DRM News

Two things have been annoying me lately.

Number one is yesterday GamePolitics released an article called Another DRM Victim Details Woes. It talks about cruise ship crew members who are hit by DRM and unable to play games. The Chief Officer of a cruise ship says:

… we quite often don’t have a good Internet connection or it’s cost prohibitive, especially on our personal computers. I watch movies and play games during my, albeit limited, time off. There have been many games that I have been unable to play because of DRM issues, games such as Spore & recently Empire: Total War caused me huge problems simply because it required an Internet connection during installation. I had to spend $120 USD on Internet charges just for the privilege of installing Empire: Total War.

A little over a week ago ars technica wrote an article titled The victims of PC gaming DRM: one soldier’s story. The soldier writes:

"I’m deployed to Iraq right now, and [DRM] has ranged from annoying to unforgivable for me. I would like to let you know that Steam is pretty awesome with working with deployed folks to make sure we can access/play our games," he told Ars.

"I’ve had hit and miss success with some of the other download companies. Any kind of game that tries to call home, though, is generally more of a problem than it is worth. Especially ones that try to resolve your IP address with your version/purchase location."

Now while I feel for both these groups of gamers that are hurt by DRM they really should have done a bit of research before they bought games with DRM on them. The information IS out there, if not from the game’s box or website, then check out publisher’s forums. These days especially the information is being released, more and more publishers know that gamers want this information and usually before a game is released we know what DRM is on the game.

Now number two is the amount of Ubisoft bashing going on. Now with their new account based DRM system there is justification for not liking Ubisoft right now, but do you really have to dredge up stuff from 2 years ago? On Reddit yesterday there was not one, not two, but three posts dredging up stuff from 2008. Really? And this is aside from all the other anti-Ubisoft threads about their account based DRM plans.

The third post isn’t even a valid complaint. Someone on the Ubisoft forums complaining that they didn’t release sales/piracy figures for Prince of Persia (and how many times does a publisher release sales/piracy numbers to the public?). Then he makes some weird passive-aggressive ‘hope for the good sake of your enterprise’ threat/crystal ball future telling that because of Ubisoft’s DRM they are going to go out of business. Now how many times have you heard those lines?

A bit of a side story… Back when I worked retail at a video game store I was talking to some regular customers that Sega was going to drop the Dreamcast (yes, it was awhile ago, I’m old, sue me). They freaked out because they were huge fans of the Dreamcast, which I knew and which was why I told them (hey I’m human, I deserve a little fun in life). They started pulling games off the shelf and telling me ‘This is the reason why they aren’t going down, and this is why not too’, etc… Well about two months later the Dreamcast was no more, which I made sure to mention to them when they came in next. These are the same guys who started a petition with their friends never to buy an EA game again, proudly saying that ‘We’re going to take down EA’. Yeah, them and their four friends, good luck with that. (I do believe that EA is still around, I think I read that somewhere) Again and again on the internet we see online petitions that get a few hundred signatures and this is going to ‘take down the company’ Really? A percentage of a percentage is not going to do a damned thing.

Which brings us back to the original issue. As much as I feel for the soldiers and the cruise ship crewmembers, they are a percentage of a percentage and in reality mean nothing to the publisher. The point of this article (Other than to rant for a bit. Cliff isn’t the only one that gets to do that.), is basically to say that if you’re buying a game, be aware of what you are buying. Publishers DO need to make the information about DRM easier to find, but most are making that effort, finally. But us gamers need to look for that information ourselves as well.