Friday, April 23, 2010

DRM (Digital Rights Management)


DRM is pretty much an evil word right now (depending on which side of the fence you're on!), but chances are if you're a consumer, you pretty much hate DRM because you're being punished for doing the right thing - just so the companies which implement DRM make sure those who do the wrong thing are punished. Not exactly a right thing to do for then you're forcing people to do the wrong thing since nothing is gained by doing the right thing! When will this issue be solved we have no idea - but we think having the whole punishment mentality is wrong in the first place - when a reward mentality will benefit all in the long run. But try telling that to corporations who are usually headed by someone like Lord Vender here.

Of late the 3 games which are having problems all come from UbiSoft - Assassin Creed 2, Silent Hunter 5, and Settlers 7. All require you to be online to play a single-player game. Should you get disconnected from the Internet, or UbiSoft servers have problems, then you can't play the game which you bought. To drive this message home, hackers recently attacked UbiSoft servers via DoS (Denial of Service) to show how even if you bought the game, you can't play it if the company's servers are offline.

UbiSoft recent games aren't the only ones afflicted with this issue - EA (Electronic Arts) recent Command and Conquer 4 - Tiberian Twilight, from the Tiberian Series under the C&C Series, uses the same always-online requirement to play single-player games. This is not surprising as UbiSoft is partly owned by EA.

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