Rants

Posted on 15 Dec 2008 at 16:08

 

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...Simon Brew rails against the business practices of modern games publishers.

The current trend in the PC gaming sector offers some quite disturbing insights into how publishers view the platform. Although so far it has been constrained to a smattering of gaming releases, I can't be the only one with real and genuine fears as to where all this will end up.

A few months back, Electronic Arts released the hotly-anticipated Spore. As one of the most original and interesting PC-exclusive releases of the year, it should have shot to the top of the charts and stayed there for some time. Instead, it's become the poster child for a new kind of copy protection, which kills the second-hand market for PC games and turns it into a rental system.

On its release, Spore limited its users to a maximum of three installations. You then had to ring a call centre in some far-flung quarter of the galaxy to ask them nicely if you could run the game on another PC. Granted, three installations is likely to be ample for most games, and when the uproar hit - most notably through an avalanche of negative customer reviews at Amazon.co.uk - EA relaxed its policy. But even so, it marked a shift in attitude towards PC gamers that was originally hinted at with last year's BioShock, where you weren't allowed to play the game until you'd got the nod from a remote server.

The gaming fraternity, of which I'm a fully paid-up member, was up in arms about this, and yet Electronic Arts has continued regardless, adding protection to the likes of Crysis: Warhead as well.

Protection racket

However, there's an even bigger issue at stake here, which is all about publishers having control over the software you buy. There's barely a big commercial publisher out there - in any genre of software - that wouldn't like to determine how many times you were allowed to install a piece of software before getting it renewed. But the idea of this software then potentially locking out a legitimate customer is, of course, the great fallacy of many copy-protection systems: the honest buyer is inconvenienced the most, and the pirate just gets a cracked copy that removes the hassle.

It's all arguably part and parcel of a shift towards a licensing model for all tiers of software, where you don't own the program you buy, nor do you have the right to lend it to a friend to try.

Sadly, it's this sort of narrow-mindedness that, in the gaming world at least, has sent many scurrying to games consoles. Publishers like that, too, as console games are much harder to copy. But if it does extend to home software applications, then publishers won't be able to complain if we vote with our wallets and reject this approach as an insult to honest customers.

Author: Simon Brew