Makestation

Piracy has become a huge issue for many game developers in recent years. Many have resorted to online-only forms of digital rights managements (DRM) to solve this issue. This has resulted in much intense debate around the purpose of DRM in the software world. Is it really effective? Should it be used?

Those who argue for strict DRM say that online-only DRM protects the work that the developers have spent many long hours on. I would personally agree. Piracy is a very harmful thing in the software world, and is basically equivalent to stealing software from the store. At the same time, online DRM isn't always effective either. People will still generally find ways to pirate the software, but it still causes a considerable inconvenience for users.

So, what are your thoughts?

It's been proved time and time again that people who pirate software have zero intentions of buying it - if they can't pirate it they'd rather go without it. Take minecraft for instance, it's been pirated many times and is easy to do but it hasn't stopped the game from selling millions of copies and hasn't stopped its developers from becoming millionaries...

So in my opinion DRM does very little to stop piracy, and piracy really is only a small problem (case in point - minecraft like I said)