Remember several weeks ago when I was complaining about the draconian DRM measures utilized on Batman: Arkham City? I’ve come to enjoy that game, but knowing that I’m so limited in the number of installs I get on multiple computers with it has tampered my enthusiasm more than a little. Still, I’m kicking myself at the moment for not saving up some of my vitriol for use on a newly revealed DRM scheme on another game that is, if you can believe it, even more abominable.

A post on Guru3D.com from last week explains how the license for Ubisoft’s recently released Anno 2070 is good for three hardware changes. No, not for installation on three separate PCs, but three hardware changes. In other words, if you have the temerity to swap out your video card while the game is installed, bam, one of your licenses is gone! This isn’t mere paranoia, either — the author of the story even reprinted a quote from Ubisoft confirming this behavior.

As I’ve said in the past, I tend to err on the side of the developers on issues like this. Maybe that’s because I come from an artistic background myself, or because writers generally want their stuff to be respected at least as much as paid for (crazy, I know). Being creative, and even more being good at being creative, is tough, and when you put that much effort and time into something you deserve to be fairly compensated. Anything and everything that can be done, within reason, to make sure the product of your hard work isn’t pirated seems perfectly fair to me.

Note, however, the crucial caveat in that sentence: “within reason.” To my mind, there is nothing reasonable about punishing someone who wants to upgrade his or her computer to play a game. Ever since PC gaming first got serious, say in the mid-to-late 1980s or so, it’s been the province of those who aren’t (or can’t be) satisfied with just the system they get out of the box. Whether it involves another (or a second) video card, more memory, or a faster processor, the chief reason people add hardware to their computers is to be able to play games better. An entire industry and whole companies have even been built to cater to just that market.

The notion that someone wanting to upgrade a graphics card from an Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 to a GTX 590 is any kind of a threat to anyone is itself a threat, to gamers, to the game industry itself, and perhaps most important to our culture’s few remaining strands of common sense. It’s not just incredibly shortsighted and burdensome, it’s also insulting — if you pay $50 or so for a game, why on Earth shouldn’t you be entitled to unlimited freedom to make it run on one computer? If even that is off limits to consumers now, what, if anything is left?

Next page: Is the Windows precedent to blame?