Is the Gaming Industry Moving Online Too Fast?

RyanDJ writes with his reaction to the Sony PSN outage, wondering if our rush to online services and digital distribution for games is a bit too enthusiastic. "I love technology, I just want it to slow down. I know I sound like an angry old 'get off my lawn' kind of guy right now, but until my 8-bit Nintendo dies from plastic corrosion and age, it will continue to play any game I find just as it was supposed to. Online dedicated games, one day, will lose servers. System crashes, such as the Sony problem, will cause interruptions. I feel if we don't slow down, stabilize the current technology and ensure its safety, find ways to guarantee that items bought are permanently owned even without a physical copy, we might see a company such as Nintendo saying that online isn't worth it!"

Comments

Re:Uninformed Rant, or Sony Apologist?

[sqrt(2)]

I'd be careful with Steam. They make mistakes just like every company. I had my very first Steam account disabled (I wasn't cheating or hacking or doing anything wrong) and they flat out refused to even tell me why. I had used pre-paid debit cards to buy my games, and they demanded I give them my CC info I used to purchase them to prove it was really me trying to get my account reactivated. Since I didn't have the cards anymore and they were one time use I wasn't able to provide it to them. They wouldn't budge, and they repeated that since I couldn't prove I was the account holder they would not help me or even tell me why the account was suspended. I think it may have been related to using too many computers at once. I had three computers at the time that I wanted my games installed to, so I suspect this triggered some sort of fraud defense mechanism when they saw too many computers trying to use the same account.

The result was I lost 250+ dollars in games, and now I refuse to give Valve any more of my money, and I feel justified in torrenting all their games for free until I get back what they owe me.

Re:Uninformed Rant, or Sony Apologist?

[hairyfeet]

The funny part? You can get "Steam rips" all day long on P2P so frankly Steam and GOG (who doesn't have any activation at all) are the only two I really trust. BTW anybody wanting a cheap game The Witcher Director's Cut is gonna be on GOG on Tuesday for $5, so snatch it.

But this is one of those things where "If I can't pirate it I don't want it" because as long as I can get a pirate copy I don't have to worry about something happening that would bone me or allow me not to play. For a good example I bought Bioshock II on Amazon for like $10, but I play the hacked version. Why? Because the not hacked version requires GFWL which frankly sucks donkey nuts and the last time I tried using it I spent more time fighting with GFWL than I did playing the damned game.

I have plenty of games like the original NOLF that simply won't play on x64 thanks to shitty DRM (thanks SecuROM, may you rot in hell) but thanks to the pirates I can just extract the files off the disc and with a NoCD I'm good to go. Thanks to NoCDs cooked up by the pirates there are nearly NO games that I can't play on my new X64 system-*.

One of the reasons I got away from consoles is I got burnt by one of the early Playstations that would scratch discs and was basically told "tough shit it's out of warranty" but with the PC I decide what runs and thanks to the pirates any game I have that is no longer supported can still be hacked and played. Between Steam, GOG, and Amazon I have more gaming than I could possibly ever enjoy, cheap prices, and no online BS if I don't want it. Thanks pirate hackers argh!

*.-The ONLY game I've found where I can NOT run it at all is my classic MechWarrior 3, because apparently they used some old Win9x hacks and when run on a modern system you get this "bouncing tanks" bug where things bounce 100s of feet in the air making them impossible to shoot. But even games where the company went tits up like Vampire:Bloodlines I was able to play through the game once a fan made patch came out, on a console that would have been impossible. If a game can ONLY be used online? Frankly they can keep it, it isn't like there aren't literally 100s of games I haven't gotten to play yet.