The gawd-almighty merged DRM in Silent Hunter V thread

[Nisgeis]

Originally Posted by Heretic

How is having an unreliable internet connection any different from not meeting the minimum system requirements? If you buy a game that plainly says you need a Wazoo 3000 video card or better to play when you only have the Whizbang 50, do you rant and rave and demand the company reduce the system requirements?

Other DRM issues aside, if the system requirements say you need a constant internet connection and you don't have that, you don't meet the system requirements.

Well, let's say that you WANT to play the game, so you check the requirements. Ah! A Wazoo 3000, no problem, I'll get one of those. So you ring up the hardware supplier and they say 'Oh no, we don't supply Wazoo 3000 cards to where you live, as there's not enough demand and the trucks would get all dirty travelling over there as you live a long way from the city.' So you REALLY insist that you absolutely must have a Wazoo 3000 card and they say 'Oh OK then, we'll deliver a Wazoo 3000 card to you, but it will cost $25,000 just because you live quite a way from the city and the truck will get all muddy and cleaning the spokes is quite fiddly.'

At this point you're quite concerned, so you ask 'What exactly is a Wazoo 3000 card and what does it do for the game?' . 'Oh,' they say, 'it lets you save your game. The game uses it like a hard disk basically.'. 'But I have a hard disk already'. 'Yeah but you need a Wazoo 3000 as well, to do the same thing.'

That's the basic difference - You need a graphics card, to do the graphics. If your graphics card was faulty or intermittant, you'd get one that did work all the time. The basic problem here is some people cannot get a 100% reliable internet connection, yet still want to play the game. They can't though. Not being able to afford the hardware minimum requirements is a completely different issue to not being able to get the minimum requirements for reason that are outside of your control. Well, OK, not entirely outside of your control. You could always sell your house and move... but just to play SH5? That would be strange.

I can see that a lot of the people arguing for oppressive DRM are saying 'I'm alright', so I guess some people are lacking in empathy.

I myself have a connection that, as far as I know, is usually up. I don't think playing SH5 will be a problem for me. It does not stop me however saying that the DRM system in use is very unfair to those that want to play, but won't be able to and I don't see it as being in Ubi's interests to limit the people that can legitimately play.

I guess we'll truly see if this style of DRM has completely failed, if the number of pirated versions of Ubisoft's titles to legitimate versionsincreases. Yes, it will be pirated.