In the last few years, to protect copyright and prevent piracy, game publishers have had to start moving toward some rather extreme forms of protection.  Of course gamers today never had the experience I had growing up where I had to plug a security circuit into the I/O port to play some Sierra games on my Apple IIGS Woz Edition.  Video game DRM (Digital Rights Management) used to prevent piracy and the software winding up on all the top torrent sites is a big issue these days.  But some of the most egregious forms of DRM have simply been smashed by the hacking and torrenting community.

The problem has existed for 30 years or more.  And the only repeat injury is to the honest users.  Most recently the uproar surrounds Ubisoft’s game Assassin’s Creed 2 which has an amazingly convenient feature in that if you don’t have an Internet connection, you can’t play it.  You know those guys with the $3,000 gaming laptops that like to show off that they can play Crysis over a Caramel Mochachino at Starbucks?  Sorry.  Rainy afternoon and you want to do some gaming but your Internet connection is down?  Oops.  Assassins Creed 2 comes out in March.  The DRM will be broken in give or take 48 hours, and the carefully crafted content protection from Ubisoft will transform itself from piracy protection to a punishment befalling those that honestly went out and purchased the game for cold hard cash.

An Internet connection should not be a requirement for an individual to game, except of course for an online component.  The industry on the other hand has to attempt to protect their investment.  Consider that Activision/Infinity Ward had close to $500 million lost to pirated copies of Modern Warfare 2, and you quickly understand why.  But the answer is not finding newer and more creative ways to punish your actual customers.

And with that consideration, there is a cyclical argument that has begun to develop.  Those trying to break the DRM and torrent the files because in reality it presents itself as a skills challenge, claim verbally that DRM is an affront to their sensibilities.  It is displeasurable on their palate.  These individuals complain profusely about the new technique, but then simply smash the increasingly strict anti-piracy technology with their “1337 hAcKiNg SkIlLz”.  (This reads elite computer user from my mother’s basement in nerd speak.)  So we reach no common ground between the industry and the honest consumer, and the 30 Years Gaming War continues, same as it ever was.