Continuously online or no game (DRM)

[rmoxon]

Not actually true.

Buy XBLA game on machine A logged in as user X.

Download game onto machine B.

Move profile of user X onto machine B.

Log onto machine B as user X - play XBLA game.

Log into machine A as anyone - play XBLA game.

You can have the same game running on machines A and B simultaneously.

Thats only if you are online at the time though.

When you purchase a game on a XBL it registers the download to the console you downloaded it too, it wont work on any other consoles unless youre online when you play the game, or transfer the license over to a new console (which can only be done once a year).

[Jay]

And I was talking about *effects* not motives, your post was in response to mine not the other way around. Most companies recognise that to retain skilled staff they have to take care of them anyway. If you don't offer attractive remuneration then you won't get high quality staff, profits pay for staff that drive profits. So the two motives are mutually entwined.

:/

Let's return to your original post then.

No they're employees with families and mortgages. It's not the "faceless corporation head-honchos" that get laid off when profit targets aren't met, it's the engineers on the ground who get thrown on the rubbish heap and have to scrabble to prevent the bank seizing their house.

But you're right, screw them right? I mean they only made the damn things in the first place. Your entertainment is more important than their livelihoods after all.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be suggesting that whatever draconian measures companies introduce in order to protect their profits, we as consumers should put up with it because of the staff on the bottom rung who may suffer. So if Capcom decide to release BC:RA 2 with a mechanism which, let's say, deletes the game after 7 days, or only allows you to play the game if you have an Xbox Live camera pointed at your face for the duration of play, we should suck it up because hey, we don't want anyone to lose their job or somesuch. Is that what you're suggesting?

If a large proportion of potential customers don't buy BC 2 because of its online connection requirement, surely there's a good chance that will cause as much revenue loss as if the game was being pirated? Also, Final Fight had the same restriction and that was *before* the PS3 had even been hacked.

[Jay]

Thats only if you are online at the time though.

When you purchase a game on a XBL it registers the download to the console you downloaded it too, it wont work on any other consoles unless youre online when you play the game, or transfer the license over to a new console (which can only be done once a year).

Yes, true, you have to be online with console B.

[fuse]

The whole business of DRM is very similar to many other areas of fraud & security - essentially companies are well within their rights to take whatever measures they please to try and protect their assets, but if you do it at the expense of a good customer experience then you will no doubt pay the price.

I would like to think that Capcom are already aware of the negative impact this will have, but that in weighing up the pros and cons they have decided to take a particularly draconian step to try and combat a problem believe was a serious risk. Going by Family Fry's logic earlier on (e.g. 10k sales of game, 40k of people on leaderboards), it would not surprise me if this was the case and someone has put in a business case for this DRM based on X percentage of those 30k freeloaders converting into paying customers. I would like to think that the number of convertees they are expecting turns out dramatically lower in reality (let's face it, people are far less selective when they're not paying), and they realise that it's not worth pissing off genuine Joe *and* losing some people's sales when they're only seeing a minor uplift of reformed pirates.

I find it interesting that they've done this on PSN but not on XBLA - to me this suggests that either MS has a policy against this kind of behaviour, or that XBLA's existing policy is much less open to abuse than PSN's: I really hope that's not the case though, as otherwise I doubt Capcom are far from the only ones suffering, and yet are the only ones bold (read: stupid) enough to step up and do something about it. Quite ironic given Sony's stance on disc-based piracy, too.

I agree that this type of DRM is terrible and something that should be stopped, but I can see the other side of it too (a desperate measure to prevent haemorrhaging cash) and would rather see it addressed from the top down properly by the manufacturers with them taking some liability, rather than left to developers to half-bake a crummy solution. To go back to the XBLA comparison, despite it being controlled much tighter (yes you can get 1 'free' copy of the game as per methods mentioned in the thread), but as an end user I've found it to be completely transparent and very rarely intrusive - only exceptions being bizarre cases when dealing with multiple (different region) accounts and multiple (different region) consoles, even still not causing any serious problems, and is as a result of hardly normal consumer behaviour.

[charlesr]

For me, the online thing is not normally a problem, but interwebs were down last week when I was trying to finish an XBLIG for review, so I couldn't play it. I'd planned to spend a couple of hours on it and was thwarted. Massive pita.

Also now that I'm with TalkTalk (They are the new owners of Nildram), I'm guessing I can expect frequent disconnects and generally pants provision - it went off last night just as I was half way through backing some stuff up - had to do it all again today because it wouldn't resume A call to the support line this morning talked about a "planned outage". Well they might have planned it, but they didn't tell me ffs. Then I had to unplug the DSL line for 30 minutes to get a connection again ("stale connection"). So perhaps I should be more worried about all this online-only stuff.

[JP]

I'm really not bothered by this to honest.

As a consumer whenever I buy things I asses what it is they are selling and if it's worth what they are asking for it. It's my choice whether I buy this or not just as it's Capcom's choice whether they use this type of DRM or not.

