Even now sometimes the online service goes offline, stripping all the logging and extra features out of some games. In fact, its offline mode wasn’t all that great in the early days. It’s this sort of scheme that forces people to pirate games. This means you’re SOL if your Internet drops or you wanna play a game on an airplane. In order to counter piracy, they require all their games to have a constant internet connection. No, but rather most DRM schemes are obtrusive and get in the way of actually enjoying the game - or music, ebooks, or movies. It’s not that most people want to take money away from the developers and engineers that worked day and night for years. Gamers can easily browse, purchase, and enjoy PC games with the service even though DRM is a central part of the ecosystem.ĭigital Rights Management is a curse word around the Internet. Nearly every major game publisher has distribution via the platform now. Valve, the makers of Half-Life, released the digital download service back in 2003. Both platforms make a strong case for digital rights management and purchasing media, but I believe Steams’s case is a bit stronger. That is what Steam is all about and I was completely ignoring it for years even though it was on most of my PCs so I could play Team Fortress 2. What the world needed was a service where I could buy a game once and never have to worry about losing the physical media or my rights to play it ever again. And the worst excuse is that it required me to have a DVD-ROM in all of my computers just to install these games. Once I own the game I can’t ever lose the CD key or it would be worthless.

Either buying a game retail from Amazon required me to wait for it to ship or I had to drive to Best Buy. So in a way the main reason I was pirating games was that I was lazy and there wasn’t a service that catered to me. Sometimes we get lucky and games like Borderlands and the original Modern Warfare have an online mutliplayer mode that plays nicely with cracked versions, but that’s getting somewhat rare. As soon as I finished my first time through MW2, Battlefield Bad Company 2 was released. But for the most part it’s not a huge deal as great games are coming out at such a rapid pace. Those of us that download games understand this limitation.

So while I played through Modern Warfare 2’s single player mode twice, I haven’t seen one minute of the mutliplayer mode. Most pirated games do not allow for multiplayer as the game often has to connect to an official server where its legitimacy can easily be verified by some sort of authentication service.

Besides the moral issue of stealing, the primary reason people buy games retail is for the multiplayer modes.

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