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Some developers choose to prevent piracy outright, often frustrating legitimate buyers in the process. In the case of ArmA developer Bohemia Interactive, they instead chose to toy with the pirates, creating an experience that would degrade overtime into an unplayable mess. Is piracy really still so widespread though? According to CEO Marek Španěl, they are recording a staggering 100 pirates for every three legitimate purchasers.
Speaking with PC Gamer, Španěl explained the philosophy behind the unusual DEGRADE protection, often mistakenly referred to as FADE:
"The motto is: Pirated games are not worth playing, original games do not degrade. Some of the symptoms are funny, usually annoying. In the Arma series, players with pirated copies have lower accuracy with automatic weapons in both single player and multiplayer, and occasionally turn into a bird with the words “Good birds do not fly away from this game, you have only yourself to blame.” While we know we will never stop piracy, we use this as a way to make our stand that piracy is not right, that it has a serious negative impact on PC games developers."
Adressing any concerns as to the effectiveness of DEGRADE, Španěl notes that the number of players attempting to play pirated copies of the game far outweighs the legitimate purchasers out there signiificantly:
" It’s not possible to provide any numbers. However, our statistics from multiplayer show that for every three legitimate buyers playing their game in multiplayer, there are 100 (failed) attempts to play with a pirated version. This indicates that piracy is an extremely widespread problem on PC, and it’s also really worrying for us as a mid-sized, independent, PC-oriented developer. We do not have any such data for single-player, but I’m afraid there the ratio of pirates to legitimate gamers is undoubtedly much worse"
While Španěl doesn't consider DEGRADE, first introduced in 2001, a substitute to conventional copy protection, he states that the company are trying to "cut off this vicious circle where piracy hurts owners of legitimate copies “protected” with annoying copy protection DRM systems, which may lead to more piracy".
ArmA III is due for release in Winter 2012.
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