.com, Bohemia has not seen any widespread tools to circumvent the system yet. If this seems to work for Bohemia and can even encourage sales instead of punishing legitimate customers, maybe user-friendly DRM is the way forward for other PC publishers as well.

Source: Luke Plunkett (kotaku.com)