I was in town the other day, and picked up Command & Conquer 4 in Game. Complete impulse buy – saw it and had fond memories of the older Command & Conquer games. Turns out this isn’t really a Command & Conquer game at all in terms of the mechanics. There’s no base building, no harvesting of Tiberium, no way to build a complimentary attack and defence set of units. That’s not my gripe though – I could have checked reviews and found that out, and also discovered it was a rather poor game in any style.

Here’s my gripe – to play this crappy game at all, you have to be online. Not if you want to play online, but even if you want to play the solo game. This kind of DRM is seriously shoddy – no playing the game on a flight or on a train, no playing it with a spotty wi-fi connection. Here’s the fun bit though – the game was released on the 19th of March 2010 according to Amazon. A quick look online shows that there were torrents of the game available from the 20th of March 2010. The pirate version doesn’t need you to be online at all times.

So, as someone buying a legit copy of the game, I have to ensure that I have an uninterrupted internet connection. If I download a pirate copy of the game, I can play it when I like.

The answer to piracy is not to make it harder to be a legitimate customer.