TinyBuild: We should not ‘cripple’ games with DRM to fight piracy

TinyBuild has condemned the use of DRM to stop illegal downloading, despite its latest game being heavily pirated.

Punch Club on smartphones and PC was purchased by 300,000 people, but downloaded illegally by another 1.6 million – that’s 81 per cent of the total players.

But TinyBuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik believes there are better ways to combat piracy than DRM, including using local pricing.

DRM is widely used by most major publishers, but it isn’t popular as it asks consumers to prove they’re legitimate owners of the game.

I do not believe we should cripple the experience in any way for people who actually buy our games,” Nichiporchik said. We’ve seen the industry try this as a whole and it’s just backfired. Remember SimCity’s launch? That was awful.”

He added: We are going to look at regional pricing and do more aggressive deals in lower wealth regions.

We also need to offer more value to people actually buying the game. We would have had many more people who start playing on mobile and would buy it on PC if we had cross-platform saves. That was a misstep on our part.”