Disturbing Trends in Copy Protection
Back before the World Wide Web, one of the best ways to judge the size and complexity of a computer game was to see how many pieces of media it came on. I can recall playing some Sierra games long, long ago that came on as many as five floppies. It wasn’t a metric of quality, by any means, but still useful when comparing games at a software store. More recently, Halo for the PC came on a single CD, and the highly impressive Half-Life 2 came on, what, six CDs? (Can you tell I don’t play computer games often?) It was also an useful metric when figuring out how much hard-drive space a game would consume; most games, once installed, took about twice the space their installation media held, give or take a little.
That’s not so true anymore.
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