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I get increasingly annoyed with game copy protections, I find is completely stupid that you have to have the disk in the drive to play the game, there’s a reason 100% of the data is already installed. The saddest part of all, is that this doesn’t really help, it won’t stop people who are really pirating the games, since its trivial to find a patch for the game that will remove this protection, all these protections really do, is that they hobble the legitimate user.

One system I like, is Valve’s Steam, you download all your games, no disk needed (but you can buy Steam games on disk so speed up install), once activated, the game gets added to your account, and you can re-download it anytime, all the games you own through Steam are there on your account, and you can uninstall/install them at will. Some people attack Steam because you need to be connected to the internet to play the games, I say so what, at least you don’t need to have the disk, or worry about the disk scratching, losing the disk, etc.

Recently more and more publishers have been signing on with Steam, I applaud that, an online distribution platform like Steam makes it so much easier to purchase the games, that I think in its own way prevents some piracy, since (it is my belief) that a lot of casual software pirates do it because of laziness, its just so much easier to download the game than to go to a store (and if its a new release, hope its in the store).

So at the end of the day, I don’t care how complicated you make the protection scheme as long as it doesn’t hobble the end user, the person who PAID YOU MONEY to use your product, I do not want to keep the damned Disk in my drive just to appease the copy protection, I don’t mind having some kind of an account and requiring a log-in to play the game each time. But overall, the major game publishers should come together and make an online game delivery system, similar to Steam perhaps (or use Steam, extend it, because I’m not sure how well what Valve’s got would survive when all the sudden all games are sold over it =)

Oh and another thing, something that may well even further deter piracy, DEMOS. Seriously, do you really expect people to buy your games because the box looks pretty? An investment of $70 requires a bit of good will from the seller, no a days its basically impossible to return games to stores for a full refund. If its easy to try the product, via a demo of say the first 2 stages of the game (this of course varies from game to game), then thus enticed a player will want to buy the game (or not, I guess, but that’s just an incentive not to make crap games). Furthermore, once the player has the demo, realistically they game maybe 25-50% of the game, it should be made easy to upgrade this demo to a full game, ideally even keeping progress in the demo towards the full game (assuming the demo was using the first 2 levels).

Now most of this applies to PC games only, console games, for those I have my own rant. Since most consoles right now have some kind of internet connectivity, and some have high capacity storage (Xbox, Xbox360, PS2 with the hard drive add-on), very much like Nintendo DS’s “download and play” feature used in stores to demo games, one should be able to download demos of games via the internet to the console, either that or simply subscribe to some kind of a demo disk mail-out from the publishers, because realistically that’s well earned marketing dollars, since they’re sending out demos to games, people who may well buy their games. So to all you game publishers, make it easy for people to TRY and BUY your product, through demos, trials and making your games download-able.