How to lose a customer base with three letters ... DRM

Digital Rights Management.  You have to be online to always play your game you just shelled out big money for.

And here is someone from Microsoft bagging out those of us in the world that live outside of a city where internet is at best choppy.

If I'm going to buy a game that I play on my desktop BY MYSELF, then I don't really want to have to connect to the internet.

Let's look at things this way.  When I brought Diablo 3 (yes I paid money for it), I had to wait to log into a game that I then bummed around in for about three hours and then never logged back into because well who wants to wait to log into play with themselves.  For guys I imagine it would be like having a raging boner but you can't do anything about it because your mum is in the room.  All you can do it cover it up and hope for an opportunity later to get a release.

And lets not even start on the internet quality when you live outside of a city.  I live in a rural area.  We still get crappy ADSL (yeah I bet most people thought that didn't exist in westernised countries any more).  What's more the internet provider I pay a fair proportion of my household's income to each month has admitted to us they have oversold our exchange.  Therefore when everyone gets home from work its good bye bandwidth.

Try playing a game that needs a good ping on an internet connection that is struggling on loading sites like facebook or even a news website.  And as there is only one company that supplies internet in our area (any other company is just reselling this one company's product) there is no point trying to churn to another internet provider.  They are just reselling the same product with a different label slapped on.

But you should be happy to have internet the bleeding hearts of this world cry.  Well I'm going to stop you there.  I might be lucky enough to live in a country where internet is possible and my household income is high enough we can afford to pay for entertainment like computer games.  But bloody hell if I'm going to shell out for this stuff I want to at least get a good go of it.  I have better things to spend my money on if I'm going to have an experience that is less than the value of the game.

And certainly I'm not going to buy another game from said game producer if they give me crap.  What this Microsoft dickhead has done has pissed me off.  I have literally no power over the quality of my internet.  I would kill for some fiber to be laid in my area.  Hell I would settle for our exchange being upgraded so that we can have a stable unwavering connection.  But you know this costs money and why is big business going to invest in giving my area better internet when I don't have a choice.  Its them or nothing.

So while this DRM stuff that keeps games online and stores all this content online so you have to always be online sounds really great, it just alienates a huge chunk of the audience.  In a town like what I live in where there is not really a lot to do, computer games keep you sane.  People in cities can fill their time with other stuff like restaurants, music concerts, movie theaters etc.  We just wait for the tumble weeds to pass us by.  And our internet to get better.

Or it could be worse.  I know a lot of cashed up guys who fly to the middle of nowhere to work with zero internet connection that need entertaining in their down time.  They aren't going to buy a game that needs to be always online.  Same with soldiers   There are many situations and places I know of that internet is out of the question.  Yet these gaming companies would rather please a few than everyone.

PS:  we don't play sim city for the online part.  We play for the god like feeling we get when we crush a couple hours of hard work with a meteorite.