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Open letter from the Computer industry to the Entertainment industry

Look at us: every year, we churn out more computer games than your entire industry is worth. You know how we do it? We like our customers. We don’t treat them like potential criminals, and try to make our products do less

This part, if no other part of that manifesto, is bollocks.

This month I’ve bought five new games (It’s been something of a bad month for my self control). Of these, four of them have had sixty-four-thousand digit CD-Keys that I have to type in, three wouldn’t work in my old CD Drive, and one had a prerequisite of two other games (It was the final NeverWinter Nights expansion pack) which also required sixty-four-thousand digit CD-Keys, and one required signing up on a website also.

All in the name of “Copy Protection”.

In fact, I could bypass all this copy protection by downloading the games from Kazaa or eDonkey or something, because the first thing the Pirates do is remove all the copy protection. So it’s not the people who download the games who end up feeling like they’re being treated like criminals. It’s us, the people who buy the fricken games for £30 a pop.

The only game that didn’t have any kind of copy protection – no magic drivers, hidden sectors, no CD-Keys, no Web registration – was also one of the ones that wouldn’t work in my old CD Drive.

Since it was a 1950s era Monopoly set.

It’s got wooden buildings and everything, it rocks.

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