The entire DRM/Anti-Copy push currently being made by near everyone publishing media of any kind was a lost cause before it even began. Remember Robocop III on the Amiga? I think the first (and perhaps the last) game that shipped with a hardware dongle that went between the joystick and the port to cripple it for users without? And that the game was cracked and distributed before it was even officially in the shops? Where there’s a will there’s almost always a way. Even Sony with all their Rootkit sashays have decided to allow full HD via analogue through the PS3 (so it’s rumoured).

Could this be because content producers are realising we destest their intrusions and won’t buy things that are both crippled and can cripple us? We can only hope.

The stickers might say “Your failed business model is not my problem.” – but that doesn’t make it true. It feels like it’s all our problems. And we have to keep telling them that, not only with logically sound and witty diatribes, but with our wallets.

Yes.

As I wrote on Tea Leaves earlier, when I buy a game, I am buying fun.
That’s what the game’s makers promised me in their ads. That’s what
the game’s makers promised me through their game’s packaging.

Thus when I return home with a game and discover anything except fun
in the box, I feel cheated. “This is _not_ fun. Did this thing just
screw up my computer? Why didn’t somebody tell me this would happen?”

If you are a game reviewer and you don’t accurately portray the level
of anti-fun that comes in the box, you have cheated me. If a game is
fun to degree N, but dealing with its copy protection and cleaning up
the computer later is anti-fun to degree M, I would expect your game
review to give me a clear sense of the overall fun: N – M. That is,
after all, what I am buying.

And if the game publishers don’t like it, just remind them that you
are playing by _their_ rules. They no longer sell PC games. The only
product they sell today is PC games bundled with anti-fun. If that’s
what they sell, that’s what you must review.

In my eyes, your duty is clear. You must review the entire product.
Anything less is cheating your readers.

It wouldn’t be a violation of ethics, but I wrote this as a separate article specifically because I didn’t think it was fair to give this game “special treatment” beyond mentioning in the review that it installs StarForce (which, when I write the review, I will). The list of games that install this malware is surprisingly large.

I’m especially amused by the fact that a StarForce employee recently posted a link to a pirate torrent of Galactic Civilizations II on an internet forum, apparently because they were pissed off that Stardock didn’t use their copy protection scheme. Is there really any doubt that this is simply a high-tech version of the protection racket?

The last PC game I played was Torment, which while fun, also required this initial patch just to keep the game playable for more than 15 minutes. I hadn’t been playing much beforehand, and poking through reviews, I saw the final straw for me. Gamespot has a stability rating for games.

Call me weird, but I think a basic criterion for your product should be that it works. However, this is apparently a daring thought in PC gaming, where the purchaser is now some kind of alpha tester.

I assume that at this point, the reviewers consist entirely of people sufficiently masochistic to play PC games, and they haven’t realized just how much of a problem they have. The same principle applies to more and more people I know; I keep getting the impression that the PC audience is dwindling because the people left playing PC games are willing to deal with a level of crap in their purchases that would make the average Trabant buyer pause.

Tangential to your point, but relevant because it’s another example of how PC game makers hate their public.