Capcom could well decide that customers will only be able to play the game on every second Thursday of each month and as long as that is made clear as it has been here it's not really of my business if they decide to do that apart from when I'm assessing whether I'm going to buy the game or not.

I may well think that Capcom are making a mistake by choosing to do this but it is their mistake to make just as it would be mine if it was my game.

I imagine that a few people will hold off buying the game due to this but it isn't the first time that this has happened and if Capcom felt they were losing out by doing this it's safe to say that it wouldn't keep happening.

It's a simple choice for everybody of if you're not happy with the game/DRM practice then don't fund it. The DRM is of course going to be a negative for some people but if those people's desire to buy the game outweighs their dislike of this practice then it's another sale to another customer who hasn't been put off by the practice.

[prinnysquad]

I find that the certain arguments in favour/accepting of DRM carry less water whenever the equality of access is considered. If a consumer with a chod connection can't make the same choice of whether or not to purchase as Billy FastNet due to tech demands (rather than talking some moral stand), then they're being unduly punished and simply have no choice but to not buy the product.

I sympathise fully with those with crap connections, ****ty broadband, etc. I would feel somewhat marginalised, and disappointed that a genuine sale to a law-abiding customer was being discouraged by technical demands beyond my control.

[Flabio]

or that XBLA's existing policy is much less open to abuse than PSN's:

As mentioned upthread, it appears Capcom are doing this on PS3 to prevent people passing the game around using a game sharing loophole. There's no such loophole on the 360.

[J0e Musashi]

It bothers me not, I am online 100% of the time. I think given the day and age we live in the majority of people are online 100% of the time too.
It's unlucky that you are situated where you are Jon, but I'm quite sure this isn't the first time we've heard this from you. Given that the online experience is a major part of the current gen, I think you'd be best to just swallow that you aren't going to be able to play certain games, and enjoy the ones that you can.

[englishbob]

This sort of thing bothers me when its not made clear that this is a restriction of use. These things are rarely, if ever, pointed out when you click "Add to basket" to spend your money on it. Knowing of these limits in advance makes all of the difference.

By I agree with the original post, its a bloody stupid practice.

[Lyris]

Not that it'll placate you, but the reason for needing to be online to start an XBLIG is to do with the rating system it uses to determine if the content is 'appropriate'.

Wonderful. ANOTHER form of censorship flucking things up for everyone.

[Flabio]

Meh, you can blame the law for that one. Ratings systems outside of the US are mostly legally enforceable now. Can't really avoid it on the consoles, won't be too much longer I suspect before there's pressure on the appstore to start doing PEGI ratings either.

[sj33]

The main thing that bothers me about this kind of DRM is that your purchase becomes impermanent. The fact that I always have an internet connection is somewhat besides the point, the point is that I rely on an external party to be able to use my purchase.

[mekanor]

I don't know if many people on here delve into PC gaming much, but Ubisoft were right into this at one stage (though they've possibly eased up now).

Having first hand experience with always online DRM, I can tell you that it's definitely something to be concerned about. I played assassin's creed 2 and splinter cell conviction, both of which I legitimately bought, on the PC and even though I've got a fairly stable internet connection, I still had nothing but problems with the system. As someone mentioned before, Ubisoft's servers were down for days at a time, meaning literally no one in the world could play the games that they had paid for. Also if the wireless dropped out even for a second, the game would pause and you'd have to wait at least 30 seconds for it to try and reestablish a connection.

In the end, it was actually easier for me to download a crack to play my legit copy of the game. It's not just games either. I've never pirated a blu ray, but I had to download anydvd just to get some films to play on my computer because powerdvd was always wanting to update (regardless of whether or not I had the latest version installed) and despite being in australia, it wouldn't let me change the default region to B.

DRM is all well and good, I wouldn't expect the software companies of the world to leave their products unprotected, but there seems to be some sort of barrier they can't get past. Maybe simple DRM stops 80% of pirates, but when companies try to push it further than that to stop that last 20%, it just ends up worse for paying customers.

[Sketcz]

Sketz making a comparison to something like Braid is ridiculous as a one man band operation is completely different to maintaining a company and employing staff.

Fundamentally it's no different. Braid is a game. It's digitally distributed. It did not have this DRM on either its Xbox, PC or PS3 release. It sold well.

Are you trying to imply that because Braid had less staff and cost less to develop it didn't need to sell as much as Bionic Commando 2, and therefore adding this utterly ****ed up DRM will somehow generate the extra sales needed for BC2? Because it's not going to increase sales, it's going to piss people off and physically prevent honest people from buying it.

Mekanor summed pretty much all my fears. Legitimate honest people forced to crack their own games because they can't play them with the DRM. I'm not really into the PC scene so I wasn't aware of this, but bloody hell people, why aren't you going made over this?

And it raises another issue. When they feel it's no longer worth the money to keep the servers running, they'll just them down, meaning you're not actually "purchasing" BC2, you are renting it.