Legal Niches

Another DRM Victim Details Woes

By pete_gallagher

Last week we covered an interesting article from Ars Technica that focused on the problems videogame DRM technology can have on soldiers stationed overseas.

Yet another group of gamers impacted by DRM? Cruise ship workers.

GP received an email from the Chief Officer of a cruise ship, who prefers to remain nameless, detailing the problems DRM can inflict on those living at sea:

… we quite often don't have a good Internet connection or it's cost prohibitive, especially on our personal computers. I watch movies and play games during my, albeit limited, time off. There have been many games that I have been unable to play because of DRM issues, games such as Spore & recently Empire: Total War caused me huge problems simply because it required an Internet connection during installation. I had to spend $120 USD on Internet charges just for the privilege of installing Empire: Total War.

Is our Chief Officer alone in his problems with DRM? Not by a long shot. He continued:

I know of 40 other crew on my ship who regularly play games in their time off, this is a ship with only 217 crew. That's nearly 20% of the crew. I realize this is a very small sample, but it could lead to a large number of people who can't play games in the entire shipping industry. Crew would also be more inclined to play cracked/pirated games to get through this DRM issue. I would buy the real game regularly, if I knew that I could play on my ship regardless of where I was. It's gotten to the point where I don't play PC games anymore, because so many have these, or similar problems requiring the internet.

Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on March 01, 2010 (boomark / email).