Buyers Who Purchased Modern Warfare 2 Via Steam Discover DRM Puts Them 2 Days Behind Everyone Else

from the that-sucks dept

When talking about video games, we sometimes hear that Valve's Steam is one of the few examples of "DRM that works," but that's hard to accept when you hear ridiculous stories like this one. Apparently people who downloaded Modern Warfare 2 via Steam, expecting to be able to play the game today (along with everyone else who bought it in a store today) have discovered that the DRM has been setup so you can't actually play the game until Thursday. Ouch. It's yet another example suggesting that Infinity Ward really does not care at all about PC gamers. The game will likely sell millions of copies anyway, but it's really amazing to see how badly the company treats its PC gamer fans.

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No World Of Goo For Europeans?

from the digital-borders-are-meaningless dept

The whole concept of staggered regional releases of digital products makes less and less sense in an internet age, but it does create some bizarre situations. Reader SteveD alerts us to the launch last week of a puzzle game called World of Goo that was apparently selling quite well (despite the developers' decision to offer it without DRM -- showing, once again, that you don't need DRM to sell a video game). However, two days after being released, the game disappeared from Steam, the popular video game distribution system, for European users. Apparently, the European publishers of the game wanted to delay the digital release of the game until the physical version was ready sometime next year. This seems backwards and bound to fail. Now any European player who wants the game is more likely to pirate it rather than buy it. It appears the game's developers aren't too happy about it either:

"As part of our European agreement, we are restricted from selling the game on Steam in Europe. I'm thinking this was a clause that was accidentally left in, since I can't imagine this kind of restriction is good for anyone. We're going to try to reverse it. We live in the future. We shouldn't even have countries and regions. Just one big Internet where everyone is equal."

It will be interesting to see what happens, as it's nice to think that this was an "accident," but we've seen too many company execs somehow think that artificial scarcity is a reasonable business model, and thus limiting the digital release for a while might make sense in their minds.

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