A sad, sad state of the gaming industry.

This is a strange way to start blogging, but someone has to say it. I am a computer professional. I have worked as a system administrator for the last seven years, and have been a geek as long as I remember. Both my girlfriend and me are avid gamers. We spend a lot of money on games, even today, since we used to believe that people in the game developers are professionals and have the right to be paid. Now, I feel like an idiot. I am honestly embarrassed to be working in the same industry as them. Never again will I but a PC game. Here's why:

Back in the days we both played a lot. She was always fond of the Sims, and I played RPG's. We both enjoyed playing titles like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale together. Neverwinter was amazing, we bought a new computer just to play that. I own both regular games, and box sets. I even own a copy to play at work. And, I live in Serbia. For those unaware it is a country which used to have incredible piracy rates. No one was even selling original games, and even today you can buy pirated copies on the street, if you know where to look. The reason I bought games was respect for the developers, not availability. I enjoyed them, and I wanted to pay what I taught was fair.

Today we have copies of NWN 2 and the Sims2 with all expansions. We bought those as well. NWN turned out to be unplayable. The entire game was a bad cliche, with the already seen story, and the only thing new about it was the graphics engine. Looking at it, they should've sticked with the old one. The latest release of the original game has a graphics almost as nice, and, unlike the old one, has no problems. The new one is so buggy it's unplayable. Starting with the red sky, which drove me crazy to places where the game got in a loop simply repeating the single cutscene over and over. And that is nothing compared to the Sims 2 experience... Now, it's not my kind of game, but my girlfriend likes her Sims. It relaxes her after a hard day. Now, it just pisses her off... The game always comes out with a ton of new bugs. Some just never get fixed. But the worst is the "copy protection" mechanism. I'm not about to say that SecuROM is junk, but our Windows PC just refuses to work after the games gets started. The "protection" just doesn't unload. This isn't just a joke issue, my e-banking gets silly, and that is not a joke. And it's not even a CD protection issue: we bought the game from "EA Link", online, and downloaded it. So, we got a CD copy protection, for a game without a CD. Why? I have no idea.... maybe so that we don't miss on the wonderful experience. :). And the download manager itself is also just peachy - it sometime just loses all the downloads, and, if we want to reinstall the game we have to re-download all 8GB of data...

We finally ended up playing the Sims with a no-CD crack. Yup, we cracked a perfectly legal game. Why? Because it just works better like that. And we don't play any new games anymore. The only thing that might have a point are online games, they are relatively free of that junk, since they can use normal authentication. As for the traditional games, I'm never buying that again. The game companies need to realise that circumventing copy protection is easy, and it's existence counterproductive. My PC isn't a "gaming" machine, it's my property. They have no right to treat me like a thief in a start, and take over it "just to make sure".

So what will we do? For a start we will not support the gaming industry anymore. Not the PC one, at least. We are considering getting a game console. She will switch to a Mac, I will stick to Linux. The first looser is Microsoft, but that is their problem. I'll probably be blogging about them a lot, so I'll just skip them this time. The second are game makers, since we'll probably never again buy a game we're not SURE are good. And I recommend you do that also. Stop paying for junk, buy only the games you will get your money's worth out of. Don't support them in taking over OUR computers. Stop being an idiot and thanking the companies for "letting you play their game" like most kids today do, demand that for what you've paid for. With today's pervasive internet there is NO reason for invasive copy protection. Don't let them get away with unfinished products, if the games are buggy, bug the developers. Make them pay twice as much for customer support as they would've payed for QA instead of skipping on it. And refuse to buy something that doesn't work. Go to the store and ask for a refund if you can. Money is the only thing the game companies understand, so take it away from them. Make them change or go bust. That's the only way they'll understand.