Well, Diablo 3 is finally out. For those of you who don't know, the first two Diablo games were two of about the coolest damn computer games ever to waste countless hours of my time. They were made by the fine folks who make those World of Warcraft games that have been popular around these days, and WoW really wouldn't exist if it weren't for the popularity of Diablo. Diablo 2 came out when I was in high school, and every chance I got, I was playing it along with my 3 best friends. When I went on deployment, I bought a copy of Diablo 2 to take with me. I still have the Diablo 2 and expansion discs sitting in my desk as I write this.
But I'm a bit burned out. You see, we Diablo fans have been waiting over a decade for Diablo 3. We've been more then patient, and now we got it. And thanks to rabid fear of piracy, Blizzard screwed all of us over.
I understand the fear of digital theft and the need for DRM. Sometimes, it's just easier to just download a bootleg version of a game, or a movie, or about anything in the electronic media; that stealing intellectual property, and theft is theft, plain and simple.
But that doesn't mean the industries that rail against it are blameless victims.
First of all, the movie and music industries will tell you they lose millions of dollars to online piracy. That's utter rubbish, and a flat out lie. There's absolutely no freaking way that you can magically produce numbers of people paying for a movie until they've actually gone to see it. And you can't tell how many of those people who might have seen it didn't because they got a bootleg. And either way, it's hard to feel bad for people who are filthy rich to begin with and have no problem using political influence to try to push out laws that do nothing but ensure they remain filthy rich. I'm not talking about the little people who help make the movies, I'm talking about CEO's, and studio heads, a-bags like that. They try to pass bullshit acts like SOPA, an act that could have gotten your facebook page shut down because you didn't pay to post a picture of a celebrity. This is not a paranoid rant, either, cause I took the time to research it, and what it boiled down to was the MPAA and the RIAA going to extreme lengths to keep people paying whatever the industry wants them to. Hell, Sony was putting out CD's with programs on them that would be installed on your computer the first time you put it in, without your knowledge or consent. These programs actually created security vulnerabilities that anyone with the right know-how could easily exploit, and would have allowed "someone" to monitor your computer. Which is a huge invasion of privacy, and as I recall, two wrongs don't make a right.
However, speaking with my rougeish side, it's gotten down to the fact that people can actually get around having to pay for the utter shit the movie and music industries pump out these days. Online piracy is almost the modern day Robin Hood. You could theoretically download a movie that just hit theaters, see that it's a piece of crap, and not pay to sit in the movie theater. You could download that one decent song and not pay for a whole album of crap. And spending my teens and early 20's having to plunk down 20 some odd bucks a pop to get one good song back when everything was on CD(especially knowing how cheap it was to make said CD), those greedy bastards had it coming. So yeah, on the one hand, it's still stealing and it's wrong; but on the other hand, the consumer is finally getting the last laugh(and it sounds like Nelson from the Simpsons, too)
But it's biting us in the ass.
The big guys are going to insane lengths to ensure that we pay for what they sell. And that brings me off my tangent back to Diablo 3. As much as I want this game, I'm not willing to put up with the Digital rights management gimmick that Blizzard has put on it. The trick is simple: Even if you're playing a single player game, you have to be on the internet and signed into a Blizzard server account. So if the Blizzard servers crash, your game goes kaput, and you have to wait till they get their shit together just to play your game.
Screw that.
I didn't need to be online just to play by myself for the last two games, and I see no reason that I need to be online for this one either. I'll put up with a product key and a one-time online authenticity check. Not to mention that Blizzard could be leading the way for a whole new level of DRM for games that really does nothing more then screw over the people who just want to play the game.
It seems really unfair, because shouldn't their focus be putting out the best they can, rather then worrying about how much money they might lose?
Blizzard's not hurting for cash, and their stuff is worth buying. And I'm willing to pay. But not with the current DRM. All it's is going to do is make certain people just work harder to get around the DRM, and they're alienating people who want to play Diablo 3 like me but can't or won't put up with the bullshit DRM.
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