The game industry is in trouble, and it's their own fault. Specifically, it's the fault of a handful of giant companies making the worst possible decision you can make in a consumer business: disrespecting your customer. Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, and Square Enix are among several companies pursuing the most bullheaded policies in copy protection and microtransactions, punishing their own customers for their loyalty. This has to stop.

The most recent issue was with Square Enix's recent iOS game Final Fantasy: All The Bravest. Square Enix has become slightly infamous for charging much more than most other game developers for iOS titles, but the $4 All The Bravest takes the cake for wringing fans dry. That $4 price only initiates you into a cesspool of microtransactions, forcing you to pay over $50 for the "complete" game - on an iOS game that makes no effort to offer the broad scope and variety found on other Final Fantasy games. Even Final Fantasy XIII.

The Penny Arcade Report's Ben Kuchera offered a lengthy (and expletive-ridden) analysis of All The Bravest, but I'll summarize it: After you spend $4, you can play the game. You get a party of up to 20 characters and attack enemies by rubbing your finger up and down the screen. Each hit from an enemy knocks out a character. It takes three minutes for a character to recover. You get three hourglass items that let you recover all of your characters instantly, but additional hourglasses cost $1 for three, and you're forced to use two of your hourglasses during the tutorial. After you pay $4 for this game, you have to decide whether you want to spend $0.33 for each additional try after you lose, or wait an hour before you can play again.

Hold on, it gets better. To unlock "legendary characters" from other Final Fantasy games, you need to pay $1 each. The characters are randomized, so you can't just pay for the characters you want. You have to rely on chance to get the party you want. After that, you need to spend an additional $4 for each extra area you want to visit. This $4 game brings together all of the worst possible parts of freemium Facebook games except for having to annoy your friends. At least when you bug your friends in Facebook games you get something for free.

Square Enix isn't alone in completely soaking gamers, and it isn't limited to iOS, or even to microtransactions. Capcom became infamous in the last few years with its seemingly endless stream of microtransactions for its Street Fighter and now-defunct Mega Man series, but sadly the idea of spending $1 to $10 after you buy a game to get more content (in the form of costume packs and variations in games) has become the norm. A more recent and offensive example is Asura's Wrath, which seems to set up a sequel in the end until you look at the DLC. To see the "real" ending of the game and play through episodes 19 to 22, you need to spend an additional $7 for the content, on top of the $40 you already spent (in total, still less than all the content in All The Bravest).

Continue Reading: DRM: Even Worse Than DLC>

DRM: Even Worse Than DLC

DRM: Even Worse Than DLC

The worst offenders aren't even trying to get more money out of gamers, at least at first. The worst are just hamstringing their own customers in the most bizarre and pointless ways. Electronic Arts is needlessly forcing players of its upcoming SimCity to be constantly online to play. In a recent townhall discussion on Reddit (an "Ask Me Anything," or AMA), EA confirmed that SimCity will require an active connection at all times, whether or not you play with other people or not. You will, however, be given some wiggle room: "We will allow you to play for as long as we can preserve your game state. This will most likely be minutes." This is simply unacceptable.

If a game relies on online content, like Team Fortress 2 or DOTA 2, then requiring an Internet connection is reasonable. If companies want to prevent piracy, a one-off online check is less reasonable but can be forgiven. If a game provides a primarily single-player experience where you build your own city and any online interactivity is optional and limited to social interactions, requiring an Internet connection is insulting. It's EA telling its own customers that it has to hold their hand while they play, for fear that they might steal the game, or cheat, or any of the other usual excuses for DRM and copy protection. EA tries to describe its online features in games like SimCity "services," but they are just disservices: forced, unwanted features that require more than just money from paying customers.

EA isn't the only company to pull this, though the online-only SimCity is one of the most recent and notable cases. Ubisoft has become utterly loathed by PC gamers for its copy-protection measures. Ubisoft had "always-on" DRM for its PC games for some time, and only stopped requiring it in September, according to an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun. You probably won't notice the difference if you try to play Far Cry 3 on the PC, though. The game forces you to install and run it through UPlay, Ubisoft's own online service. You have to run UPlay even if you purchase the game through another online market, like Steam. UPlay has an "offline mode," but it's buried, and if you're not familiar with getting around DRM for your legitimately purchased PC games you might think the game requires you to be online to run.

In all of these cases, publishers are punishing, limiting, and soaking paying customers. The people being affected aren't pirates or cheapskates, and have spent a great deal of money and developed a great deal of brand loyalty for these companies' franchises over the years. Whether it's a $4 iOS game (that many gamers would consider paying more than twice that if it was complete) or a $60 PC game, these are restrictions placed on the very people who give these companies money. It is disrespectful at best and outright dishonest at worst.

Content piracy can be an issue, and I don't begrudge companies the ability to make additional money from additional content. The efforts to prevent piracy shouldn't punish paying customers, and the efforts to make additional money shouldn't be forced upon those same paying customers. Microtransactions might work in some cases like freemium games, but when you're already spending money on a game, paying more for content that doesn't significantly expand upon the already finished game (like a proper expansion, as seen in major DLC released by Bethesda Softworks and Rockstar Games for their Elder Scrolls and Grand Theft Auto series), it's leeching off loyalty and wronging the people who have already given you money.

Square Enix, EA, Ubisoft, Capcom, and every other company that employs these ideas are only hurting themselves and their customers in a wrongheaded attempt to prevent piracy and get a few more coins out of gamers.

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