The Perils of Buying Legitimate Software

I am posting the image above to emphasize a point concerning the abuse by companies of digital rights management software (DRM). Back in November 2006, I bought a copy of the game you see above: Neverwinter Nights 2. It was not a popular or highly anticipated game, but I had enjoyed the first one, and had high hopes for this game. Upon opening the box and installing it, however, I found the game to be unplayable. It had not been fully tested by the developers before being rushed to the shelves, so it was buggy, bloated, and missing many features that are standard on even the most basic video games today - not to mention the high-end, processor-intensive, "state-of-the-art" games that this one was claiming to be in the same league with.

Nonetheless, I pressed on. I had paid good money for this brand-new game, and I wanted to get the most out of it. So, I tweaked my computer settings, kept up with the forums, and diligently downloaded each patch and fix, though many of them caused the game to become more broken before it got better. After about six months, though, it was finally getting to the point where the game was playable, the graphics were decent, and it didn't bog down or crash my system every time I tried to play. Then, all of a sudden, I was blindsided by DRM.

Over six months AFTER the game was released, the developers decided that the game needed a patch that would surreptitiously add third-party DRM to the game in order to weed out all the pirated copies. Unfortunately, the company they chose was SecureROM, a company that places DRM on many computer games and that has some strange ideas about what types of other programs potential pirates would have running on their computer. After having this game for six months, I was suddenly told that I would not be allowed to play it because I had virtual drives installed on my computer and, get this, a third-party task manager! In order to be allowed to play a game that I had paid money for, in a store, I was told that I had to remove a legal open-source piece of software that had nothing to do with playing the game, or with being able to determine whether it was pirated or not.

The fiasco I had with Neverwinter Nights 2 was enough to make me want to pirate any computer game with DRM from now on. When a company puts out a crappy, half-finished game whose only real buyers would have been fans of the previous title, then chooses after six months of release to slap a broken DRM scheme onto it in a critical game patch, they are really doing nothing but hurting themselves by alienating their customers. And they are not the only ones. Bioshock, one of the most acclaimed games to come out this year, was tagged with a similar DRM scheme, and tons of people had the exact same problems - being forced to remove legitimate software from their computers because some company has tagged it as "piracy-enabling" software. And while Neverwinter Nights 2 may not have been able to recoup its costs unless it tried to thwart piracy, I am certain that the people who made Bioshock have done so several times over already.

So why do they do it? That's what I don't understand. Why do companies alienate their customers and treat them like criminals when all it does is push more and more people towards downloading the pirated versions that have all the copy-protection hoops stripped away? I don't know how these companies think, but I do know how people of my generation see them. Growing up in the era of Napster, You-Tube, and torrent sites made me realize that no one is entitled to make money off of their work. There is a good chance that if you have a product on the shelves, especially if it is a quality product, most people will buy it. I know I still will, and I believe that you deserve my money for providing me with quality entertainment. But I also know that attempting to force people to buy your stuff by making it harder to pirate, or by treating potential customers like criminals in an effort to net yourself a few more bucks, just makes people like me realize why so many people choose to pirate stuff in the first place. So what's it going to take for the big companies to realize this too?