Hatin’ on DRM (and other things)

I love it when some developers talk absolute sense. Like stardock’s developer does in the following post:

http://draginol.joeuser.com/article/303512/Piracy_PC_Gaming

Now I’m not going to say that having absolutely no DRM is the way forward, although that would be a very welcome change of pace. What I am saying, however, is that the current trend of treating my property (my computer) as their own playground, where they install whatever they like and use the excuse “oh but pirates force us to do this”, screw up the stability of my property, and just generally treating me like a no-good thieving pirate until I prove otherwise by running through hoops … has to stop.

Peg it back a few notches to the point where you protect the first few days of sale, and you’re golden.

Or hell, stop making games which are way too high on the blitz factor but short on content/playtime, and start catering to the tastes of people who might actually want to buy your games. Don’t like how a game sells? Look at who’s playing the game, and how likely they are to buy it if they can just wait a while and get it for free (which they will after a very short while, no matter what you try). You might find that if you f.ex aim for a bit older market, you might find people who are that much more willing to pay for a game, because they might be in a bit more of a mature and honest mindset.

Treat us like shit, and you’ll find that the same people who were mature and honest enough to buy it to begin with, are old enough to have plenty of other things to spend their time on instead of buying the latest glitzy new game for the console which has a playtime of, oh I dunno, 10 hours?

Take me for example, I’ve got quite a few games detailed here on this blog already which I probably would’ve bought and played if the copy protection would’ve stopped at just requiring the disk be in the drive. But no, EA has to go beyond that, so what do I do? I play Eve Online instead. I don’t lose any sleep over not seeing the lush graphics of farcry 2’s steppes, but EA lost $50, and the games developer lost $whatever_they_get_from_publisher.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 7:57 am and is filed under Ranty McRant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.