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I grew up in a pretty damn good period for video games, catching the dawn of the golden home video game age – the return of the Atari under the 2600 Jr moniker and the dawn of the 8-bit era. I stayed with consoles until I caught the dawn of the FPS on the PC. And thus began the fate of the PC gamer – the never ending cycle not of keeping up with the Joneses, but of continual hardware replacements to stay one step ahead of the graphics and processing arms race so that games run at a passable rate.
And man, that was a money suck. A fun one, but damned if it didn’t get expensive. So, as I grew into a poor twentysomething the console gaming fell by the wayside. Eventually, I moved back to consoles because a couple hundred bucks on a new console every five or six years is a lot easier to manage than a couple hundred bucks every year on a new video card.
And it looks like I got out right around the perfect time, because as PC game manufacturers have taken the normal methods of DRM – disc must be present, users must type in a special code during installation – to the illogical extreme.
In an effort to fight “piracy.” videogame publishers have adopted techniques that started with the game periodically checking into a remote server while playing to requiring a constant Internet connection *. And while that might not seem to bad on the surface, as just about everyone who wants broadband internet has it now, that means you can’t play when the internet is down. Or when you’re traveling. Or, worse, when the company you legally purchased your video game from decides that keeping that server – the one the game has to check in to – online is just too much money.
And publishers will eventually turn those servers off. All servers eventually get turned off. Or moved. This little fact of internet life means that a legally purchased game has an expiration date, after which it cannot be played again. However, the pirated version of game that came with a crack to route around the DRM scheme? That illegal version of the game will work forever.
What’s worse is, publishers typically don’t tell potential buyers that the game has an unplanned obsolescence date. I mean, why would they? Of course, as a potential video game buyer, this makes purchasing any video game either risky or research intensive. Buyers must either: read reviews, meet minimum standards and research a publisher’s DRM scheme or throw down $60 and take a gamble on a publisher treating the customers with at least some measure of respect.
The entire ordeal is so goddamn frustrating that I’ve got half a mind to chart out which publishers should be avoided and the respective titles, tossing the entire mess up on a website.
But I’ll probably just read a book instead.
*And we’re not just talking about multiplayer games. Major publishers are slapping this kind of DRM on single player games with no other online aspects.
