Gamer Rights Managment

While reading Stuff.co.nz’s Game Junkie Blog Gerard Campbell was writing about his experiences playing the Beta of the upcoming Sim City (http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/blogs/game-junkie/8232089/Becoming-God-playing-the-SimCity-beta). One of the main issues he brought up was how the implementation of always on DRM (Digital rights management) detracted from the game play. Although the game is still in Beta testing and the DRM is probably not complete Campbell was annoyed at how if he lost Internet connection for just a second the game kicked him out and he lost his game progress. I don’t doubt that this issue will be smoothed out by the time the game ships. 

However, it does bring up some interesting points about how gamers rights. In the lectures we have discussed about how when purchasing a game the buyer actually only has the right of access to the content not the actual content. The implementation of DRM has been increasing over the years and is intended to prevent the unauthorised tampering or access to the game itself. The game publishers claim this is to prevent piracy (aka the actual cancer killing the gaming industry) however it is really just an effort to exercise control over their content. There has been a huge backlash against DRM in every game that it has been used on. With gamers complaining about not being able access the game that they have paid for with key examples being the Assassins Creed series, or actually anything from Ubisoft has really intense DRM. I have experienced the irony of buying a new game only to not be able to play it because my Internet connection is a bit shoddy so I am biased towards the side of anti-DRM but only on the grounds that we have paid for the access to this content. So if the gaming publishers do need to implement a safe guard against piracy that’s fine but if they are, even accidentally, impeding access to game then they are in violation of the terms of agreement.

So what are some alternatives? Well the steam network does use DRM but it does not require constant Internet connection so it is better than the Ubisoft iron grip but it can present some issues with cross platform games not working and is limited by the third parties that publish the games. The main alternative the will reduce piracy is to make downloads ‘easy and cheap’. Most DRM coupled with the price actually puts people off buying digital content so alternatives such as subscription based cloud storage sites or Good Old Games (http://www.gog.com/)  which offer ease of download, low price, and are DRM free thrive in comparison to the publishing monoliths who demand huge profit margins. So while gamers will have to coned that they do not actually own the game to do with what they like game publishers will have to compromise and implement a system that will reduce piracy and will not infringe on the consumers rights to the product.