Open letter to the gaming industryDear 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. Oh, and I'll just get this out of the way before I start the letter proper. If you (and by "you" I in this case mean anyone, whether or not in the gaming industry or some random internet dweep who is all angsty, emo and/or full of rage for whatever reason) feel like calling me a pirate for berating the current direction on copy protection etc: Fuck you and the horse you rode in on. There, now that that's done, let's get on with it. So, apparently you, the entire gaming industry, has decided that we, the PC gamers, just aren't to be trusted. I understand the fact that piracy is a bad thing, but the fact of the matter is, it will always be there. I can't exactly say how the copy protection is removed, but it doesn't exactly take an internet searching ninja to figure out how to get an uncracked version of a game's .exe file, nor does it exactly take an internet downloading ninja to get the game in the first place. So basically, those who want to pirate a game, most probably will do so. And the sad thing is, as I've learned after a few hours worth of reading up on things, they're probably much better off than legal users are. I mean, don't get me wrong, you guys do make a few great games. So great, in fact, that I would happily buy a lot of them, even if we're in a recession, and that should say a bit. Of course, there are a few duds, but those are easily avoided. No, your great games include such games as operation flashpoint (and expansions), supreme commander (and expansions), red alert, command and conquer, UFO, fallout, system shock, and I could go on and on and on and list almost every game I've bought... but that would make this a very very long paragraph, so I won't. Part of my problem is how you've got this weird fascination with the console as a gaming platform. I can sort of see the point, since it's easy to program for that specific hardware, and know it'll work. It's a very valid point. However, during my short stint into xbox360 gaming, I've been subject to a boxing game of some sort (can't remember its name; it was fun for 2 hours, then got boring), a fighting game (dead or alive 2 I think, sucked, got bored after 1 hour), mass effect (brilliant, lacked a few features I was expecting from the initial videos, but oh well, still a damned good game), Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (played for about 15 minutes, got fed up with trying to aim with a pad, put it away), and the biggest stinker of them all due to sheer bad execution, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. To be fair, the last one's fault is because the entire game was badly produced, but the main killer, a seriously bad auto aim, was there because of it being on a console. I even pre-ordered this game, and I didn't read about the auto-aim until it had been shipped, at which point it was too late. Now, the console could have been better if there'd been made a few changes to it. I can't speak of the PS3, since I don't own one, but one thing which annoyed me about mass effect was how textures kept popping in all the time due to load times from the DVD, and how monumentally slow the elevators were. I have a HD on the xbox, why can't that be used to store the game data on? It'd cut down on load times, it'd cut down on DVD media and reader wear, and it would eliminate moronic ideas such as using elevators as loading screens. And speaking of improvements, why oh why is allowing a keyboard and mouse IN THE GAMES such a dangerous idea? I've seen excuses such as "oh but it'd make the xbox too much like a PC". In what way? You allow its use in other areas such as Live chat etc, and last time I checked, I couldn't install that many actual programs on it, just games, mostly because it's a gaming platform, and there are just games developed for it. So what exactly is so threatening about letting ME use a keyboard and mouse in FPS games such as GRAW so I'll actually bother trying to finish them, instead of getting fed up and stop buying them? I can assume it's because you think console games are only for the MTV generation, whose attention span is way shorter than this letter is going to be (and whom will whine about "TLDR"), but I would seriously hope you would re-evaluate that view. I would very much like to use the console as my one-stop gaming machine, if I could. Instead I'm hindered by idiotic artificial (i.e. not technical, but political, reasons) barriers which just frustrates me. So I guess I'll have to look to PC gaming for my kind of games. Except for one small thing... Copy protection. This 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 etc etc, in an ever escalating war against pirates. It started out innocuously enough, but it ended badly. 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. 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. I don't remember exactly which game it was in when I first noticed it, but I also even found it in a demo of some game released on steam. A goddamned demo. And apparently your reasoning behind that was "it would delay the pirates from hacking the full version". Bollocks it will. That made me ask every gaming clerk if a game had starforce on it, and if it did, I would put it back. Yay, lost sales. I thought that was what you wanted copy protection to avoid in the first place. Then there was the Spore debacle. 