Comment by dasyatidprime
10 hours ago
The “keep up the appearance of working” story feels like a misleading comparison to me, because the motivations are pretty much reversed. In the hypothetical factory, there's an external social element requiring the appearance of working, some observer to whom it looks good that this is happening: the way I read it, the assemblers and disassemblers may well be cooperating with each other to produce that appearance, so that the absurdity is visible from within (though they could also just be unaware of each other's assigned tasks). In the case of anti-copying technologies, game publishers trying to guard their revenue stream, and other groups trying to distribute or play unauthorized copies, are adversaries whose tactics create relative losses for each other that can bleed into the surrounding society: seems bad that it impacts other users / risks jobs and livelihood / is various forms of unfair (depending on one's moral feelings around which actions are ‘justified’), but their individual actions are incentive-aligned from within the conflict.
DRM authors and implementors know it doesnt work. The decision is made by people in suits based on traditional business culture that doesnt fit the digital world. The same people making denuvo are also the ones breaking it.
Are you grouping the implementors with the crackers because they understand the limitations of the technology, or are you saying they're directly working with each other to scam the publishers and/or audience (and that this is sufficiently common to overturn the whole framing—a conflict can have some proportion of double agents and defectors while centrally remaining a conflict)? If the former, even supposing that many individual implementors and crackers would agree that the technology is inefficient/breakable/whatever, I still think the driving conflict that causes the implementation and the cracking to happen at all is between a broad cluster of agents around the game publishing activity (including managers, investors, game developers and artists, and more indirectly DRM implementors, integrators, and salespeople) and a broad cluster of agents around the unauthorized copying activity (including people who do ripping and DRM cracks on a technical level, distribution channels, and people who look to those channels to play games without buying them the authorized way). That there are principal–agent inconsistencies within each cluster seems like more of a sideshow; a war doesn't stop being a war because enough of the soldiers have realized that their weapons don't work very well, or because they realize that in some other world they'd have been on the same side.