DRM Protection is Destroying Computer Gaming

Piracy has become a real problem for those who are into computer gaming, but it’s not just because these people are taking money away from gaming companies, but because those gaming companies are now going out of their way to fight the pirates so hard that they’re making games almost impossible for people to play, even if you’re a legitimate owner of the game.

Now, I don’t pirate games. I don’t believe in it. I’ve been buying computer games ever since computer games have been on the market. I used to buy a ton of the games, pretty much every game that was produced. Now, I don’t buy that many. But it’s not because of the cost, even though the cost is somewhat ridiculous these days. Manufacturers have been trying to raise prices constantly, having kept them at $49.99 for awhile before trying to grab the $59.99 mark recently. This would be understandable if games weren’t so watered down these days, where you end up getting less of a product than you used to get in the past. But that’s another story.

The story today is DRM, digital rights management, which is software or procedures developed to make it difficult to pirate a game. In the past, the restrictive features might require you to use a wheel included with the packaging to put in a secret code somewhere during the playing of the game. Then they started requiring you to have the CD (or DVD) in the drive the entire time you were playing the game. But piraters have always been one step ahead of those trying to stop them, so what the gaming companies are trying to do now is force you to be online while playing the game, so you have to sign onto their servers in order to play the game. And you have to remain online, tied to their network while playing the game or it kicks you out.

This is a bad thing, and it’s going to piss off gamers a lot. First off, if this was a PC game, which a few titles have actually required this, which has created a bit of a nightmare of publicity for Ubisoft, which thought it could dictate this as part of its games, then people would probably just stop playing. As mentioned with Ubisoft, that’s what’s happened. The company is shocked that it’s latest game hasn’t sold as well as planned, but not once has it ever entertained the thought that its customer base got pissed and decided not to buy a game that requires you to have to sign onto their network in order to play the game.

Think about it. If the company making the game goes out of business, you can never play it again because that server is going down. This isn’t an MMORPG like World of Warcraft where the content is online. The game is completely on your computer; the permission is what’s online, and gamers don’t like that.

Recently, the PS3 is forcing these restrictions into its games, like with Final Flight. In order to play the game, you have to be signed onto the Playstation Network, and maintain your connection, or you can’t play the game.

As a Playstation 3 owner, this pisses me off to no end. Granted, I don’t play that many games on my Playstation 3, mainly using it as my Blueray Player, but if I decided to buy a game to play on it, I want to be able to play a game on it without having to use the network functions of this system because, to be honest, I don’t generally have it hooked up to the Internet. That’s what my computer is for.

What is really going on here, for those that don’t follow the whole computer gaming thing, is that gaming companies are making computer gaming so much more difficult for the people who actually follow the law, in hopes of hurting the pirates. But the pirates don’t care because whatever restrictions are put in place will be worked around by them, because that’s their forte. They know how to work around the system. The regular gamer, on the other hand, gets screwed. It’s like the RIAA and its draconian processes to stop people from illegal downloading. Not surprising, Sony was one of the first companies to try to circumvent this by forcing a rootkit onto the computers of customers who were buying legit copies of music. Again, the law-abiding customers were screwed while the pirates were able to continue pirating and stealing left and right.

If computer gaming companies want to survive, they need to do what they can to make people want to buy their products. Steam is an online distribution company that gets it. People buy their software through them, and there is no crap forced onto your computer or system in order to play a game that you legitimately bought. If you want return customers, you treat them well; you don’t treat them like potential criminals and then play the game of “if you aren’t doing something wrong, then you won’t care if we treat you like a criminal.”

This is why I’ve bought few games in the past few years. Companies that distribute them have gone out of their way to treat their customers like adversaries, often releasing games half done and then promising a potential “fix” later down the line. I’ve done what a customer who is pissed SHOULD do: Stop buying games. Every now and then I’ll buy a game from a company that does what a company should do, and I’ll continue to reward that behavior.

It’s amazing how many don’t get it though.