3 installs and online activation, is it? Yes, yes, I know you upped that to 5, but you're still being pretty damned insulting. I mean, games these days cost a fair bit these days (all due to "pirates", you say, and then you have the audacity to demand MORE money for your console versions, which are more limited because all we get are these gaming pads ... so I get less for more.), and I still can't for example take a legally purchased copy of Spore, go to a cabin way up in the mountains with no internet, and relax with an hour or two of gaming after a long day trekking about, simply because the game can't verify that "yep. I am actually a legal copy of this game, I haven't been installed 3 (or 5, as it may be) times before, the authorization servers haven't been taken down yet, and my serial number isn't blacklisted for some reason or another. Yay for someone not having keygenned my serialnumber yet, forcing my owner to buy another copy (or downloading a cracked version, and having NONE of these problems) and leaving me here all lonely and stuff :( :( :(". Seriously, that is so far beyond fucked up, words fail me. If I buy a game, it's mine. I can do what I want with it, as long as I don't use any of it to sell or give copies of it to others. I would prefer if I were able to make a backup copy, or if I didn't have to use the disc every time I start a game up, but I'll accept that as a compromise for now. Maybe. There have been cases of me wanting to fire up a game that I installed a year or two ago (and never uninstalled), but the DVD is in the back of a closet somewhere safe, and I can't be arsed to dig it out. So I either download a crack, or worse, I just ignore the game. Either way, your role as a delivery agent of entertainment fails. Then there's the alternative to physical media, i.e. Steam and the like. They're brilliant, as long as you have internet access. I was in the position of being at a LAN party this weekend, where I'd signed up for COD4 and CSS competitions. I'd downloaded the games from steam while at home, they both said "100% ready", but they weren't. The LAN party apparently had a few problems with their internet connection, which wasn't fixed until 14:00 the next day. This prompted me to start steam up in offline mode, except it wouldn't let me play. Apparently when COD4 is downloaded from steam, it isn't the very latest version, it needs a few updates to get to the latest version. And with the internet access being down, that kind of didn't work. I even tried with a few manual patches, which obviously didn't work (I assume the steam version of the game exe has a few mods from the disc version). Needless to say, this pissed me off even further, and prompted me to thinking that disc versions were the way to go forward from now on. But for that to happen, I was going to have to make sure that games I were going to buy didn't contain starforce and the more nazi versions of securom. Apparently this was going to be the PC version of mass effect as well, which was supposed to phone home once every 10 days, until that was changed because people were complaining. That was worrying, because up until then (i.e. Spore and Mass Effect) I'd thought that you would've learnt your lesson from StarForce's example. Apparently not. So I started digging around a bit, and what I found was even more worrying. StarForce
SecuROM
SafeDisc
I seriously was surprised by this, since I really had thought you guys had learned from StarForce, but it gets worse. SafeCast
Tages
I can go on and on, but I'd just spend ages and ages, so I won't. The common denominator here is that the systems all install drivers or services where they shouldn't, and they all dictate how I can or cannot use the software I've spent money on. That is, you, the gaming industry, believe you can dictate how I can use it. There's been one indie developer who make games without any copy protection on at all, which I'm very inclined to purchase a few games from just to support. However, he's done a poll on why people pirate his games, and the result is on http://www.positech.co.uk/talkingtopirates.html. He was surprised about the results, but I wasn't really all that surprised, since I've been fairly insistent on buying games I thought were good, specifically to support developers, some of which are like him. Small, and highly dependent on me doing the right thing. I believe I see why the 3 or 5 install limit is something you want to enforce, though. I don't agree with it at all, but I think I can see the reasoning behind it. It might cut down on second-hand sales of games, but that is simply not your place to dictate. As I said earlier, if I buy a game, it is mine. I can do whatever I want with it, including selling it to other people. If I'm done with a book, then chances are I won't read it again, and it'll just take up space at my house. I'd even be more environmentally friendly if I were to sell it on (not that I care all that much about that part, but it's a benefit nontheless). But basically, what you, the software industry as a whole, but the gaming industry especially, have all done over the years is
And then you have the audacity to wonder why the PC versions aren't selling. Brilliant. I even used to be proud about how I've never had a virus or spyware on my own personal computer in all the years I've owned one, but I guess that looking back, the DRM some games have installed should be called a virus, because that's basically what it is. It is software I haven't authorized. And after thinking about all of this for a few hours, I believe I have a much better alternative to all of this. No, don't be a dweeb and automatically assume I'm going to pirate games. It's better than that. I'm going to take a stand here. This is my line in the sand. I am not going to tolerate paying for something which would work better if I were to pirate it. No, I am going to just not buy any games which has copy protection on it which installs drivers, dials home, fucks with my hardware or software (especially the OS), or in any way, shape or form beyond requiring that the disc is in the drive assumes I'm a criminal until proven innocent. There are plenty of other things which I can spend my time on rather than games. I will also not buy any games off of steam which I might need in a competitional setting, no matter how friendly the competition might be. I will not be put in a position where I may not be in on the fun which I travelled X hours just to be in on, ever again. So Valve, you may thank EA and Spore for being the last straw that triggered this whole chain reaction. So basically, what Spore did (well, in MY case, anyway) was trigger a chain reaction which means I will not be buying at least the following games:
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,
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