games-as-a-service-sucks
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Blizzard acknowledges Diablo III always-on is DRM
Despite weeks of insisting that Diablo III's internet connection requirements were all about improving the experience for gamers, Blizzard has finally copped to the fact that the feature was actually designed to prevent piracy. "While we've never said that this requirement guarantees that there will be no cheating or game cracks, it does help us battle those problems," Blizz co-founder Mike Morhaime said in a D3 state-of-the-game post. As Rock, Paper Shotgun points out, Morhaime claims to "fully understand the desire to play Diablo III offline" despite the fact that the game was "designed from the beginning to be an online game that can be enjoyed with friends." The online requirement "is the best way for us to support that design," Morhaime writes.
The Soapbox: Games-as-a-service sucks for the consumer
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. If you pay close attention to game industry marketing-speak, you've probably heard of something called games-as-a-service. It's an initiative that's been gaining momentum in recent years, as publishers and development houses look to increase revenue, strangle used game sales, and clamp down on both PC and console piracy. It's also championed by a few of our more clueless game "journalists," more often than not due to their (desire for a) cozy relationship with the aforementioned industry players. Put simply, games-as-a-service seeks to change both the definition and the public perception of the phrase "video game" from a product that you buy to a service that you rent, thereby granting developers and publishers complete control over the end-user's experience. If that sounds somewhat nefarious, that's because it is. It's also something that MMORPGs have been doing for two decades.
