Is the Gaming Industry Moving Online Too Fast? 185
RyanDJ writes with his reaction to the Sony PSN outage, wondering if our rush to online services and digital distribution for games is a bit too enthusiastic.
"I love technology, I just want it to slow down. I know I sound like an angry old 'get off my lawn' kind of guy right now, but until my 8-bit Nintendo dies from plastic corrosion and age, it will continue to play any game I find just as it was supposed to. Online dedicated games, one day, will lose servers. System crashes, such as the Sony problem, will cause interruptions. I feel if we don't slow down, stabilize the current technology and ensure its safety, find ways to guarantee that items bought are permanently owned even without a physical copy, we might see a company such as Nintendo saying that online isn't worth it!"
Re:Uninformed Rant, or Sony Apologist? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd be careful with Steam. They make mistakes just like every company. I had my very first Steam account disabled (I wasn't cheating or hacking or doing anything wrong) and they flat out refused to even tell me why. I had used pre-paid debit cards to buy my games, and they demanded I give them my CC info I used to purchase them to prove it was really me trying to get my account reactivated. Since I didn't have the cards anymore and they were one time use I wasn't able to provide it to them. They wouldn't budge, and they repeated that since I couldn't prove I was the account holder they would not help me or even tell me why the account was suspended. I think it may have been related to using too many computers at once. I had three computers at the time that I wanted my games installed to, so I suspect this triggered some sort of fraud defense mechanism when they saw too many computers trying to use the same account.
The result was I lost 250+ dollars in games, and now I refuse to give Valve any more of my money, and I feel justified in torrenting all their games for free until I get back what they owe me.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)