I think this more than makes it's point. You have a busy life, you get only a few minutes to use it wisely. Then that game you brought the other day that you thought would be a great way to fill in a couple minutes of your time does this to you. That one little tiny spark of happiness in the otherwise bleak world.
Ultimately I have seen better ways to protect content then DRM. This punishes the working man who gets up and goes to work for his family. He can grab a couple mins here and there and the last thing he needs is a half hour wait to play a game that shouldn't really be online in the first place. The gaming company gets the cash but the user gets no experience.
The best way I saw to protect content was used in the Batman game Arkham Asylum. When the game was pirated, there was a piece of code that figured this out and Batman's cloak repeatedly opened and closed when you attempted to fly. Which meant you could no longer fly. Which meant you could no longer complete certain aspects of the game. The game is still usable to other people who actually shelled out for the game and the pirate gets the crap copy. This creativity I actually applaud Its just the sort of thing that makes you smile. Especially when reading forums of pirates seeking help to resolve the problem.
Another anti piracy tactic used what in Command and Conquer, Red Alert 2. After 30 seconds of loading a map all your bases would explode. But then again this sort of thing just feeds the trolls and pirates of the world by them making it their epic quest in life to see how fast they can destroy their bases before the anti piracy script kicks in.
Nintendo probably came up with the cruelest anti piracy option. In Earthbound, they created a game that was nearly impossible to play if it was detected that it was a pirated game. Fair enough, some people would have enjoyed the challenge. That was until the last boss. When the game crashes, then deletes all the saved files. Ouch. I imagine there was a few broken gameboys at this point.
You can check out some other hilarious anti piracy options here : 6 Hilarious Ways Game Designers Are Screwing With Pirates
My point here today is that always on DRM in games is sloppy and lazy. Its like "well we couldn't be bothered coming up with anything else so we are forcing everyone who wants to buy a copy of our game to get an internet connection just to play it". On the whole, the casual player (which by the way would probably make up the larger chunk of a games audience) is the one that is screwed over by always on DRM rather than the actual pirate.
Actual pirates of games will probably code a hack for said game to remove the always on DRM. Computer programming is an easily accessible skill now days. All you need is a computer, the internet and Google. You can teach yourself a hell of a lot with those three things. Youtube is a great source too. Those things alone will teach you everything you ever wanted to know about hacking. And you don't even have to be that good at it to achieve it.
I can find anything I like in about 2 minutes from Google. It could be a key logger, a virus, a torrent, anything. If you know how to look, search engines will spit out what you want with the right question. And learning to program from the "little black book of programming"? You could probably sign up to 4Chan and they will give you step by step instructions and sign you up to Anonymous so that within half an hour you're an expert hacker. Though why anyone would want to put up with the trolls on 4Chan ...
The game market is no longer about some 10 year old with a hand held playing Pokemon. That was twenty years ago. These people have grown up and they still want to capture their youth. I watch cartoons because when I watch a cartoon I escape from the world and go to a better time. When I didn't have to worry about paying bills or rent or cleaning the house or going to work. I can pretend I'm five again where the biggest worry I had was how to get mum and dad to buy me that cool toy I saw on TV or if I would ever grow tall enough to reach the cookies on the kitchen counter.
Ultimately always on DRM is like the commercialization of Christmas. The digital raping of what is left of our childhood innocence and wonder so some fat cats can ensure a couple more sales.
No comments:
Post a Comment