Capcom‘s Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D is seeing vicious backlash on Amazon.com following yesterday’s revelation that the game’s saved data cannot be erased. Gamers are outraged, claiming that this is yet another Digital Rights Management stunt to erode the used games market. See the chaos for yourself.
The lack of a system reset feature makes it so the game cannot start over again from scratch. This is a problem if the owner wishes to start over for fun, let somebody else play from the very beginning, or most importantly, sell the game back. A game with save data present on the cartridge earns much less in resell, if the retailer would accept it at all.
Since the initial press release, Capcom has attempted damage control by claiming secondhand sales had nothing to do with the decision. As we can see in the Amazon reviews and comments on these articles, gamers are not convinced or amused.
The scathing reviews call the game “broken,” “crippleware,” and “incomplete,” among other things. The reviews even open fire on Capcom itself, calling the company out on “bad business practices” and “attempting to erode user rights even further.”
There are some positive reviews in the mix, claiming that by the game’s nature, there is no reason to reset the data or that the game is good enough to not want to sell back. What do you think? Is Capcom going overboard with DRM or is this a non-issue blown out of proportion?
Queue big gaming company appologists claiming this is fine and that people getting outraged are overreacting. “Dude, its just a game”.
I think it’s a pretty foul move which sets a sad precedent and is a good barometer for the state of gaming today. Viva la indie developers.
Even if we disregard the issue of the company blatantly trying to control the used game market, a decision such as this limits the replay-ability of their own game. Are we, the consumers, expected to buy multiple copies of the same game if we want to play it again?
If this is setting the tone for future games, are we to infer that decision driven games are falling by the wayside? What if I wanted to play through a game making decisions which would ally me with evil? I’d then be forced to buy another cartridge to see where good decisions would lead me. I doubt even if the game was absolutely amazing that I’d buy the exact same game just to see minor differences to the plot.