My guess is that it started with the simple idea of "we want to move to digital so we can phase out retail and get more out of each sale like steam does" (pressure from shareholders and increases in development costs).
Then they probably went through every worst case scenario possible, like a group of friends sharing a single licence of skyrim and just leaving their consoles offline, and made rules around them.
It probably didn't really click with them and they thought this was a great idea up until the point they got absolutely grilled at E3.
The thing is with steam, they don't really care about people sharing steam accounts and being offline, it's only a violation of the TOS but they have no checks for it since it's not a rampant problem. I think if they sold games for a decent price and trusted their customers they wouldn't need any invasive DRM schemes.
I think you're bang on. It really is just as simple as them wanting to do everything digitally ala Steam and then they walked through every possible scenario in which a person can cheat/game the system and built their checks, restrictions, requirements, etc. around those.
And in doing that, they created something truly quite terrible and very difficult to explain to the average person. I followed a lot of the Xbone coverage and have to admit I'm still confused as to how exactly their systems/checks, etc. would work. Based on what I did understand though, it sounded horrible.
> Then they probably went through every worst case scenario possible
It's such a bad idea to develop a product like this. Developers who focus on anti-piracy measures miss the point: focusing on a frictionless way for consumers to acquire your product (and keep it up-to-date), while ignoring all those who pirate it will lead to more money in the long run.
Most anti-piracy measures introduce friction for genuine consumers who want to give you money. It's a poor trade-off.
The success of Valve and Steam distribution show this is absolutely true. As far as I'm concerned its all that needs to be said on the piracy debate. The proof is in the profits.
Valve are a private company but certainly worth billions and $500-800m annual revenue. Gabe claims, per employee, they are more profitable than Google and Apple. See the forbes article for more analysis [1]. Note its from 2011 and Gabe has said elsewhere that Valve had a huge 2012, approx 50% revenue growth.
Here's another short article with Gabe commenting on their entry into the Russian market. [2]
GoG is also a private company, but well established and popular with netizens. I'd be very interested to see their financial figures.
Then they probably went through every worst case scenario possible, like a group of friends sharing a single licence of skyrim and just leaving their consoles offline, and made rules around them.
It probably didn't really click with them and they thought this was a great idea up until the point they got absolutely grilled at E3.
The thing is with steam, they don't really care about people sharing steam accounts and being offline, it's only a violation of the TOS but they have no checks for it since it's not a rampant problem. I think if they sold games for a decent price and trusted their customers they wouldn't need any invasive DRM schemes.