We all love games whether we purchase them online or at a brick and mortar store, and it’s from these physical and online retail stores where many people still have a need to purchase their games directly. For years, games used to come on a retail floppy disk or compact disc and you simply just popped it in and played the game, be it straight from the medium or by installing the game first.
Many years later, on the PC at least, developers started binding their retail copies to Steam forcing users to create an account on Valve’s platform. However, even if you were offline, you were still able to install the entire game to your storage device and play the game like before, so there were no real issues.
Perhaps this is where things started to haze over. Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls: Skyrim forced retail users to download additional game files that were not on the retail discs, and for those that did not have an online connection, or a very slow connection, this was a very bad thing indeed. Having said that Skyrim sold mostly digital copies anyway so the issue wasn’t really that well known to gamers.
Fast forward to 2015 and it seems that many titles are starting to do the same thing; you purchase a retail copy only to find that you need to start downloading the remaining game files before you can play the game, and I’m not talking about day 1 patches either. The game files themselves are actually missing from the retail game discs in the first place.
Surely the purpose of having retail copies is to allow those hindered with internet issues or very slow connections to be able to play the game, but it seems that there are some publishers and developers that are tacking on this bad practice and making it difficult for others to play the games they want.
Digital Rights Management! We’ve all heard it before, it’s all because people will pirate the games, but you know what? Pirates actually don’t have these issues because they download the whole game in the first place. DRM is just a poor excuse and it hasn’t and never will work so I do not understand why companies always point the finger. Have they ever thought that draconian methods might lead to piracy because:
- Users can’t run the games via their optical drives
- Software based DRM causes problems with launching the games
- Limiting game installs means that your copy becomes redundant if you had to reformat, reset, or RTM your PC/console
- Always online DRM in single player games means that users that are not online can’t play the game
- Offline users cannot play the game because they have to download the game anyway
Pirated users have zero of these issues because they get the full game and it has no DRM, no issues, it just works, while those that purchase the game legitimately are the ones that are being hurt when it should be the other way around. But that last point where the game is split in half makes you wonder why the game is even sold at retail in the first place, perhaps publishers should just save money and sell digitally only.
For many users on the internet it might be fine; you buy the game, you download the other portion of the game in an hour or two, then you hit play and off you go… wait did I just say that you had to wait an hour or two before you can play the game? This is on a very fast internet connection too like 72Mbps – I would hate to think what those on a connection 20x slower than that have to wait for.
Fallout 4 is a recent game that has been hit with these issues. The game that comes on the retail disc is 5GB in size and the remaining 20GB had to be downloaded before the game would even play. It is still a long time before one can even play the game, and funnily enough it is a Bethesda game – no surprises there I guess.
One day a console will be retired and when this happens the game data will more than likely be dropped from the servers and your game will then become redundant. You bought a game at retail to use it in the future and you no longer can. You essentially have bought a game that is on a timer so you had best make sure to play it to death before the game is gone forever.
There are places which take archives of games throughout history to preserve them and in the last few years they have increasingly been having trouble with this. The forced “always online” and now “half game on disc and half online” DRM has caused issues with these galleries that show the history of games. The British Library and the National Media Museum work together to archive the entire video gaming archive since records began and these DRM measures are making things worse.
There are many other games that use a similar tactic to half on disc and half online approach such as:
- Batman: Arkham Knight (7GB on disc, 23GB download)
- Elder Scrolls: Skyrim (5GB on disc, 400MB download)
- Fallout 4 (5GB on disc, 20GB download)
- Mad Max: Fury Road (Unknown)
- Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Unknown on console, PC only had a Steam install file on disc requiring a 55GB download!)
- Mortal Kombat X (Unknown)
- Tony Hawks Pro Skater 5 (Unknown)
Are there any games that you have seen issues with that you can’t play offline because of this? Sound off in the comments below.