I’m actually starting to get quite annoyed now. Throughout history there has been the status quo, which was fine for those who liked it, and hell for those who did not. The problem is those who usually liked it were those who were gaining the most from the situation, which is usually the minority group. Making much sense? Think I’m talking about a cheesy Rock band? Too young to know who Status Quo are? Read on…
Today, I read about the Movie Industry, in particular the origins of the movie industry and got into the founding of Paramount Studios, a company which made a lot of movies and a lot of money. See Paramount went for something called vertical integration, no I hadn’t heard of it either, whereby in a nutshell you own every stage of the development process to save yourself money and make lots more. E.g. They owned the movie production and the distribution and exhibition of said movies. Pretty smart. Of course this lead to bullying business practices where they forced theatres to buy blocks of movies, even films they hadn’t seen to show to customers.
They must have bought some absolute trash that nobody should have had to see, or probably even bothered to see, putting all the risk of the movie production on the distributors. Lame for them. They didn’t like it, they fought back and eventually the supreme court (ego much?) told them to knock it off, a fairer business practice developed and TV became massively popular.
So. 4th paragraph and no DRM. Yeah. Suckers… The point was that the system was corrupt, evil you might say, and they had to fight back. We may be getting close to such a situation in video game land as quite frankly publishers are starting to take the piss. DRM in games is getting ridiculous. Today I also read that the new Driver game, asides from not supporting steering wheels (…) will also require you to be connected to the internet at all times. ALL times. It will actively stop you playing if your net drops, or wire comes out or as pointed out, you go somewhere that doesn’t have internet… Let alone this relies on their servers working, supporting the load and not suffering a PSN style hack attack…
Also, bye bye to pre-owned games. You need a pass to play most of them online, or get DLC and the new Resident Evil game on DS only allows you to have 1 save game… Hope you didn’t fancy starting that from the beginning. Cause you can’t. We’ve long since been in a world where games that were too hard to finish never we’re witnessed to the end, so they made all the games easier. Now we’re getting too much content free it seems so if you don’t pay them up front there’s no on-line or DLC for you. Even if you do buy it new some of you won’t be able to play if you’re net is dodgy.
We have rights, although clearly not enough. We need to nip this craziness in the bud. Spore had one of the craziest sets of DRM on the planet and it was the most pirated game of that year. You’re asking to be taken down a peg if you start criminalising you’re legitimate customers. The people that take you’re stuff are not going to buy it because they don’t respect the product or you’re company. Is it right? No. But is their solution any better? If they worked to earn their business and didn’t treat even their loyal customers like scum perhaps they would do better for it. Certainly wouldn’t hurt to knock 5 quid off the RRP for every game…
I hope you’ve learnt a little bit of movie history, and enjoyed a rant at the “man”. Maybe we can start a revolution, maybe we’ll say I told you so, or I knew this was coming, but I fancy it’s only gonna get worse before it gets better. We will have to make a stand, let’s see how far they take it… Soon they’ll be charging you a flat fee for the person who has to witness you playing the game before you can play it, just to make sure you didn’t steal it. I don’t know why but I suspect his name would be Scott. You’d have to feed and cloth him too. Don’t worry though, he’d be your unlock code for all games by that publisher. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned this idea. If I spot any EA ip addresses reading this entry I’ll remove it immediately and issue a full apology…
