9 Crippling Problems With The Gaming Industry’s Future

6. DRM

Digital Rights Management (or DRM) has been around for some time on the PC as a way to combat the rampant piracy that plagued that platform since the day dot. CD keys or document authentication are deemed insufficient now and disc authentication was cracked with NO-CD patches a LONG time ago, so publishers and developers have tried to keep their work out of the hands of pirates by using varying forms of DRM. The problem is, they can sometimes hamper legitimate players rather than deter the pirates, and then everyone suffers. Some of the most recent attempts at securing PC games have been the most obvious and highly-criticised due to their absolute failure on day one of launch. Of course, we're talking about Diablo 3 and Sim City which were hyped to the point of ridiculousness in the lead up to their launch, and because of their day one problems resulted in a backlash from critics and gamers. Both games require that the player log into a server to connect and authenticate their copy of the game before they can actually play, meaning that you can never play them offline despite both having particularly large single player components. On the first day for both of the games, the servers that were put in place by the developers weren't capable of dealing with the millions of connections that were flying at them and the whole service went down. Players were left with nothing but failed errors while Blizzard and Maxis (respectively) attempted to resolve the issues and get more servers up and running. In the case of both games it took weeks for the developers to get their online connectivity working but by then it was too late; the internet had had its say and many people were turned off both games.