New Pet Peeve (For Video games anyway)

[owsf2000]

So, I picked up Akiba's Trip for the PS3 the other day since xseed generally does bring good games over from Japan, many I'm sure wouldn't make it over otherwise. Xseed has also been fairly kind regarding DLC Whoring overall - at least with the games I've purchased.

However, they did something I generally don't remember seeing done for video games thus far. Keeping in mind that I don't play many AAA big budget titles (of which this isn't anyway) I don't know if this has become common or not already.

But the first thing that you're shown when you start up Akiba's Trip... is an anti-piracy warning. You know, that retarded ineffective thing done in front of every single movie that gets released.

Why is it ineffective?

It's because you're showing it TO THE WRONG FUCKING PEOPLE.

I bought the game. You think I need to be told this shit? You think I appreciate being assumed that I need to be told this shit despite buying your fucking game? Well let's just say this has pissed me off. I always get pissed off on this shit with movies, but luckily I rarely bother to watch any movies to begin with and I find it EXTREMELY easy to avoid watching new movies for years - plenty of time for me to forget about how annoying those things are - only to be reminded the next time I buy a 10 dollar DVD/Blu-ray combo at Wal-mart (Latest one was the Amazing Spiderman! Ain't buying any more Sony produced movies for a while as a result of some bullshit preview tactics.)

To cut to the chase, despite otherwise enjoying xseed games, I think I'm going to pass on any more of their games for the next year or two unless I happen to find it EXTREMELY cheap and/or secondhand. IE: No more impulse launch day purchases from me. That's what your anti-piracy nagging has earned you. I don't care what kind of explanation they try to justify this, it won't make a lick of difference. They're shit-listed til probably 2016. Anti-piracy warnings have never done a thing to stop piracy. Ever. I can't make them stop being retarded, but I -can- stop buying their games.

No, I won't miss out on any games I avoid buying over this. I have hundreds in the collection waiting to be played - many still factory sealed.

Comments

[kane-magus.livejournal.com]

I remember games having anti-piracy screens at least as far back as the original Doom on the PC. And then, of course, there was all the built in anti-piracy shit on old Sierra games and the like which would yell at you for piracy and not let you even play the game if you didn't successfully pass them, regardless of whether you bought the game legit or not. If you ever lost your instruction manual, or it became unreadable for some reason, you were just SOL back in those days.

I don't remember seeing anything like that lately, though, but that may just be because all that shit was usually buried down in the EULAs that nobody ever bothers to read. Then again, with stuff like this and stuff like how Batman's cape doesn't work in the Arkham games if you pirated it (and how they are able to determine if someone pirated a game like that, I don't know) and so on and so forth, maybe this sort of thing is making a comeback. I sure as hell hope not, given that this shit tends to fuck over legit customers as well (e.g. the cape thing in the Batman games), usually even more so than it does the pirates, since the pirates will eventually just hack around that shit. If even one legit customer is inconvenienced by some bullshit anti-piracy measure then, in my eyes, the pub/dev fails.

[owsf2000.livejournal.com]

Pretty much all of your examples are from PC games though and are all DRM mechanisms. I tend to shy away from the PC market in part because of those very things. (The other being that I have a very bad track record with getting PC games to even work on my comps. Bargain bin computers do that I suppose.)

What I'm talking about, are console games, which are designed to work properly on their host machine - but nowhere else. The console itself -is- the DRM. And I'm fine with that since unlike with a PC, I have no intention of doing anything -but- play console games on my consoles.

This message doesn't screw with legit customers ability to play the game, to be sure. But it does piss some of us off and ruin the mood to play the game at all. And so, to avoid giving them the potential impression that I think this accusing their paying customers is ok, I avoid their products entirely. I do the same with movies and shit all the time. It just bothers me a lot more when it comes to video games since I like those things a lot more than hollywood shit.