NIDZUMI+

Piracy paranoia, forced digital distribution, patches, money and online validation. Welcome to the new age where weekend game shopping should give you experience points upon purchase.

I don’t know what to say, apart from the piracy paranoia is getting out of control. It’s not just game developers and publishers with mass amounts of DRM but its retail stores as well. Earlier today, my weekend game purchase was Sim City Societies. I had read a lot about this game from a Marketing Journal I am subscribed to.  The article detailed how some games get big corporate sponsors, rather than fund themselves with advertisements and Sim City Socities being the prime example as it was sponsored by BP.

However just after purchasing it I went for a walk around the store, I looked at some of games and of course moved games around seeing what was hidden. I then realized I had been tricked out of my money by good old shelf placement. Right behind one of the boxes was a deluxe version of the game, with the expansion pack for 20 dollars more.

Naturally I was a bit peeved. Not only because I had no idea there was an expansion but because they had pushed all the ‘non expansion’ copies to the front. I went up to the man at the counter and that is when I encountered store policy.

“May I return this and get the deluxe one”

His reply was swift and to the point and I think he even sighed, perhaps from being over worked, or maybe he thought it was sad, his words hinted to the latter.

“Sorry, no, we have a policy, no returns or trades on any game bought, due to piracy.”

Oh how sad I was, so very sad, especially since the game still had its shrink wrap on. So off I went home to find out how much it would be to buy the expansion on its own.

I spent a few hours online doing the usual rounds of every local games store in the country and it was in this moment I came to a discovery. There is no copy of the expansion for sale alone. Unless I spend more than I paid for the game at the EA store and buy it as a DOWNLOAD. EA never published the expansion alone except for in bundles.

I have never been a fan of Digital Distribution because every few years I tend to change computer and I’d rather keep them close by in case I get a weird craving to play them. Coupled with the fact that my internet isn’t the greatest, here in my small obscure country out in the middle of nowhere. We still have to pay per the data we download and upload so to download anything means that extra few dollars on top of the sites price.

Not to mention the fact that right after installing the game I have to go through some weird validation DRM and then get greeted with a 200mb patch. This was just to get the game up and running although I wouldn’t have to do any of this if I had the expansion…

So there we have it, the age we live in, to buy a game means we must pay upfront, never see it in physical form and occasionally  never be able to move it from computer to computer. We also must download a large patch before being able to play properly because developers didn’t finish the game in the first place. We must pay more for the forced digital distribution, who knows why, because somehow direct downloading directly from the publisher costs more than buying a boxed copy with a manual you can lay in bed and read.

And just to top it all off, I wasn’t given any experience points to make all this work rewarding, perhaps finding another passion will stop me being put in a stress induced coma.