Good Old Games – DRM free?
After reading all of the sucky news the past month or two about all of the fantastically hyped (accurate?) games that continue to be published ridden with DRM, I stumbled across this article again and wanted to post a link to it here.
CD Projekt also recently launched its own digital distribution service called Good Old Games, offering classic games from years past patched to run on current systems and completely free of copy protection.
Sounds pretty awesome. But …
I’m a huge proponent of hard media that can be resold as it supports second hand markets (eBay, Amazon Marketplace, brick and mortar game shops, etc). I’ve bought used books (and new ones, this one lately) for as long as I can remember. I made a regular habit of buying used dvds from pawn shops (I am on a limited budget after all) and plan on doing the same for Blu-Ray in the future.
With all of that said, I am of the understanding that “Good Old Games” will feature modifications to the original games to make them run on modern OSes (XP or Vista?).
All of this sounds fantastic.
But … how does that factor in to the second hand aspect? Up until recently we’ve been ‘quite’ accustomed to physical goods. …, Atari, Nintendo NES … Playstation 2 used hard physical media without a need or the option for non-physical means of providing the content.
Now that we have other options, many are jumping for joy and leaping into it. Often with mixed results.
Maybe if I was from the current generation (i.e., born after 1988) this wouldn’t be an issue, but I’ve come to rely on a game being available to install whenever I feel like it – from hard media. I just rummaged through my collection a few hours ago and came across Baldur’s Gate, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, Blood and many others from the same time frame.
If I want to play Blood, I can fire up DOSBox, install the game, and I’m off playing. That is soon to be 12 years after it was published!
From what I can tell GoGs is going to allow people that missed out on those older games or lost their original media to purchase and enjoy them.
I’m still left with a big question: What if I want to resell my purchase?
I don’t know the answer to that one …
Tags: Blood, CD Projekt Red, Crysis, DRM, Good Old Games