Posted May 31, 2011
high rated
Okay so here's my personal journey on the path to hating DRM.. it all began many years ago when..
Bioshock was a game I was looking forward to playing.. I used to pirate some games, but I was planning to buy that one as I felt that great games deserved my money. Luckily, it hadn't been released in time for my birthday and a friend came over later with a genuine version he'd just bought as a gift. [Little did he know that he was about to regret that decision.]
First we endured the 10 minute wait for Bioshock to install - then the game immediately wanted to go online to download an update. We decided to "skip the update" for now and just check out the game.. Bad move - because without any warning, the game automatically uninstalls itself when we declined to update. A disappointing start, but we tell ourselves we're made of sterner stuff - and we reinstall - another 10 minutes pass.. we agree to the update this time... a message says "Please be patient" and proceeds to download the update - without giving any approximate file size - and I was on a dial-up connection. So, 30 minutes later the update is complete - it asks if we want to play the game now - I click "no" because I feel safer being offline in single player games - and I want to disconnect before I play. Once offline, I click the Bioshock desktop icon - only to find that it now wants to go online again for "activation"...
At this point it's getting harder to remain upbeat about doing our bit to help the software industry by purchasing original software. Anyway, we go back online to find we need to type the serial number - which has been printed on the supplied manual in such a way that only the lower two-thirds of each character are visible. That's right, we need to play guessing games about the serial key... and what's worse - the '1' and '0' characters are indistinguishable from "I" and "O" in the font they used. Yes, it's real
grit-your-teeth-and-start-searching-the-forums time. Another 30 minutes of web browsing passes as we begin to realize that customers the world over are undergoing the same torture - and if their experience is any yardstick - our situation is probably only going to get worse.
Having uncovered the magic formula to deciphering the serial key [Only one number is included in each 4 character group of letters] we go through the two or three variations on the guesswork to read the remainder of the 2/3rds visible characters. The online activation attempts to do its thing - further waiting ensues - then it reports back that it can't connect and we should manually get an unlock code from the store we bought the game from... but after this hellish two-hour-long-install-period, it's now 7 PM at night, so that's not an option. Over the next few hours, we try to activate half a dozen more times - with the same result. In desperation we return to the forums - only to learn that the activation servers are down and nobody can play the game. We look at each other and curse DRM hell for its role in the bastardisation of the PC gaming scene.
We decide that our only hope is to give up on Bioshock until we can download a pirate crack to make the damn thing work. Wisely, we don't uninstall it, because the word on the forums is that Bioshock only allows a certain number of installs before it bans you from installing on your own computer. We then load up a cracked game and enjoy some happy hours of hassle free gaming - where you just click on the icon and the game loads up. We begin to recover from the stress of dealing with original DRM software. My friend later returned the game for a refund & we vowed to stick with pirated software for the foreseeable future.
Later, having calmed down, we pondered the plight of the aptly-named developer "Irrational Software". They had said they were counting on this game selling well to justify their design decisions over the years. We believed in the kinds of games they'd tried to create, so we did the right thing - and they burned us for it. That's how I came to hate DRM.
Bioshock was a game I was looking forward to playing.. I used to pirate some games, but I was planning to buy that one as I felt that great games deserved my money. Luckily, it hadn't been released in time for my birthday and a friend came over later with a genuine version he'd just bought as a gift. [Little did he know that he was about to regret that decision.]
First we endured the 10 minute wait for Bioshock to install - then the game immediately wanted to go online to download an update. We decided to "skip the update" for now and just check out the game.. Bad move - because without any warning, the game automatically uninstalls itself when we declined to update. A disappointing start, but we tell ourselves we're made of sterner stuff - and we reinstall - another 10 minutes pass.. we agree to the update this time... a message says "Please be patient" and proceeds to download the update - without giving any approximate file size - and I was on a dial-up connection. So, 30 minutes later the update is complete - it asks if we want to play the game now - I click "no" because I feel safer being offline in single player games - and I want to disconnect before I play. Once offline, I click the Bioshock desktop icon - only to find that it now wants to go online again for "activation"...
At this point it's getting harder to remain upbeat about doing our bit to help the software industry by purchasing original software. Anyway, we go back online to find we need to type the serial number - which has been printed on the supplied manual in such a way that only the lower two-thirds of each character are visible. That's right, we need to play guessing games about the serial key... and what's worse - the '1' and '0' characters are indistinguishable from "I" and "O" in the font they used. Yes, it's real
grit-your-teeth-and-start-searching-the-forums time. Another 30 minutes of web browsing passes as we begin to realize that customers the world over are undergoing the same torture - and if their experience is any yardstick - our situation is probably only going to get worse.
Having uncovered the magic formula to deciphering the serial key [Only one number is included in each 4 character group of letters] we go through the two or three variations on the guesswork to read the remainder of the 2/3rds visible characters. The online activation attempts to do its thing - further waiting ensues - then it reports back that it can't connect and we should manually get an unlock code from the store we bought the game from... but after this hellish two-hour-long-install-period, it's now 7 PM at night, so that's not an option. Over the next few hours, we try to activate half a dozen more times - with the same result. In desperation we return to the forums - only to learn that the activation servers are down and nobody can play the game. We look at each other and curse DRM hell for its role in the bastardisation of the PC gaming scene.
We decide that our only hope is to give up on Bioshock until we can download a pirate crack to make the damn thing work. Wisely, we don't uninstall it, because the word on the forums is that Bioshock only allows a certain number of installs before it bans you from installing on your own computer. We then load up a cracked game and enjoy some happy hours of hassle free gaming - where you just click on the icon and the game loads up. We begin to recover from the stress of dealing with original DRM software. My friend later returned the game for a refund & we vowed to stick with pirated software for the foreseeable future.
Later, having calmed down, we pondered the plight of the aptly-named developer "Irrational Software". They had said they were counting on this game selling well to justify their design decisions over the years. We believed in the kinds of games they'd tried to create, so we did the right thing - and they burned us for it. That's how I came to hate DRM.
