Draconian DRM And DLC Strip Mining Modern Games

DRM (Digital Rights Management) and DLC (Downloadable Content) are two systems used in computer and console gaming that are quickly being overrun by corporate greed and destroying the rights of paying customers (gamers).

DRM (Digital Rights Management) makes buyers of software (computer games, programs, etc.) jump through hoops in order to use the product they purchased and restricts freedom in the name of reducing piracy and increasing sales. DRM has never successfully stopped a game from being pirated. Hackers are very smart and very quickly come up with clever ways to remove DRM. Meanwhile, the paying customers are stuck handcuffed by the DRM making their game experience at the very least annoying and at worst completely impossible.

DLC (Downloadable Content) is extra content (levels, weapons, armour, costumes, maps, buildings, characters, quests, etc.) that a player can buy on top of buying the original game in order to add extra bits and pieces to the experience. Extra content can be a win/win for both the company that made the game as well as the customers. The company can create extra content and sell it for a couple dollars a month or more after the game has come out, extending a game's longevity and adding more content to expand a player's experience. The player gets more content and the game company makes more money.


DRM Death Squad

The most popular form of DRM these days (when it comes to games) is locking each copy of a game to a single user so that the game can never be traded, sold, given away, or even installed on additional hardware (more than one computer). This is done by requiring the customer to register an online account with the company that made the game (or the online store that the company goes through). Unless the customer registers online (giving a user name, a password, and an active authenticated email address [at the very least]), the game either will not install or will not play. Once the account is activated, the game must then be able to regularly contact that game company's servers to authenticate itself (prove that you are the proper legal owner of the game) every time you start the game and even while you're busy playing the game. If at any point the communication fails (your internet goes down or the company's servers go down), your game automatically stops working and kicks you out.

I have purchased a few games over the years with DRM that frustratingly handicapped the game I bought. In one case, the game stuttered and skipped so bad that it was almost unplayable. I figured out that it was because the game was constantly verifying itself online, even though the game was single player. I got so annoyed and fed up with the awful performance that I finally just downloaded a pirated version of the game so I could play it. It worked perfectly. Another game I bought was constantly locking up and freezing on me. It did this exactly 10 minutes in every single time. Turns out, it was trying to "phone home" to the game publisher to verify that I was the rightful owner. It was failing because I had turned my internet off temporarily (which I often do when playing single player games). Another game I bought wouldn't even install. The game was 3 years old, and though it was a single player game, the game required me to register online and keep an open internet connection. Problem was, the company had disbanded since then and it was impossible to register with them because the company no longer existed. The game I paid for, was 100% useless.

Imagine this kind of system on anything else you purchase. Your DVD player has to be online and every 10 minutes it must verify that you are the rightful owner of each and every DVD you play. Or you have to register your email address, user name and password in order to start using that brand new toilet, car, stereo system, or lightbulb. Or each and ever time you start up your car, it must first authenticate itself and all of its parts online with the manufacturers before you can drive anywhere.

The whole point of all this is to handcuff and lock paying customers directly to the company that created and published the game. If anything goes wrong anywhere in the process for whatever reason, the game you paid for simply stops working and you're out of luck. There is no freedom to simply play what you bought. You are tied down and hobbled by draconian DRM. You have effectively given up your rights as a paying customer. You purchased the game, but only get to play that game so long as the company who made it allows you to do so.


DLC Strip Mining

DLC (Downloadable Content) "strip mining" is basically cutting features and chunks from a game in order to sell it later as "extra content" for more money. This can be levels, maps, characters, equipment, game play features, quests, costumes, and all kinds of other content that has been intentionally excluded from the game in order to make customers buy it on top of the game's full price tag. There are some absolutely horrendous examples of this going on lately. Some of the worst is when the content already exists on the DVD of the game that you bought, but you can't access that content without paying extra to have it unlocked. That's right. You bought the game, and this content is already on the disc, but you can't use it unless you pay more. Capcom is notorious for this. Another example of horrible DLC is when your game gives you a quest or mission, but then you can't play that quest or mission because it was cut from the game and requires you to pay extra for it.

One last example comes from Diablo 3. The game has an online auction house where you have to pay real world money to buy and sell digital items in the game (weapons, armour, etc.). Blizzard, the company that made the game, will automatically take a percentage cut of the money for each and every transaction. But what's REALLY bad about this is that players have realized that the whole last section of the game is impossible to play without buying high powered items from the auction house. So you cannot play and beat the full game without spending more real world money at the auction house. The monsters are intentionally made too powerful for you to defeat unless you pay for better gear.


Example In The Extreme:  New SimCity

The new SimCity game (due out this year, 2013) is a prime example of BOTH these systems ramped up to their full powerful maximums.

It has come to light that the game will not only require a constant internet connection, but that your saved games are actually run and stored on the servers of Electronic Arts (the company that is publishing the game). So if you lose your connection to their online servers for some reason, you lose your progress on the game. When customers heard about this a number of them were rightfully outraged, saying things like, "Hey, Electronic Arts! Our own computers have a wonderful little device called a hard drive that's absolutely perfect for storing saved games on and it requires no internet connection at all to work." Games have been able to save to your system/hardware since before the 1980s, but because of EA's super powered DRM, the new SimCity will not allow that.

And how about DLC? Turns out, the new SimCity game is "nickle and dime-ing" tons of content that used to be included in previous SimCity games. For example, the land space for your cities in the new game is severely limited, only equivalent to a few city blocks. Previous SimCity games, even as far back as the 1990s, let you build huge sprawling cities. No more. Why? Because EA (Electronic Arts) wants to sell you that extra land space as DLC. And that's only the tip of the iceberg. There are tons of features that used to be included in SimCity games that have been cut and made DLC so players have to pay extra for them.

This is corporate greed and power tripping in the extreme! I've been a fan of the SimCity games since the 1990s, but what I'm learning about the new SimCity is infuriating me and I will NOT be buying it.