Bought Company of Heroes off of Steam this morning. I’m generally an RTS hater, but since everyone around me seems to be playing it constantly, I thought I’d give it a try, so that if nothing else, I would be able to whine about specifics, rather than just in general. And Relic did Homeworld, the only RTS worth playing, so…
As it turns out, the game needs to authenticate itself against THQ’s servers, which would be fine, if we weren’t behind a firewall. And since it can’t phone home to mama, it asks me politely to insert the disc… Wait, what?
As it so happens, I happen to have a disc I can use, which I promptly put it in… But, of course that doesn’t work.
Horror stories of copy protection schemes are abundant. It’s a sad state of affairs, when I would have saved both money, time and a headache by downloading the game illegally. And let’s face it, it’s a 4-year-old game; if you’re still worried about copy protection, you’ve got your priorities wrong.
Can we please get past this? How can the experience of buying a game get worse as our technology gets better? It makes no sense.
Update: Tried authenticating via a cellphone instead, to bypass the firewall. Still no luck.
Well, at least now you can download it illegally with a clean conscience.
Indeed, this basically gives you full justification to move to “other means” of obtaining the game.
Copy protection is one of the main reasons I abandoned PC gaming all together. And not because I pirated everything I played – I bought my fair share of PC games over the years. It’s when things went wrong after taking the time to go out and buy the game legitimately. It happened time and time again, and it just became too much of a hassle to deal with.
Another wonderful thing about PC gaming is that the last two PC games I’ve bought haven’t been able to run on my computer, in spite of it exceeding all minimum requirements, and I am unable to get my money refunded, so I basically just threw $120 down the toilet.
Especially egregious was Fallout 3 and Bethesda’s completely uninterested attitude in their broken piece of shit game and it’s technical shortcomings.