Online Activation Is a Ripoff

Lost in the tumult over whether or not StarCraft 2 will provide LAN support is the fact that the game will provide DRM in the form of online activation. I keep seeing these comments from well-meaning fans to the effect of: “Oh good! It’s a reasonable system! Nothing to worry about.”

Online activation is not reasonable at all. Of all the forms of copy protection, it is the most anti-consumer, because it’s the one form of DRM that can take the game away from you, forever.

“What’s wrong with activation? It’s way easier than other modes of copy protection!”

This is what some people say to me. Specifically, young people with always-on internet who don’t own games purchased during the Clinton administration.

Yeah, it’s better for you. But it’s not actually “better,” it’s just screwing a different group of people. If you’re on the road a lot and hate dragging all of your discs around, then a one-time activation might sound like a lot less hassle. But if your gaming PC isn’t hooked up to the internet, or if you’re behind a firewall administered by someone else, then you can’t get into the game at all. Ever. If you switch back and forth between a gaming PC and a laptop or if you upgrade your hardware often then online activation might mean a lot of extra hassle.

You’re basically saying, “To hell with those other gamers.” You’re in this false mindset where it’s you or them. The publisher has us arguing over which group of us should get the shaft, but keep in mind that we’re all paying customers. The pirates never deal with any of this.

(And this is assuming online activated games don’t require the disc to be in the drive. Sometimes they do, and we end up with the worst of both worlds.)

“This is a multiplayer game, so activation isn’t a big deal.”

A lot of people play these games for the single player. You might not hear from those people very often, but that’s because they’re not online where you can meet them. If this is just a “multiplayer game,” then why is Blizzard wasting all of this money making a single-player story?

“Steam requires online activation and Steam is awesome, so online activation is therefore awesome.”

Hopefully, you can spot the gaping chest wound in this fallacy. Steam is a download service that will let you put any game onto any computer you own at any time and will never again require the disk once it’s registered. Steam isn’t just an activation server, it’s a universal backup for all your Steam games, it offers “free weekends” for popular titles, seamless matchmaking, friend lists, social networking, in-game chat, achievements, high-speed access to demos, and automated headache-free patching. It’s got more features than Xbox live, and it’s free. Yes, Steam does require you to register your game, but they give you a whole lot of features and freebies in return.

This is not what you get when you pop in your BioShock DVD. The online activation in BioShock has nothing to offer you. It provides no value to you, and no value to the publisher. It’s a stupid drain on resources and a waste of everyone’s time.

It used to be that when you bought a game, you got a game. As in: Now you own it and can play it at will. Sure, once in a while someone would come along and – in the voice of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons – tell you that:

“Uh, actually, you’re not buying a game, you’re buying a license to play the game.”

But with online activation, you aren’t even getting that. You’re getting a license to ask to play the game, and hoping the publisher says yes. If they say no, or if you can’t ask them because the servers go down, then your purchase is worthless. I don’t care if you call it a license or ownership or what, but a minute ago you had something of value, and now it’s gone through no fault of your own and there’s nothing you can do about it. This is not true of the dozens of games on my shelf that are fifteen years old and still work even though their developer went under, their publisher was bought out, and the building where the game was made has been bulldozed and turned into a Starbucks.

“This game is from a huge company. The activation servers aren’t going anywhere.”

Really? Are they as big as Microsoft? Because Microsoft sold music that required online activation. Then they changed their minds and took the service down. Everyone who had purchased music found that the stuff they “owned” went poof overnight. No refund. All that money and data. Gone. Someday, this will happen to online-activated games as well.

It costs money to run a server. The cost of running a server forever can’t be anything less than infinity. Sooner or later, they will get tired of paying that money to authenticate a game that is no longer on the shelves. At that point, turning the server off will make good business sense.

Sure, they could release a patch to remove the need for authentication, but doing so would cost money. Why would they go through that hassle? Microsoft has proven you can yank the rug out from under your customers without consequences. If you read the EULA, I’m sure you’ll discover they have left themselves room to do exactly this.

“I trust this company. I’m sure they’ll release a patch if they ever take the servers down.”

It’s nice that you trust them, although it’s worth noting that this entire system exists because they don’t trust you. In any case, companies are not people and a company can change ownership – and thus personality – overnight. Blizzard is a rather striking example.

“No, seriously, if these guys go under I totally trust them to release a patch to remove the need for activation.”

That seems reasonable at the beginning, but the truth is that this is extremely unlikely. If this company goes out of business, it’s because they’re out of money. Which means they can’t afford to pay a couple of programmers to sit around for a few weeks sifting through decades-old source code to remove all the activation gremlins from all of the dozen or so games they’ve released over the years. (Keeping in mind that the original programmers have probably moved on, and also keeping in mind that activation systems are imposed by publishers but source code is written by developers. It gets messy very quickly.)

Moreover, they won’t have the right to do so. When you go under, your company is now owned by all the people who have loaned you money. They own the games now. Do you really think they care about the stupid-ass activation system you put in ten years ago? They loaned you money and that money is gone. They are trying to get out of this without losing more. What could possibly make them care about your useless and short-sighted activation system?

BioShock is no longer on the shelves. You can’t usually find it in the store. Now would be the perfect time to release a patch to remove the need for activation. Yet, they haven’t. Honest customers installing the game on their new computer for a replay are still hassled by the system. If they won’t patch the game now when doing so would be easy, then they certainly aren’t going to do it later when they’re going out of business or just sick of running the server.

“Well, they have to do SOMETHING about piracy!”

I’m open to suggestions, but a system which turns a purchase into a rental while doing nothing to stop pirates doesn’t seem to be a winning strategy. Not for us, anyway. I’m not against activation because of how easy or hard it might be, I’m against it because it’s a ripoff that dooms the game to become unplayable at some unknown point in the future. To own something is to control it. If I sold you a car and kept the keys but promised you could “borrow” the keys any time you liked, you would immediately recognize that I wasn’t selling you anything at all – I’m just charging you full price and then letting you park my car in your driveway. But people are fooled when confronted with the same deal in software form.

Don’t be fooled by how easy activation is. If you’re activating a game, you don’t own it or have the freedom to play it at will. You are at the mercy of the publisher, and they are not on your side.

Shamus Young is the guy behind this movie, this website, this book, these two webcomics, and this program. He just bought Riddick without noticing it requires activation. Whoops.