The Console Wars

Downloadable content is a wonderful idea - when it works.

On consoles, it works great. Every system is exactly the same, and the system of delivery for content is consistent and unified. When people buy "The Lost and Damned," they know it will work with their copy of "Grand Theft Auto IV."

Problems begin to arise when you buy downloadable content for PC games. One example of this is the "time trial" levels for "Mirror's Edge." If you bought the game from Best Buy or Wal-Mart or any other traditional retail store, the content works fine.

But what if you bought it through Valve Software's Steam? If you did, that content completely fails. It's unusable, and not because there is any real difference between the retail and digital download versions of the game. It's because Electronic Arts did not see fit to make sure that the installer for that content could deal with the way that Steam stores game data. It looks explicitly for a registry key that points to wherever the game was installed - a registry key that doesn't exist for games installed by Steam.

The best part about all this is that EA is unwilling to support the new levels on Steam installs and refuses to give a refund to those who bought it.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the way EA has done business until recently should not be surprised by this. This is just one more example of the mangled mess of DRM (Digital Rights Management) that EA has produced over the years. One cannot argue that EA does not have a right to protect its content from pirates. They do have that right. The problem is that they've managed to foul up their attempts to protect their property so badly that the only people it hurts is those who have actually paid for EA games.

To be fair, over the last year, the company has gotten a lot better about that - not to mention the fact that the DRM it chooses to employ is a lot more bearable for one simple reason: EA is actually making good games again, unlike the sludge it was selling from roughly 1998 through 2007.

So why this slip? Is it simply an oversight on the part of whoever programmed the installer? Or is something more sinister going on? The conspiracy theorists in the gamer population will be quick to assume that this is some sort of attack on Steam, and the really paranoid in that population will assume it's an attack on PC gaming as a whole. After all, no one who bought this content for their console is having any kind of problem like this.

To compound this embarrassment, Microsoft, who, in the PC world is the king of embarrassingly nonfunctional DRM on all manner of software, is getting DLC perfect these days. The DLC for "Fallout 3" has been totally flawless so far. It's simple to buy, even simpler to install, and doesn't cry when the copy of the game it's being installed to is placed in a nonstandard drive path.

Electronic Arts could learn a few lessons from Microsoft's book. Better yet, maybe EA should make all of its PC games "Games for Windows LIVE" compatible and let Microsoft handle the downloadable content.