(Rant)
At this point, I'm pretty sure everyone's heard of the SimCity scandal. In fact, I'm sure of it, because even my dad, who isn't a gamer in the slightest, has even heard of it. Here's the low-down for anyone who lives under a bigger rock than I do: EA and Maxis released the next installment of SimCity, only to find that nobody was able to play their game because their servers were steaming piles of ass. Players who paid $60 (who were also deined a refund, by the way), couldn't even play a single session of what was supossed to be a singleplayer game, instead being promted to wait a constantly increasing amount of time, which tended to be forever floating around the half-hour mark. Those who were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the actual game were promptly booted out a few minutes later. As if to kick 'em while they're down, Amazon.com reacted to the outburst of fans and removed the game from their online store entirely. Here's the kicker: why did this happen and how does it affect us as gamers?
Simple. A little concept known as DRM.
DRM, for those who don't know, is a sort of "tool" implemented into a piece of software that renders the entire thing innoperable unless connected to the internet. So, basically, it's as if the games you downloaded on your iPhone wouldn't even boot up unless you had a strong cell service. The fact that this was put into a game that was primarily made for a singleplayer experience doesn't make any sense, unless looked at from a corporate perspective. ...scratch that; it actually makes less sense. According to EA, SimCity was given DRM coding to "prevent piracy". I'm going to put this bluntly, everyone: you cannot prevent piracy. It's everywhere, and with an output like the internet, it's literally flat-out impossible to completely prevent someone from getting an illegal copy of your game. In this scenario, however, you're just shooting yourself in the foot; by screwing over customers like this and giving them a game that doesn't work, you're making piracy even more prominent than it was before, especially when your little DRM thing can be completely removed with a simple edit to a mere three lines of code. (Yes, that happened with SimCity. Go figure, huh?)
Now, from what I hear, Microsoft is planning on using DRM on the entirety of their next console. Simple response: don't. Bad Microsoft. Bad. Don't make me get the newspaper. Nobody in the gaming world will ever react positively to the concept of DRM, primarily because broadband internet isn't as common as we'd all like it to be. There are still people who don't have internet access whatsoever but still want to play video games, and then you have people like me who have an internet connection, but one that's so unreliable that it kicks you off every 10 minutes. In my case, I'd be in the middle of a game I'm playing by myself in singleplayer mode, about to complete a mission I spent an hour on, when suddenly I get booted out because my internet cut out, and most likely losing my progress up to that point. You can't even begin to implement something like this when internet access isn't worldwide yet.
There's also the concept of servers. Every multiplayer game has to have a server to operate, which is a tower of technology in some building somewhere in the world that hosts your little Deathmatch games every time you hop online. After a period of time, not as many people get online to a certain game anymore, so the company decides to save money by deactivating the servers, rendering said game's multiplayer mode(s) inactive forever. Bungie did this with Halo 2, as more people were playing Halo 3 or Reach at the time. With my GameCube, I can go back and play whatever game I want whenever I want for as long as I want, but if Microsoft puts DRM into their consoles, come 20 years later, you and I won't be able to use the console or its games anymore. Why? Because the moneygrabbers behind Microsoft shut down their servers because they just pushed out the Xbox 6 and want people to play on that instead. Because of that, your $400+ system and whole collection of $60 games becomes utterly useless. The NES my family owns can be passed down through generations, but that bigass paperweight from Microshit is now a hunk of wasted money and time because the system's DRM function no longer has a server to connect to.
To those of you up in the corporate world of the gaming industry: don't fuck us over like this. It's not fair to your consumers, and the bottom line is that if you don't treat us fairly, you're not going to keep getting service and you're going to lose a lot of money. Save yourself (and us) the trouble and scrap the concept of DRM altogether, because it clearly is not the way to go from any viewpoint.
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