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I think its important to consider not only piracy but the effects of malicious users in online games. It only takes one person to ruin your experience in a game, even worse if you are cheated and can't do anything about it.



I have advocated in the past for Sony and MS that they are behaving as mostly rational actors defending their business interests. People using cheats and hacks in multi-player games is another strong case for keeping consoles locked down. More and more I'm questioning the methods they use to do so though. The constant firmware/system software updates that they roll out are incredibly obtrusive. Prior to this generation of consoles one of the things that really made console gaming superior to PC gaming was the ease of use. Buy game. Stick game into console. Play game.

Now you buy the game, download it (and wait) or stick it in, install whatever stupid update is required for the game (and wait), restart your stupid console (and wait), install the game (and wait, or don't install it and suffer awful load times), and then after all that maybe you get to play the thing. Meanwhile, PC gaming is way ahead of the curve in this new paradigm in almost every respect. Yes, you often have to download the game, but you can also start installing and playing before it's finished downloading (Diablo 2 let you do this, I'm not sure how common that is), and you don't have to restart your computer due to some stupid firmware update (that is really just there to prevent piracy).




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