By Brian Perry

Anyone who has listened to the Life Inside the Box podcast knows my reluctance for reliance in the cloud for gaming. Cloud Computing is the concept of converting our points of interaction, be it computers or consoles,from isolated units to terminal access locations. Over the last few years we have seen a steady move to this system. Some beneficial to users, like external backups of save files and game configurations ala SteamCloud. Some dubious, such as OnLive’s proposed gaming service. Lastly, some draconian like Ubisofts recent DRM scheme requiring gamers to be online and connected to authentication servers the ENTIRE time they are playing.

More and more we trust our data, our games, and our rights as consumers to third parties. Services such as Xbox live Arcade, PSN, Steam, and Impulse are all digital distributors of our games, they provide us with service to access the games we want without having to obtain and keep physical media. by doing so we are losing our rights as consumers to exercise our privilege to resell these games through the first sale doctrine as established by the American supreme court in the 1908 Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus case (apologies to our foreign readers as this may not apply to you.) We are trading security for convenience. The quick and easy access to the games we want without leaving the home, or not having to look for that CD/DVD case for hope that the service we use will remain to work in the future.

This is the side of digital distribution and cloud computing people seem to forget. These are services offered by corporations. Services that cost them money to maintain. in the between February and March of 2010, Electronic Arts will shut down 30 multi-player servers for online games purchased between 2007 and 2008. Why? Because, it is no longer profitable to maintain support for games that are not actively being played by a large audience. These closures by the way are steadily becoming an annual event with Electronic Arts.

Electronic Arts states the reason for these closings as prioritizing to the majority of their customers:

Despite some people’s perception, there is a lot of behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping these older games up and running. We would rather our hard-working engineering and IT staff focus on keeping a positive experience for the other 99.7% of customers playing our more popular games.

As time goes on however we should ask ourselves do we really want our purchases to be at the mercy of someone who, by law through their fiduciary responsibilities, is not looking out for our best interest, but instead looking out for their shareholders pocketbooks?

Even Valve a development house known for it’s loyalty to customers and fans has not definitively stated how they would handle such as situation as evidenced in this quote credited to Gabe Newell:

“If you right click on a game in Steam, you’ll see that you can back up the files yourself. Unless there was some situation I don’t understand, we would presumably disable authentication before any event that would preclude the authentication servers from being available.

We’ve tested disabling authentication and it works.”

But most recent events are even more troubling. Over the last weekend the Ubisoft Authentication Servers suffered a denial of service attack preventing users from authenticating their games. For over 7 hours people who purchased legitimate copies of an Ubisoft product, and adhered to the DRM scheme were denied access to the ability to enjoy their game because Ubisoft was unable to authenticate their product license.

Sometimes when you look up into a thundercloud you can see the lightning inside. This weekends outage is that self same thunderbolt. The Cloud Computing can have its benefits, but there is danger for consumers as well. Caveat Emptor.