Smues Looks at DRM Protection aka Digital Rights Management

When I was growing up the majority of my video gaming was done on consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Sega Genesis, or hand-held systems like the Sega Game Gear and Nintendo CREAM SPINACH COLOR BOY Game Boy. The process of loading up games on these systems was a relatively simple matter: grab a cartridge, put it in the system (possibly after blowing on it to remove dust and glitch demons), hit the power button and boom before you know it you’re dying on that damn dam level of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TMNT). We also always had at least one computer in the house so I got in a fair amount of PC gaming as well, because who needs friends and a social life when you can sit in the basement and make elves disappear? In fact I also owned that same Ninja Turtles game for the PC, but the frustration caused by the PC version was inflicted long before you got blowed up real good at the damn. To get the game to load you had to enter a code found in a barely readable (and most importantly for the developer, non-photo copiable) table in the manual. No manual? No game. No turtle soup for you.

Flash (AHHHHhhhh) forward to the present and copy protection (cp) (wait no that’s a bad abbreviation to use) for PC games has gotten much more frustrating for the user and there is a looming threat of the same thing happening to console gamers. In the past, assuming I hadn’t lost the damn manual, I could loan my copy of TMNT to someone else and they could play it, until they lost the damn manual and I had to disown them as a friend. They then disowned me as a friend for making them play TMNT so call it a draw I guess as I digress. Anyway, in present day (all the good little boys and girls look forward to Present Day) we call copy protection digital rights management (DRM) and it has gotten much more complicated.  You no longer have to consult the instruction manual to use a game, possibly because instruction manuals barely exists anymore, but instead most DRM relies on the internet to validate your installation. Depending on the piece of software it can be quite a frustrating process that adds no value to the purchased product and can almost feel like punishment for daring to purchase a product.

I’m going to focus this article mostly on the user side of DRM, and not get deep into the ethics of piracy or the debate on if DRM should exist. I absolutely acknowledge that piracy is a huge problem facing software developers today. They deserve to get paid, and I could go on for pages about what I think about some of the rationales people use when they pirate a piece of software but that is for another place and time. Today I just want to talk about the user experience when facing DRM and the problems it presents. Or maybe I just want to vent a little bit, I don’t know. I’m not smart enough to have any solutions to the problems and I’m not even sure there are any good absolute solutions to all of today’s piracy and DRM issues. However, when I pay $60 for a game and can’t play it when I want to, that’s a big Neddy no-no. Seemingly the most common DRM system for PC games these days is Steam. Steam is pretty good overall. You install your game, you activate it through Steam, and now it’s forever attached to you. You can’t sell it or give it to someone else, but you can install it on other computers and re-download it if you need to. Steam has its own share of problems though. For me Steam loves to throw a fit when I am not connected to the internet. You can play Steam games offline, but what happens to me half of the time is Steam decides either Steam itself or the game I want to play needs to be updated and oh oops sorry we have 1 byte of the ten billion bytes we need downloaded so you can’t play until we get the rest. Oh you’re on a laptop travelling and there is no Wi-Fi? Too bad. Read a book. Loser. Lose some weight too while you’re at it.

It gets even worse with what the kids now days call always-on DRM. You have to be connected 100% of the time to the internet and the games server to play. This is ok for an MMO. This is not ok for my single play dungeon crawling role playing puzzle racer game. At the moment I refuse to buy games with always-on DRM. I say at the moment because I assume someday there will be a game I just have to have and I cave, but I never see myself accepting always-on DRM all the time. And despite not buying these games I do have some ‘fun’ experience with one because we got a ‘free’ copy of Diablo 3 because my wife is a Warcraft addict and committed to a year of service. Diablo 3 is a great example of many of my problems with the requirement of a constant connection. Because of my work schedule I only had a small bit of time to play it the day it came out, and I didn’t even get to use all of that because of server errors on Blizzards end. These continued for several days. You haven’t lived until you’ve experienced the joy of single player lag. So at least I got to live a lot thanks to Blizzards. Other fun I had caused by Diablo 3’s DRM included:

• Losing dungeon progress because of a dropped connection, on either end.
• Dying because of a pause in the connection.
• Character naming restrictions. If I want to make FuckTard the Wizard in my game I only play alone then I should be able to. Immaturity rules!
• People joining my game without my consent because the game defaults to allowing people to just drop in.
• Forced updates. If they nerf your gear, too bad. If an update is buggy and accidentally breaks something in the game, which happened at least once, it is still forced upon you and you can’t avoid it.
• Didn’t happen to me, but there have been accounts hacked and all their gear and gold stolen. Not an issue when your game is saved on your computer. An issue when the game is saved on a server.
• No ability to cheat.

That last one isn’t a big deal, but it kind of gets to a greater point. When a single player game requires a constant connection and is always being checked by the server, you lose the control over your own game that you used to have. In the first two Diablos if you didn’t feel like grinding up another character you could download some software and edit up. Those days are over. In fact, I think they ban you for cheating in Diablo 3, which would mean you could no longer play it at all. For cheating in a game you were playing alone. That scares me. And if Blizzard decided one day they no longer wanted to run the Diablo 3 server, then you could no longer play the game. Sure it sucks having to grab the instruction manual, or a .pdf of said manual, to be able to play my legally purchased copy of Leisure Suit Larry 3, but I’ve owned it for probably close to twenty years and I still have the ability to play it. I’m not so confident that in twenty years I could play Diablo 3. I was going to end with ‘and that scares me’ but I already said that (and already saying that scares me), so instead let me end with this: No matter how shitty a game may be, I believe developers deserve to be paid for it when someone decides they want a copy, but there has to a way that is better for the customer than always-on DRM.