08.10.08
GameTap loses from stupid DRM decisions
Another company loses my business from stupidity in DRM. It’s crazy, but these people are harming the people who actually want to give them money, forcing them to look elsewhere to spend their cash. Hardly a business model that I’d be willing to back at all!
So what’s the deal with GameTap? Well, the software they chose for their DRM happens to use a device driver because that’s apparently so sneaky that no one will ever figure out how to crack it. Sadly for them, this restricts their platform support to 32 bit only when the fastest growing market segment in PC operating systems is the 64 bit market, primarily because many games really are pushing the 2G limit of 32 bit systems and are also enjoying the 10–15% performance boost a native 64 bit app will give you.
Not only does GameTap not care (they openly state they have no plans to develop for x64), they are blatantly obnoxious in their refusal of support:
Conclusion: If you have a typical use of commercial software such as “GameTap” with no need to work with “huge data sets”, upgrading to a 64-Bit OS is not recommended.
Whoever wrote that needs to be fired. Games often work with “huge data sets”, in fact they are one of the most compute-intensive applications known to exist. Similarly, just because people using GameTap itself may not have a desperate need to go to 64 bit right now, it doesn’t mean they don’t run other applications that benefit quite markedly from the improved processing power available from the 64 bit platform (say anything that has a native 64 bit engine such as Half Life 2 and derivatives, Crysis, Far Cry, Hellgate:London, and many more).
Sometimes I just don’t understand companies. They keep finding new and ingenious ways make it better for end users to go down the piracy route and then wonder why they fail in the marketplace. Idiots.