Attention Electronic Arts! When Mass Effect comes out for the PC, I am going to pirate an illegal copy of it. I don’t really want to. In fact, I was more than happy to pay you fifty of my hard earned dollars in exchange for this game. It is a fantastic RPG, designed and then improved upon by a studio that I remember fondly. It is in many ways an upgrade to the already brilliant (if slightly flawed) Xbox 360 version of the game. Everything about Mass Effect makes me want to play it.

However, the copy protection is quite simply a function of the game that I am utterly unwilling to tolerate. After ten days of inactivity, Mass Effect is going to connect to the internet and verify with your server that it is legitimate if I want to play it again? Fuck you. That is unacceptable. That locks this otherwise brilliant game into the subcategory of “people who are reliably online”. It also puts a sunset on the game tied to whenever you stop validating it, despite it being a single player RPG. The way I see it, if you’re going to treat me like a god damned thief, I might as well enjoy the benefits of thievery.

I really wonder what good this is supposed to do. Everyone reading this is aware that there will be a crack for this new version of SecuROM before the game even makes it to the shelf. Absolutely no piracy is being prevented with this awkward, byzantine game of packet ping pong. It does make me wonder if the box for Mass Effect will have a “requires internet connection” sticker on it. And to be honest, it’s not really the danger of being offline that pisses me off. It’s the presumption that this sort of behavior is even remotely acceptable.

DRM systems like these are notoriously buggy and even exploitable. The whole Sony Root Kit fiasco should have been the slug in DRM’s brain, and I thought it was until I installed Bioshock and was rendered unable to play it for two days because it couldn’t connect to its server and verify that I was not, in fact, a criminal. I neither want nor will allow software on my machine that phones home to check in with mommy on a permanent, ongoing basis.

It makes me question, on a larger scale, the type of insults that gamers are willing to put up with. No other consumer market gets shit on by its suppliers as much, or in such fine detail, as gamers do. Imagine if you had to get your car “certified” by your dealer once a month to prove that you legally own it, or else the engine will fail to start. To say nothing of the thousand other paper cuts that gamers are dealt. No other type of product is sold so woefully incomplete, with the understanding that it will be finished via “patches” months after money exchanges hands. To use the car analogy again, that would be like purchasing a car that didn’t have brakes, with the understanding that in a few months, when the brakes are ready, someone will come around and install them.

This type of DRM, which punsihes the legitimate, paying customer while preventing absolutely no illegal activity, is so pervasive now in all forms of media. Music publishers telling me where I can listen to the songs I’ve purchased. Movie studios setting time limits on how long I’m allowed to spend watching a film. But this new obscenity, where the product you buy routinely checks in with its own publisher to make sure it hasn’t been stolen, that’s just too much.

And part of the problem is that all of the trust is on the side of the buyer. There are real problems now with DRM-based video when the “parent server” goes offline – sometimes permanently – and consumers are locked out of content that they legally purchased and wanted to view. Is Electronic Arts promising to keep their Mass Effect validation server online until the end of time? What happens if people stop buying Madden every damn year and Electronic Arts goes out of business? Are they going to give a shit about me not being able to play Mass Effect? Doubtful. Will I be screwed out of my fifty bucks? You betcha.

And so, Electronic Arts, please be aware that I intend to illegally download a cracked, fully functional version of Mass Effect once it comes out for the PC. Not because I am greedy, not because I am cheap. Not because I want to do harm to the developers and the game designers – quite to the contrary, BioWare is one of my favorite game studios. And not because I’m a no good crimial. I am going to pirate Mass Effect because the official version of the game does not meet my minimum standards for quality and acceptability. You are releasing a gimped version of an otherwise exceptional game. A version that crosses some very ethereal and paranoid boundaries concerning ownership and authority. And I am unwilling to pay you for the experience of being treated like a thief.

Interestingly enough, I can get that for free.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.