Japanese playing around with DRM

This really is sad to me.

I loved having the Japanese as my videogame masters for almost two decades now. They chose the trends and they developed their "wacky" games, and I ate them up like they were candy. But Japan is xenophobic, and much like America they have a pride at being the best at everything, barely ever taking the humble route. I like that about them. I feel a kinship.

Now though, its just sad.

A few years ago we had Western(when I say western I mean culture) companies scrambling to include this new thing called "DRM" to our PC games to try and keep piracy down. It literally caused a few games to fail. The money made off sales did not make up for the money it cost to put something on PC, and for about a year they were blind, stuck to their guns and claimed it was all piracy, not DRM that did it.

Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is a way to make it difficult for pirated copies of a game to work. Its not as easy as it sounds, or as nice. Many games required that you were online to be able to play, even in a game without multiplayer. What you got was a flicker in your internet due to Yahoo restarting, and you'd get the great "Game Over you pirate!" message, and you were screwed.

They are beginning to see the light. It doesn't stop piracy, it just sets up a challenge to hackers. On top of not stopping piracy, it actually annoys the ever loving piss out of legit gamers that payed 50 bucks for your game. Entire websites dedicated to selling games without DRM are thriving(Good Old Games, Google it).

We thought DRM was done and on its way out the door...

And then someone in Japan goes "hey, can't we use an internet connection to somehow keep pirated copies from accessing the game?" and his buddies cheered "YES! its BRILLIANT! Why have we not thought of this before??"

So now, with Japan's game industry literally in the toilet, less and less of their game titles being made and selling in the West, they are about to shoot themselves in the foot. Because not only is their DRM schemes going to be annoying, its going to hit our market a full 4 years into us evolving this crap OUT of our own games. While the cycle in Japan will be: Indifference, Annoyance, Protest, Retraction, Acceptance, the west is going to be on step 25: Fuck it, I won't buy it.