The issues with the Diablo 3 launch had me thinking about Digital Rights Management (DRM) and how best to go about it. For starters, DRM is here to stay, but there is a right way and a wrong way to go about it.
Firstly, I don't really want to get into whether companies should or should not employ DRM. They do. And I don't really want to get into the ethics of piracy or anti-piracy. At least not in this post. My main point is that publishers have used some type of copyright device from very early on, from quizzes at the beginning of Leisure Suit Larry to the spyware/malware that Sony once put on music CDs. Publishers want your money. The whole reason that they exist is to generate profit and DRM is a tool that they see as being key to that profit generation. Clearly some publishers are more ruthless than others.
We're all familiar with the standard type - you buy your awesome new game, download it, and then try to type the long code in the tiny print. Sometimes is blurry, smudged, or contains printing errors. Sometimes you wonder if the dashes are required, or if that's a 1 or an I, or whether it's a 0 or a O. Fun times. But if I'm running a LAN game, I can sometimes get away with copying the same disk to multiple computers or even copying the disks, and so long as I'm not actually connected to the Internet, or at least a site like battle.net, I can have my LAN lovin' and game on.
Blizzard decided to pick a different route. They decided to keep people like me from pulling shenanigans like the ones I explained above I need to be connected to battle.net the whole time I play my 1 player game. This saddens me a bit because I can't take my laptop to work and continue my game on my lunch breaks, but Blizzard is creative and clever and the, in my opinion, really do care about the player's experience and gave us something in return for being shackled to their servers - they made a really nifty friends system and two auction houses (one of which is not yet implemented at the time of this writing).
Blizzard got it both right and wrong. Right in the sense that they tried to provide value in trade for the fact that my 1 player game can only be played when I have an internet connection and wrong in the sense that they failed to launch smoothly and angered/frustrated players right out of the gate with server malfunction issues. Most players would never have cared about the mandatory connection, and many would have never noticed if that fact was not brought to light so very early in the launch. What Blizzard could have done better was to provide an offline mode for players like me who wish to play alone and without an Internet connection at times.
While I'd love to rant about this, anyone interested is seeing someone froth at the mouth on this issue can simply search the D3 forums. I'm more interested in what this means for the future of DRM. Was this launch enough of a disaster that companies will hesitate to shackle you to their server? I doubt it. I think we'll see more and more of this from companies who will give us less in return. Blizzard knew this was a possibility from the PlayStation Network outages and people couldn't play certain single player games. The reality is that DRM is here to stay. And while the old adage that "locks are for honest people" will always hold true, you'll still see people using locks that will hassle their honest, paying customers and will still do little except slightly slow down those who are determined to pick that lock.
They only thing that I can really say to you if you truly hate the direction that DRM is heading is to keep calm and keep your comments civil and constructive. Hammering away in all caps and calling the devs all kinds of filthy names will not get your argument heard, it will get you banned and ignored. Threatening to burn down the publisher's office will just get you arrested. And do not threaten to boycott. Let's be serious, will you really never buy another video game again? And how many of your friends are likely to follow your lead? Look at the recent NOM boycotts of Starbucks - sales actually rose during that time. There is no surer way to tell a company that you are irrelevant than to prove you are toothless. And once you've crossed that bridge, it will be tough to get a good dialogue with anyone who matters. So keep calm, keep constructive, and keep civil.
Again, I really don't want to get into politics here or to agitate toward forcing publishers to steer away from this trend. I could name a dozen different ways of protesting, but for now, I really want to educate my fellow gamers what DRM really is, and what its effects are, and how companies are trying to slip it past you disguised as as features. I want to get the dialog started on alternatives - how can a publisher ensure that they will see a return on the investment it made in creating the game and how can players not feel taken advantage of or inconvenienced in the process.
No comments:
Post a Comment