Video Games and Heartache

[jackofallgeeks]

A few years ago, I heard the first bits about the game Spore. It was
going to be everything SimEarth wanted to be. It would run through
several genres of gaming in one continuous arc, starting at the
lowest single-cell level in what was reminiscent of flOw, and moving up
through the evolution of your own user-built creature, and on into the
eventual creation of a global civilization and finally galactic conquest.
And one of the coolest things was creature creation: you could make your
creature look however you wanted, and the game could figure out how it would
walk and attack and eat. Plus, with the Internet being as pervasive as it
is, everything users made would be able to be sent back to a big database in
the sky and redistributed to every other user as in-game content. The
creature I make could become the galactic rival for some kid in Asia.

It was going to be great.

I have been waiting years for this game. Years.
Entertainment-wise, there's nothing I've wanted more; I'd buy a new computer
if I had to just to run it. So you can only imagine the soul-crushing
disappointment I feel when I say I will not be getting this game. I'm not
going to buy Spore.

Saying that hurts a lot more than it should, I think.

So, what happened? Did the game run out of budget and get canned? Was it
moved to console-only status? Did Will Wright die and in honor of him
memory they decided to kill off his legacy (if you ever played Ani-Mayhem
you know what I'm referencing)? No, nothing so positive. EA, who's
publishing the game, is shipping
it with DRM which requires an internet check at installation and every
ten days after that. After twenty days without a check, the game will not
run unless it makes a successful check.

But Andrew, why's that so bad? You said yourself that one of the cooler
aspects was the online, user-generated content anyways. Why would
you, of all people, ever go a month without the Internet? It's not
that I don't expect to be online, it's that I expect EA to not be there when
I need them. Even if this were a 100% system that denied pirated copies
always while at the same time allowing legal copies always with 0% error
(hell, even if it just always let legal copies in with 0% error), which I'm
sure it's not because no such system exists (or probably can exist) -- even
if that were the case, how long will EA's servers be up? Microsoft just
killed their PlayForSure DRM servers (so if you have PlaysForSure music it's
basically dead space now); how long before EA decides it's no longer
profitable for them to support Spore's DRM? PlaysForSure is, what, 5 years
old? Maybe? I'm still playing StarCraft over a decade later. I would want
to be playing Spore while bouncing grandchildren on my knee. EA deies me
that.

What's more, they system will only allow 3 installs. THREE. Do you know
how many computers I've had in the last two years? Three. That's it, no
more than two years of enjoying Spre before I'm denied use of my
legally-paid-for product. All because EA wants to crack down on
piracy. And you know what drive piracy the most? Piracy-deterence
mechanisms like DRM. They add DRM to kill piracy; pirates crack the DRM;
legitimate users get pissed off by the DRM and get the cracked version;
piracy rises so developers add MORE DRM -- lather, rince, repeat. I don't
want to pay for a game that expects me to be a thief. I don't want to pay
for a game that I can't enjoy when I want. I don't want to pay for a game
that I can reasonably expect to not work in a handful of years.

I really want to get Spore. But I won't be.

Comments

[metis2be.livejournal.com]

Getting the cracked version sounds like a good option to me.

[naughtjennifer.livejournal.com]

This is the same reason I'm against Steam. Yeah, it seems like a good idea. A massive library of games, directly downloaded, for below market prices. There's even an, admittedly Byzantine, process by which, I think, you can legitimately set up a game for offline play. A restricted version of the game, I believe, not too sure about that.

The problem, however, is exactly what comes up here - it's short-sighted. We all know that Steam won't be up forever. It will be around for a forseeably long time, arguably, but there's no guarantee that it won't up and fold tomorrow. And then what happens to the hundreds of dollars you pumped into your Steam account? For that matter, what of the hours invested into games which you likely hadn't completed? Or any of a multitude of other problems that would come from no longer having access to your games?

And this is all for the sake of "protecting their intellectual property" or one of a series of other terms for it.

We live in an era of nostalgia gaming, and they still think it's acceptable to potentially kill any long-term possibility of playing the game.

I don't mind a little protection of intellectual property, if they feel it's necessary, but all this DRM which hamstrings legitimate uses, when all is said and done, is hardly more effective than the old games where you had to insert a code from the five pages in the back of the manual written in blue ink. Heck, copying those five pages would probably be more work than removing the DRM from some programs.

And, worst case, this will become a sort of arms race. EA puts up its authentication servers, you know there will be patches and copy servers to bypass EA entirely. Won't necessarily come soon, but it will happen, and the end result is the same status quo, but even more money is being spend on games that are already massive productions, resulting in an overall loss for the legitimate user, on all fronts. When the only victim is the person you're trying to help, something's seriously wrong.

[bsgnome.livejournal.com]

I think in this context, byzantine should be decapitalized, since you aren't expressly referring to things "of or related to Byzantium".