Short version: Adam Orth of Microsoft was getting into it with Manveer Heir of BioWare over why some companies were (bizarrely, or nastily, depending on your point of view) requiring always-on internet connections in order to play some games. We turn now to Cheezburger:
Manveer Heir, a developer at BioWare, pointed out to Orth that “always-on” DRM was particularly unfair to customers in rural areas who aren’t always afforded the best internet connections to begin with. Orth’s response? “Why on earth would I live there?”
Sweet, dude. Not only does Orth not care about customer’s grievances surrounding their poor DRM model, he thinks that all those backwoods country folk have just made bad life decisions by living in sparsely populated areas.
I understand that Orth has since made his Tweets private. Can’t imagine why…
Moe Lane
Do you recall, Moe, back when Eudora was a commercially viable product, and Netscape was .. Netscape .. and Microsoft got laughed at over their early email clients?
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MS went from a lousy re-implementation of Eudora to MS-Outlook .. a product that *demanded* constant network connectivity. Oh, sure, there was a “work offline” option, but even then it was kludgy and hard to figure out.
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The point is, MS developers never seem to be offline… so they don’t develop products that work well offline. Just try using the help feature in a recent version of MS-Word.. it does an *internet search*.
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Idiots.
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Mew
FWIW, both Orth and Heir are claiming this was Orth joking around with Heir.
I can only imagine how little a Sim City/Diablo III player cares about that explanation right now. 🙂
The “I was only joking” reply?
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Seriously? May as well admit he *wasn’t* joking… nobody buys it anymore.
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Mew
I only find the claim persuasive because Manveer Heir is backing Orth up on the matter.
I would totally play Sim City Diablo III….
It’s not a design choice that gives me a lot of warm fuzzies, even as a person with an always-on Internet connection in a large city. (Honestly, the design choices in the next round of consoles are almost entirely things I don’t find encouraging: I already have a PC to play games on.)
All the consoles want to be “at the heart” of the entertainment center… streaming videos, playing DVDs, surfing the web, blasting aliens, each want to “rule the world”.
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I .. decline to grant any piece of proprietary hardware that level of control. My Onkyo receiver is the heart, everything else is a peripheral.
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PERIOD.
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Mew
Now waiting for him to issue the “I’m sorry you were offended by my brilliant humor, you ignorant peasant” kind of statement.
Arrogance has a penalty, and they are paying it. They’re just not bright enough to realize it. There are a lot of people even with good connectivity who just refuse to buy games with DRM. The fact that they don’t realize how much money this is costing them is their problem.