Open letter to the gaming industry
Dear gaming industry,
I’ve been an avid player the last 20 years, but lately the frustrations of being a legal gamer are starting to exceed the pleasures of gaming itself. So much so I’ve even resorted to writing “open letters” about it.
This whole thing began as silly and easily circumvented things such as manual checks (i.e. I had to look things up in the manual, which could be circumvented by making a copy of the manual), to requiring the CD (and later the DVD) disc be in the drive, to start doing things like bad sectors etc, in an ever escalating war against pirates. It started out innocuously enough, but it is starting to go very badly wrong. Some people haven’t been able to use the games they bought because the copy protection was physically incompatible with their drive, for example. I haven’t been one of those, thankfully, but if I had, I would be back in the shops, claiming a refund, be denied one because I’d opened the packaging, swearing, going back home, downloading a crack, and finally play what I’ve paid good money for. And obviously swearing to never buy another game with the same protection system on it.
Lately, however, things have gone from bad to worse. The first I’ve noticed of this was when StarForce got its 15 minutes of fame, and this outraged me by installing a driver in Ring0. It was the first time I’d met a game that actually required I reboot to play after installation, and it wasn’t just limited to full games, oh no. Demos were apparently something you had to protect as well. That just rubs me the wrong way. This made me check with gaming clerks whether or not any games I were considering buying had StarForce on it, and leaving it there if it did.
Apparently after a loud outcry against StarForce, this was replaced by Tages, which also installs a driver, so now I had 2 DRM systems to avoid. And now even SafeDisc and SecuROM (which I previously thought was on-disc protection only) have joined the driver-in-ring0 game.
I believe those 4 represent the vast majority of games released today, and they’re all broken/cracked/whatever within hours or days of release, sometimes even sooner than that. This means that pirates or legal users who are breaking the EULA or just plain stealing, are getting a much better product than legal customers. This is intolerable, and I am hereby announcing that as of today I will not be buying any game with those copy protection systems on it, or any other systems which insist on treating me like a criminal, when I’m being an honest customer. If that means I will not be buying any games for the next 5 years, so be it. This is basically my line in the sand, where I’m saying “this far, but no longer”.
If you absolutely must have some sort of verification that I have actually bought your games, limit it to disc checks. Do not mess with my OS or enforce draconian DRM like online activation and a maximum number of activations pr copy. If I want to play it while offline, it’s my prerogative. If I want to sell the game on after I’m done, it’s my prerogative. It’s my copy, I do what I want with it.
So basically, what StarForce and Spore did (well, in my case, anyway) was trigger a chain reaction which means I will not be buying all the games listed in the following post:
And I am not alone. Below is a link to a collection of links which basically say the same as I am, that things have gone too far:
Baslically, I don’t represent a lost sale due to piracy, I am a lot worse than that. I represent a lot of lost sales simply because you have pissed me off by treating me worse when I buy your games, than if I had just pirated or cracked your games instead. And you have none other than yourselves to thank for it.
Yours annoyedly,
Jan Martin Mathiassen
Annoyed Ex-Gamebuyer.
December 5th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
I agree with your viewpoints on DRM, but I’ve been trying to figure out how this translates to a user on a Mac. Since we only run Ubuntu and OS X, many games are out of our reach of playability. Since my girlfriend wants to play Spore, I’ve been looking into how SecuRom works in the Mac version. Since it seems that Spore is running within Cider (Wine), only the virtual machine contains SecuRom. But of course I’m not sure.
I want to make a statement to EA, even if I purchase the game. In a forum post, it was suggested to pirate the game and then mail the money to EA with a letter explaining the reasoning. Sounds like something I may do.
December 6th, 2008 at 5:24 am
Well, it’s not as much of an overtramp on the computer itself, but it’s still a problem with how they’re just walking all over your part of the “fair use” rights. If you haven’t already, check out http://invasive_drm.mindriot.as/index.php/2008/12/05/casual-piracy/ and by all means do a bit of research on your own. I assume I’m right here, but I’m not certain since I haven’t researched this as in-depth as I could’ve.
If I am right, though, then it is pretty serious, and I seriously hope they get spanked hard for it, because it is just bloody annoying the way they’re just basically bitchslapping us around and the only thing we can do, basically, is whine on forums or not buy their games… in which case we’re probably always labelled as pirates and dismissed.
But we do need to take a stand if that is the case, before they manage to make too much inroads into our rights, and manage to get it into law. Then we’d really be screwed.
May 12th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
There are a hundred reasons EA must die. They killed Bullfrog and Cancelled Dungeon Keeper 3 to focus on safer projects like Harry Potter. They destroyed Maxis and turned Will Wright’s baby into a steaming pile of dumbed down s***, they’re focused on marketing almost exclusively to frat boys, they try to gouge gamers on half efforted expansion packs containing mostly content cut out of their original games (often at the expense of game quality), they release broken and unfinished games with great commercial hype then offer very crappy support, they almost never maintain the sites for the game’s they’ve released, they put malware on our computers without warning…
Hell I could go on but I think I’ve said enough.