How to ruin your PC port in five easy steps
PC’s & Laptops are open, and game companies hate that. They’d rather you were gaming on a closed, walled garden game box where production is easy and all the games are forced onto rails. When they port a game to a PC they assume that the game must either be a MMORPG, or have network functionality even though many PC gamers still like solo games that can start and stop on their schedule and ones that don’t require them to spend hours online working & interacting with others to make any progress.
PC Gamers also hate games that make them create an account at X or Y service and logon every time they freaking play, even though the gamer could care less about service X or Y. It’s kind of like “Ping” in Itunes - I want music from Itunes, not social networking. So screw that noise, I can get better than what you are offering at several other social networks, just make an API for those freaks who think it’s important to notify their social network that they just beat boss X on level Y and got the boots of galumphing as a reward.
Ben Kuchers at Ars Technica covers some of the pet peeves gamers have with gaming companies who do the ports.
It’s hard to be a PC gamer these days. This is true even though many independent developers are cranking out great games. Success stories are common, and there are new games released almost daily that play with gaming tropes and conventions like they’re toys. It’s not just indies; when you look at EA’s accounting on its latest earnings call, the company has the PC earning more money than the 360 or PS3, at least when looking at the non-GAAP accounting figures.
PC gaming is alive and well, but it seems as if companies almost want their PC ports to fail on the most powerful gaming platform. We’ve compiled a list of a bunch of ways that companies can make sure their PC games annoy gamers, and if you bundle up all these “features” you may also see a loss of sales and increased piracy! So, how do you make sure your PC game pales next to its console sibling? Let’s find out.
Add customer-hostile DRM
PC gamers openly attacked Spore when it was released with activation limits, but Ubisoft has to be the king of annoying paying customers. It has recently been announced that Driver: San Francisco will require the player to be online to play the game.
Ubisoft claims this is a win for the company. It has seen “a clear reduction in piracy of our titles which required a persistent online connection, and from that point of view the requirement is a success,” a company representative told PC Gamer. The always-on requirement has been dropped from other games from Ubisoft in the past after the players complained, but it looks like it may be here to stay.
It’s also worth pointing out that Ubisoft’s servers have been hacked in the past, making certain games unplayable. Ubisoft may claim that piracy has been diminished, and we certainly can’t argue with that assertion given that the company doesn’t share usage data, but this is bad news for people who just want to play the games and don’t have their systems hooked up to an always-on Internet connection.
SecuROM, activation limits, and always-on Internet connection requirements—there are multiple ways companies can choose to punish customers who pay for their games. In the past we’ve even talked to soldiers who are kept from playing certain games by these strategies.
Diablo 3 will also require a persistent Internet connection, and Blizzard’s Rob Pardo agrees that it’s kind of a pain in the butt. “I want to play Diablo 3 on my laptop in a plane, but, well, there are other games to play for times like that,” he told 1up.
Just so we’re clear, when you’re bored on a plane, and you have your laptop, and you want to play the game you bought in order to fight boredom, Blizzard’s official recommendation is that you play someone else’s game. That’s pride, right there.
much more at Ars Technica