microsoft

Spoon a stingray, perhaps?

Recently, game developers have been shifting to an "always-on" DRM, forcing players to play online as a form of copyright management and piracy prevention. The problem is that major game releases that have utilized this "always-on" DRM model have been total disasters (SimCity, Diablo III anyone?) because their online servers haven't been able to handle the game's sudden influx of traffic upon release. Not only that, actual features of the games themselves have been curtailed significantly in order to make them run more smoothly on the online servers. Essentially, customers get a worse game that's always down to protect against piracy.

Enter Adam Orth, creative director at Microsoft game studios. He doesn't get why customers have to be such whiny little babies. I mean, they actually expect to have their games available to them all the time? Talk about entitlement! Sarcasm aside, Orth took to Twitter to chastise customers about their demands. Manveer Heir, a developer at BioWare, pointed out to Orth that "always-on" DRM was particularly unfair to customers in rural areas who aren't always afforded the best internet connections to begin with. Orth's response? "Why on earth would I live there?"

Sweet, dude. Not only does Orth not care about customers' grievances surrounding their poor DRM model, he thinks that all those backwoods country folk have just made bad life decisions by living in sparsely populated areas.

Nice to see the creative director of a major game development company cares about his customers.

What Do You Think of an Always Online Requirement?