Capcom has admitted that the controversial always-on DRM it has used in recent PlayStation Network releases has had little impact, with the publisher saying it had proven "as much a hindrance as a help."
US vice president Christian Svensson told Eurogamer: "Sony has a form of network DRM that we have chosen to use on a couple of titles, really as much as an experiment as anything else, to see what the impact was.
"[The results were] inconclusive, frankly. As far as we can tell, it neither helped nor hindered us. We continue to look at it on a case-by-case basis."
Capcom apologised last year for its failure to make clear pre-purchase that the PSN release of Final Fight: Double Impact required a constant internet connection to be played. It then used similar measures for the release in February of Bionic Commando Rearmed 2, though that only required a connection when the game was first booted up.
The publisher was therefore the subject of criticism during the six-week PSN outage earlier this year, during which both games were unplayable. It removed DRM from the PC release of Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition following a user backlash when it was revealed that offline players were limited to 15 of 39 characters.
Source: Eurogamer
Comments
2I don't begrudge publishers
I don't begrudge publishers trying to keep people from pirating their games, but it absolutely must be 100% transparent to the paying customer or it has completely failed.
It's a nice idea, but
It's a nice idea, but unfortunately it's flawed. Now that I don't have anything but a dongle to go online with I can no longer play either Final Fight or BC:R 2 (not to mention during the great PSN outage of 2011). So now they taunt me until I get Broadband :(