Jay Barnson on Always-on DRM

Frayed Knights developers Jay Barnson (also known as the Rampant Coyote) has penned a blog post on a wildly debated issue: Always-on DRM. Here’s a couple of snippets:

My take on it is much like my take on telemarketing: It’s my phone, and I pay the bills, and therefore my phone exists for MY convenience, not yours. Likewise, my Internet connection is for MY convenience, not yours.

Hey, kids! You know what you call software that goes out on your computer and does stuff without your knowledge, permission, or . let’s be honest . benefit?

Malware.

Oh, of course, now it’s not (malware) because you gave it permission when you installed the software. Yeah, there are a whole bunch of horrible programs out there that will make your computer run like a 386 and inform every marketer in the world of your bathroom habits that use the same excuse.

The thing is. well, maybe young gamers really are that ignorant, but those who understand the world recognize that games frequently have an online component, even if it’s just updating a leaderboard. No problem. But we also recognize which components are critical to us playing a game. And that’s really limited to playing simultaneously with friends on the Internet, or playing in shared world. Oh, there are minor conveniences or nifty items, like having our saved game in the cloud so we can resume from a different computer (something relatively few gamers actually use, but I occasionally do), or leaderboards, or having the game directly announce news and updates for us. But we recognize that these are not critical to playing the game.

We also recognize that this is nothing more than a control grab by game manufacturers, an attempt to force us to their door so that we can pay for a game like it was a product, but use it only at their discretion as if it was a service. It’s the best of both worlds as a publisher, and the worst of both worlds as a consumer.

So what does (Always On) DRM get you as a consumer?

Nothing. Oh, Marketers will offer such empty spin-speak BS as, (To better serve you as a customer,) or will list online features that we know damn well do not need to be tied to an (Always On) requirement. Or maybe they’ll even stoop to claiming that it will allow them to (keep costs down) with the implication that they’ll pass the savings on to the customers (they won’t, they’ll charge you what they know they can charge you, it just means that they can afford to keep up the nuclear arms race of massive development and marketing budgets with their competitors). I’m sure Microsoft is getting all kinds of support and exclusives for their new machine from publishers with visions of zero piracy dancing in their heads.