RoF had a lot of things that needed patching, but the most cause for gnashing of teeth was given by the DRM used, with the pay-per-plane add-on system coming second. So, how did the DRM work out bad for them? Very simple, many people can and will live with a half-complete game until it's patched to a satisfactory standard, as long as it's easy to use. Heck, one might even get suckered into it without paying too much attention to the unfinished bits if it doesn't stray from one fundamental axiom: games are meant to be entertainment and that means you get to use it at your own discretion. If you institute things like a mandatory 300 megabyte update that happens to be on my day off, well you've just ruined my gaming evening and lost yourself a customer.
The moment you use restrictive systems like these is the moment you lost a large chunk of your impulse buyers. Not only that, but if you give the cranky, high maintenance flight-sim crowd (there's no use denying it, we're a demanding audience compared to other kinds of games) reason to pause with your DRM, then they'll have enough time to thorougly dissect your game and find everything that's faulty with it. Now i'm not advocating that companies should sucker the consumer into buying an unfinished game, but this discussion is meant to be an example of how heavy-handed DRM can look bad even from the developer's and publisher's point of view.
Oh and yes, they have confirmed it themselves that they are doing away with it on their blog, so it's already strike one for DRM in the simulator world. The next big showdown will be silent hunter 5, the last in a long line of games that sold very well. When a simulator series (about submarines none the less) manages to sell a couple million copies or more it's definitely a success. With UBI's new system, SH5 falls under the constant connection deal. I'm waiting to see how well or badly it sells. I'm guessing that it will be much like RoF, the guys who are really hardcore about their sub-genre within the simulator genre will buy it, defend it and say it's no big deal in order to convince the rest to chip in and keep it from selling badly, while the rest of the crowd who's interested in more kinds of simulators than just the particular sub-genre will pass it by until the company caves in. So yes, i expect it to sell worse than SH3 or SH4 did.
Finally, let's take a moment to ask ourselves how did we live before mandatory connections and how did a lot of succesful companies manage to thrive despite piracy? Of course there are the studios that had to close because of piracy, but there's an equal or greater amount of game designers than overcame the obstacles and they didn't really have much in the way of copy protection going for them.
This includes giants like Blizzard, with games like Diablo and Starcraft being top-sellers and propelling the company to greatness despite the fact that they were both heavily pirated. Why? Because they took care of their legitimate customers and they even let non-customers have a taste of their product. You could play Starcraft on LAN with your buddy with just one copy of the game, as long as you installed a specially modified, stripped down version of the game. Then you could host a session and he could join in. He couldn't host himself, play on the internet match-making service or play the single player campaigns, but he could play all the races and units in the game if he had a friend to host LAN sessions for him, without even paying a cent. This didn't come with limited installation, activations or any other redundant and useless artificial hurdles, it just had a serial number when you installed the game and you could install the light version on as many of your buddies' PCs as you wanted. That is good marketing right there, we had ONE guy in our group that bought it and after he started handing out the "light" version to the rest of us and playing some sessions on LAN, we all ended up buying the game as well. Contrast this system that served them so well, with the upcoming Starcraft 2 title where you won't even be able to play on LAN but only through their proprietary service and it will ship in three parts, with every 1/3 of the game priced as a full stand-alone title, and something becomes clear...it's no more about survival, but about the ability to run market analysis on customer demographics by collecting data from them, control how your customer uses the product in accordance your liking and not his and in some cases, plain greed.
Better yet another question, how has DRM and mandatory connection requirements stopped piracy? The answer is they haven't. Black Shark is pirated. ArmA2 was pirated before they lifted the DRM. Grand Theft Auto IV with its online authentication and release date restrictions? Ditto, just set your system clock 5 days forward, apply crack and play 5 days before the game is even on the shelves. Empire Total War, a game that even its boxed version requires a Steam account? Yup, it was leacked days prior to release, a friend of mine was using it as a demo and was half-way through the campaign before the original versions showed up in the stores and he actually bought it. The latest Need for Speed Shift also had connection requirements and guess what? Yup, it didn't prevent people from pirating it, it even runs with your router turned on but it doesn't connect to EA's servers. What about Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War 2, which i think requires both a Steam account and a Games for Windows Live account? You guessed right, that one is circulating freely among pirates too.
So, my question is, since they can't prevent these people from stealing their games no matter what they do, why are they trying to contain the phenomenon with means that are not only ineffective but also p*ss off their legitimate customers? Are they such masochists that they want to further hurt their sales by turning away their fans as well? Or are these decisions made not by the developers, but by a bunch of accountants who have absolutely no connection with the demographics and culture of the PC gamer crowd and think that we'll buy any half-baked, unfinished game they throw at us that requires you to jump through fiery hoops while fighting a polar bear with one arm tied behind your back before it even lets you see the introduction screen?
I'm betting on the latter and if you do some digging around on the internet you'll see that many developers are trying to self-publish their work and not have to deal with dedicated publishers anymore for this simple reason alone. They have no freedom whatsoever to decide how their own creation will be shaped, distributed and marketed if they end up working with a big publisher. Some companies use simple copy protection like serials and disk checks, some other use light versions of DRM and some use nothing at all, but the truth remains that some of the most succesful and certain low-key but highly specialized developer studios are doing just fine on their own without imposing ridiculous requirements on their customers and that is for a very simple reason. They make games that none of the big studios care about and even though their market share might be small, their audiences are small, dedicated communities that will buy their work out of mutual respect alone. That, gentlemen is how you defeat piracy, by showing the guy who's giving you cash the necessary respect so that he will feel pampered and well treated and continue buying your stuff. Just my 2 cents as usual
