inqk.net

I have a (slightly pretentious¹) story for why legitimate customers dislike DRM. It is a story in four parts.

I. Whereupon Our Hero Does the Right Thing

One of the most successful PC games of all time is Blizzard Entertainment’s StarCraft. It has sold approximately nine million copies since it’s release in 1998. It is, by all accounts, something of a religion in South Korea. It is to my eternal shame that although I have been playing PC games since the late 80s I never finished the game. Indeed, I had never even owned it until recently. When I was in high school, I played the game mostly at a friend’s house and at netcafé’s and so never progressed all the way to the end.

In June of 2007, feeling slightly bad about this, I took the opportunity to purchase a copy of the game. A friend of mine picked it up for AUS$10 and I very happily paid him back for it. $10! For a classic of gaming! What a steal².

But still I didn’t finish it. There was always something else to do and although I pottered around here and there I could never muster up the motivation to play through the entire campaign. I logged onto to multiplayer on occasion but after 10 years you can imagine the type of people that still play this game online. They have become almost one with the product. More machine now than man. Twisted and evil. They would kick my ass.

So I left the game for a while.

II. Whereupon the Fire is Rekindled

About two years ago Blizzard announced they were working on the sequel to StarCraft, imaginatively titled StarCraft II. Blizzard is notorious for taking a very, very long time to develop its games so no one expected anything especially soon. And that’s probably a good thing since it is, as I say, almost two years later and the game’s still not out.

To keep our appetite whetted (whet?) Blizzard recently released a clip of two of its developers playing an alpha build of the game. Called the StarCraft II Battle Report, I watched it the way an ex-smoker watches someone sucking down on a Marlboro. I had to play it. And if I couldn’t play it I oculd at least play the next best thing to it. It didn’t matter that most of what they were doing in the video wasn’t possible in the original version. I just wanted to be in that universe again.

I contacted a friend who’d been similarly afflicted and after spending a good portion of Friday afternoon discussing how awesome it would be rushed home to fire it up and play a few games. My wife was in Tokyo for the weekend which was perfect. She dislikes me wasting time playing games but with her not home it seemed like God himself was trying to tell me to play this game.

In the back-and-forth my friend had informed me it was now possible to download the game directly from Blizzard. All you needed was your CD key and you were then able to download it to any computer you were on. Now I love this type of thing. It’s why I have a terribly bad thing for Steam, the digital content delivery platform developed by Valve Entertainment for their Half-Life franchise.

Starting up my web browser, I pointed it at Blizzard’s site and was quickly setting up my account for their online store. It was all smiles until I got to the point where I needed to enter my key. Checking my email I typed in the code and was promptly informed that my key was already registered to another user. Surely this couldn’t be right. The game might have been purchased for $10 but it had been purchased new.

But it was true. I tried the key a few times but it was no good. The site refused to budge. A Google search promptly revealed the ansewr. Some enterprising individual had created a key generator for the game and it was common knowledge that you could use the keys it generated to download the game for free from Blizzard. Whoever had entered my code had stumbled upon it by chance. Unfortunately, Blizzard’s site didn’t recognise this and as far as they were concerned the game was now this person’s.

This is where it gets a little sad³. Still desperate to play the game I did the only thing I could do at 9 pm that night. I bought it again. This time for US$15 but this time directly from Blizzard, secure in the knowledge that they would recognise me as the legitimate owner of the game.

III. Whereupon God Shows Displeasure Towards Our Hero

I ended up playing StarCraft a few more times over the weekend but as good as the game is, it is 10 years old. I missed a lot of the innovations that have come to the RTS genre StarCraft helped establish. There is little squad combat in StarCraft and the game does next to nothing to help you stay organised and on top of things. For Korean masters this is perhaps part of the fun but for me it’s part of the not fun.

My collection of RTS games does not begin and end with a $10 (now $15⁴) copy of StarCraft, however. I also own a copy of one of StarCraft‘s illustrious successors, Relic Entertainment’s Company of Heroes.

I purchased Company of Heroes a month after StarCraft in July of 2007. It is an excellent game. It builds on a lot of what StarCraft did and takes great pains to flesh out the tactical dimension games in the RTS genre often neglect⁵. I purchased it through Steam and have never had a physical copy of the game. As far as I’m concerned it lives inside Steam. Whenever I log in to Steam, no matter where I am, I have the option of playing it. It downloads updates automatically and remembers my settings.

Feeling in the mood for an RTS that was slightly more cutting edge, I loaded up Company of Heroes. However, instead of loading the game presented me with a login form for Relic Online. I’ll admit it’s been a while since I last played Company of Heroes — probably around about a year — but I never remember needing to sign up for something called Relic Online just to play my game.

Oh well, I shrugged. I suppose this is what everyone does these days. I chose my usual username, filled out the remaining details and clicked ‘Create’. But of course it didn’t create. Instead it informed me that my CD key was already in use and that my account had now been banned. I was provided with an email address to contact to have the notice explained further. That was it.

Now I’ve written about what happened next (or didn’t happen, as the case may be) so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice to say that the problem turned out to be an old .ini file from a previous installation of the game. I don’t know why that .ini file had a stolen CD key in it. I guess that’s just one I’ll find out when I die.

IV. Whereupon the Ire is Rekindled

So here’s the thing. Over the space of a week, with two different games that I paid money to play, I was barred from doing so. In one of the cases I had to repurchase the game. In the other I spent about a week wrangling with customer support before I discovered what was wrong and fixed it. In neither of these cases was I able to play the game I had purchased, even when I was offline. In neither of these cases did anyone ever apologise. In neither of these cases did I, as far as I can tell, do anything wrong. And yet at the end of the day I was the one who was screwed.

It did not pass without notice that if I had just pirated the games I would have been able to enjoy them. I considered doing this several times but decided not to each time. Why should I? Why should I, a person who has paid money for these products, pirate them and receive an inferior product? Why shouldn’t I, a person who has paid money for these products, not be extended the courtesy of support from the developer?

This is what media companies need to understand. Call us old-fashioned but we as consumers expect something when we purchase a product: we expect to be able to use that product. We don’t expect to have to negotiate with someone via email to let us use the product. We don’t expect to have to purchase the product again. We just expect it will work. Now is that unreasonable? Is that asking too much? Is that something we should even need to ask?

We’re waiting for your answer.