The Era of Disposable Games… is already here

There has been a push in the gaming industry to fundamentally change the means of selling games for years now, proceeding little-by-little. Each year, these emphases on digital distribution, downloadable content and digital rights management becomes ever more prominent.

The industry wants you to buy the game directly from the company, then buy the rest of the game (and bug fixes) afterward and always have their permission to so much as load it into RAM.

Gamers have been barreling down a dead-end road for years the industry has paved with gold. It will cost us all the age-old expectation that buying a game meant that we got to have it forever, and replay it at our whim so long as our console or PC still worked.

A recent example

The upcoming release of Diablo III and its related announcements have had gamers up in arms. In particular, they cry foul over the necessity to be logged in to battle.net to play the game with no option for offline play or local storage of saved games and characters.

There are a number of practical reasons cited for this: Being able to play the game where connections are flaky or nonexistent; not dropping out of the game in the middle of a quest and having to restart back in town; not contributing extra traffic to ISP’s draconian bandwidth caps; Anonymous or LulzSec or somebody might decide it would be fun to hit battle.net, or delete the tantalizing target of every Diablo III save by everybody ever being kept like so many eggs in one basket.

While all those and more I feel are legitimate concerns, nobody has put forth what my biggest gripe is (and I cannot emphasize this enough):

Blizzard gets to choose for us when we can’t play the game anymore.

While I can dust off my copy of Pitfall! and toss it into the 2600 for a round of nostalgia some 30 years later, or Legend of Zelda in my NES after 25 years, do you honestly think Blizzard will still be authenticating sessions in 2040?

It honestly astounds me that I will be able to (legally) play Diablo and Diablo II for the rest of my life, but inevitably Diablo III can and will be shut off. As will IV and V and so on.

Getting personal

It occurred to me while plugging away in my 320th hour of Dragon Quest IX that I had best do everything this time, because I’ll never be able to again.

Want 100% of the wardrobe? Many pieces of equipment are only available though the DQVC service. And many more pieces can be found on the special inn guests who only activate when you connect to the Nintendo Wi-Fi connection. A full third of the quests will no longer be so much as listed once Nintendo clears up some space on their server. And because those quests are missing, a cascade effect occurs. You can’t finish the storyline. You cannot recruit the story’s NPCs into your party. You can’t find any of the most powerful alchemy recipes. You can’t learn all the emotes. While you CAN get the legacy boss maps, it is made much, much more difficult.

Meanwhile, so long as I have working hardware (which isn’t a difficult feat at all), I can still play and replay the first eight Dragon Quest games to completion with a reckless disregard for time. I doubt this shall be the case for No. 10.

This is why I never played MMOs. I knew that if I really, really liked one of them, I would want to replay it. But MMOs are on borrowed time by design. Someday even World of Warcraft will be turned off and never return. I do appreciate that you know at the door that an MMO will eventually become unplayable. I was happy that the trait was constrained to a particular genre of game. Sadly, this ‘feature’ is no longer sandboxed.

The new standard

Of course, Diablo III is likely to be a big part of battle.net for many years to come, owing to Blizzard’s trademark evergreen titles with long development schedules. Other games will not be so lucky, nor are consoles spared this wrath.

Remember how the PSN outage made whole classes of games unplayable because they couldn’t phone home? Now imagine that was every game you own. Now imagine that home stops picking up the phone after a few years (if that) and you now have a few gigabytes worth of fully paid for binary paperweight on your hard drive.

And speaking of digital downloads, it’s important to note that download-only titles are only available as long as all parties involved feel like it. With no leftover supply, you can’t track down a copy or score a secondary sale after it’s electronically “out of print.” TMNT: Turtles in Time Re-Shelled was pulled from Xbox live earlier this summer due to an expiring license. Not a problem we used to have in the time of physical media being the only option, but one we’ll be seeing more and more of in the days ahead. Perhaps someday these dying licenses will pull a Kindle, and having your own purchased copy wiped out as well.

Also note, someday Nintendo will stop caring about your broken Metroid: Other M saves. Sony and Microsoft are more than happy to offer patches for discs that shipped with game-breaking glitches, but someday those will be cleaned out too, making the games unplayable if you ever lose your downloaded data or finally pick up a copy after the patch is no longer offered. This will be less of a problem on computers, as enthusiasts have kept most ancient patches in circulation. Sadly, file management for patches isn’t so transparent on consoles.

But that’s okay. Companies would rather keep on selling us new game after new game, only allowing us to have a second thought on the games we already have if they want to sell us DLC add-ons. Eventually, everything will be digital-only. You will no longer buy or own games; you will just pay the developer directly whatever they ask for to borrow the ability to play their game it until such time as they choose to cut you off.

Don’t like it? Well, that’s what you all get for acquiescing to DLC, online DRM solutions, annual EA sports games, Steam, On-Live and MMOs. Each and every one of them laid a piece of this groundwork. Combined, their individual failings create this future.

Status report

Just started: M.C. Kids (replay), Star Fox Adventures

Still Playing: Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest, Dragon Quest IX, Metroid: Other M, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Torchlight

Lagging behind: Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, The Incident, Infinity Blade, Persona 3: FES, Starcraft: Brood War, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4, Wii Sports Resort

Just Finished: Escape Velocity: Nova (replay), Master of Orion II (replay), NHL Hitz Pro (replay), Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People

Up Next:Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Dissidia Duodecim, Dragon Quest IV, Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon, Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman: What Did I Do to Deserve This?, Jumping Flash 2, Kingdom Hearts, Mega Man 9, Okami, Scourge, Trine, Zach & Wiki