I’ve not bought a PC game for a long time, I got the Entrenchment expansion for Sins of a Solar Empire, and that has been it.  It’s not that there aren’t any games that I’d like to play there are.  So, what is stopping me from buying them?

DRM, it’s got past the ridiculous and to the point, with Ubisofts latest plans, of extreme customer control.  No DRM is ever going to be good enough stop piracy.  Currently a man from the UK is fighting extradition to the USA for hacking into Military computers and downloading files, if a multi-billion dollar agency can’t protect itself then a software company has bugger all chance of stopping their software getting hacked and DRM limitations removed.

Piracy has been around as long as home computers have been, even in the distant past when software came on tape you could get copies of games.  The introduction of disks and the added protection didn’t stop it, and with today’s DRM/Copy Protection it’s not going to stop.  I think the biggest threat to people downloading pirated software isn’t the legal penalties but the risk involved.  The probability in having unwanted spyware installed is increasing along with problem of online fraud.  I know that people will point out that they didn’t know that some companies were installing software onto their computer from legitimate games – SecuRom.

I have used pirated software for two reasons.  To see if it’s worth buying, I downloaded the Dawn of War series, liked it enough to buy the game and its expansions, in fact I bought two more sets as gifts to my brother and nephew (not getting the DoW II though).  Secondly, to get software that is no longer available.

I could buy the games I want from Steam but I won’t as I don’t want to be forced to use the Steam client, in the same way that I don’t want to be forced to jump through activation/deactivation hoops to get a game working. And Steam is now being used in addition to other forms of DRM.

Out of the 70 games that are region locked on Impulse, 57 are available to me on Steam.  I can only think of one reason, Steam has exclusive digital distribution rights.  If I was working at Steam why not get as many titles exclusively, it hurts our competitors in that they can't offer the games and thus increases the dissatisfaction of their customers and results in more custom coming to Steam, increasing our profits and generating positive sales figures for the publishers. Win/Win.

I can live with having to have the disk in the drive.  I can live with having to type in a key code from the manual, but when it gets to the point of controlling how I play that is a step too far from me.

In the eyes of the Publishers I’m just one person who doesn’t matter, I think they would rather have one less legitimate sale than one more pirated copy.

Jason