東西 | dongxi

As long as there is piracy, DRM won’t be far behind, trying to clamp down on illegal practices. The gaming industry has had its own share of piracy/DRM issues. Spore, released by EA, was the subject of much hatred when its DRM policy was announced to the public. Using SecuROM, the number of installations was limited per copy and authentication was required (originally on a frequent 10 day basis). After a huge public outcry, leading to 1 (out of 5) star ratings on Amazon and a huge surge in illegal bittorrenting, EA eased some of their policies. Still, DRM trucked on, most recently by Ubisoft, which required games such as Assassins Creed 2 to require a constant internet connection for authentication purposes. Though believed to be the work of hackers, Ubisoft’s servers suffered an outage, blocking out players who had bought the game. The victims were consumers who bought legitimate copies of the game, who then were unable to access the game and play.

Now, Capcom is following in the footsteps with their own DRM policy for their newest PSN release, Final Fight: Double Impact. Requiring a constant connection on the Playstation Network to play, the game now requires the account the game was purchased with to play. This step, as Capcom explains, is an attempt to curb the practice of game sharing, where users may pool PSN purchases on one account, but shared across up to five Playstation 3 devices.

One father, as described on IGN, discovered this when he tried booting the game up his children’s account, only to blocked from accessing the game. The PS3 allows for several user accounts within the same machine, so that various members in a household can customize their PS3 experience, keep separate gaming files/saves. Unfortunately, it looks like this is now translating to a requirement of separate game purchases for each account. So even though a PS3 can play the game disc regardless of the account (although perhaps one should start watching out for that as well!), PSN purchases, at least with Capcom will be limited per “user.”

While there’s no dispute that illegal practices should be addressed and handled, these attempts against piracy and illegal sharing, which are implemented in such a wide-netted way, will end up hurting and punishing legitimate consumers. In a fight like this, no one wins.