What Do You Own?

I saw a recent post at Random Battle about how people get the shaft at their local store. As I posted in the feedback there, our local EB was recently seen (by me) selling a copy of Auto Assault "on sale," well after they announced the end of their game.

What's more interesting to me here though is with MMOs, what do you own? If you'd bought Titan Quest, and then Iron Lore went out of business, you'd still have TQ and be able to LAN it up with your mates. W00t. The game still exists, there's no activation - just a CD key and a valid CD, and you can enjoy it and all released patches to your hearts content.

Something like Hellgate skirts a middle ground - you've got your solo game you'll always have, but the real secret sauce is the multiplayer world. If Flagship die, then your multiplay dies too, because the rtards didn't include LAN play in their product.

Games like EverQuest or World of Warcraft are completely online - if the company dies or takes the game away, you're proper fucked. If they ban your account, you're proper fucked.

So the question is, what do you own? When you buy a game, do you expect to always own that game? For me, it's been a bit of a problem when deciding what to buy on services like Steam - if Valve dies you're going to be unhappy with your Orange Box or your activated BioShock, because it's not available anymore. Even if you have install media, you can't use it.

For me, this comes to a decision point when I choose to use those services:
1. Do I care about playing this game in more than two weeks, and if so
2. Do I think the company is financially secure enough to support the game, and if so
3. Do I think the game is going to be popular enough to risk it (as even a financially stable company will yank an MMO that's not performing)?

When BioShock shipped with an activation service, I was fairly unimpressed; I bought in on PC for the best shooter experience, only to find that I'd bought into a risk I wasn't aware of. My online store hadn't advised of an activation process, and by the somewhat vicious backlash on the Internet I suspect many others felt the shaft too. Regardless of the reparations that the developers made after the fact, the original media still can't be used without activation. It's possible that in two years time, I won't be able to replay BioShock for old time's sake, simply because the activation service is dead.

To me, this is a fairly compelling reason to keep purchasing more software for consoles for now. When you buy on this generation's consoles and get your DVD, you have the game to have and to hold. The argument I think is valid that all three major vendors - Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo - are likely to be around and supporting their products for years. There are some not so obvious caveats here - for instance, if you buy an Arcade title on XBLA, and your HDD dies, you need to re-buy your content. Thanks Microsoft.

This area of the market is far from mature, but I feel that software vendors are pushing us strongly down the DRM future with digital distribution - and apart from some small price advantage, there's no good reason for consumers to want it (unless you're in the boons, and can't get to product or get product to you). For now, I'd advise being a little wary about digitally controlled content; the game you bought you didn't really buy at all, and it could go away.