Comic #18 : "Always On DRM"

Udate 16th May 2013: - someone built a DRM Chair to satirise the DRM where a file destroys itself after a number of plays.

Original Notes:

Two days, two major controversies from the Triple A gaming industry discussed. There's not much to be added to the discourse that has already taken place.

Obviously, the most famous incident in the whole saga is with former Microsoft employee Adam Orth. Microsoft have since let him go - although this is not known if this is because his comments were damaging to the company or if his comments violated any NDAs he had signed.

While I am almost certainly not the first to point this out, I think it is important to reiterate it as much as possible. He stated - when people were saying that if the Internet goes down they would be unable to play their games - "Sometimes the electricity goes out. I will not purchase a vacuum cleaner." - the scale of logic fail in this statement is enough to create a logic blackhole that swallows up the entire Universe.

Presently games do not require an Internet connection to be played. Let's assume that vacuum cleaners did not require electricity to work - suddenly engineering a vacuum cleaner that did require electricity with no added benefit would make no sense.

The same applies here: there is no complaint that you can't play an MMO, or online Call of Duty, when your Internet connection goes down because the Internet connection is necessary to play the game. This is not the case with single player games, and adding it would be a case of a company making its product worse for legitimate consumers.

It's kind of similar to the huge, unskippable anti piracy videos the studios put at the beginning of DVDs. DON'T PIRATE. DON'T PIRATE. DON'T PIRATE.

I haven't pirated, but if I had pirated I would have got a much better experience. Games publishers and movie studios: Don't punish the people who are actually buying your stuff.

Also, while I previously mentioned that I was going to attempt to draw every frame rather than copy and paste, the copy and paste here was used deliberately, to highlight the repetitive nature of the event. The same approach was used in Comic #2: Deadline.