Jeff Green used to work at Games For Windows magazine before taking a sweet gig at EA, but that little fact won’t silence his criticism of the DRM found in Command and Conquer 4. He tweeted white-hot rage when, as everyone on the Internet predicted, this “always-on” nonsense worked as intended, and prevented a law-abiding citizen from playing his game.
Here are the tweets, hombres:
It’s safe to say we’ve been fairly clear in, well, hating all this DRM. It’s very easy to say, “It’s 2010, who doesn’t have their computer constantly connected to the Internet?” You’d be correct, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that people’s Internet connections aren’t reliable enough to require gamers to be 100 percent online for the duration of a gaming session. Your Wi-Fi could go down. (Mine goes down like five times per day. Thanks, D-Link.) You could have Comcast. There could be cosmic rays.
The point is, your Internet connection isn’t stable enough to work well with this particular form of DRM.
Now, what Mr. Green brings up, that perhaps if we didn’t look at C&C 4 (or Assassin’s Creed II or whatever) as a “single-player game” we wouldn’t not expect to be online. After all, World of Warcraft is an online game, and the second you’re disconnected, you’re booted from the game. No one flips out over that, right?
But the very idea that a fairly prominent EA man has publicly questioned the integrity of this type of DRM means all of our complaining is affecting the right people. Keep it up!