One thing that really annoys me when I buy a Blu-ray or DVD is the unskippable ads or warnings that play at the start. It’s just useless grind that gets between me and the content I paid for. Well, video games have their own version of this in the form of online accounts.
Every Publisher Wants You to Sign Up to Play
It seems that every other game that I buy on platforms like Steam for my PC has some sort of account requirement. It’s not enough that you have an account with the platform where you bought the game. No, it seems like every second game publisher wants you to sign up to its own online service.
Why? I guess it depends on the specific publisher, but there are lots of reasons why it’s good for publishers to get you to hand over your email address and other sundry personal details. It’s a way to send you marketing material, or to gather information about your spending habits, or gameplay. In many cases, it’s a desperate attempt to get you to sign up to a storefront, so that you can buy directly from the publisher without any sort of cut going to Steam, Epic Games, or other similar third-party storefronts.
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I Hate the Carrot and the Stick
There are both positive and negative incentives when it comes to these accounts. In the worst case, you simply can’t play the game if you don’t sign up or sign in to an online account. In this case, the account also acts as online DRM. Thankfully, this is still pretty rare, and in some cases the requirement was even rolled back.
For example, when I bought the classic DOOM games for Switch, it seemed to have a mandatory login screen that would not let me play the game unless I logged into a Bethesda account. This “bug” was quickly rectified and the roadblock removed.
Sometimes it’s specifically the multiplayer component of the game that gets locked behind an online account, as was the case with Helldivers II on Steam, which started requiring a PSN account at one point, though this was reversed later after backlash,
Some games use the carrot rather than the stick, by offering you perks such as in-game items that would usually be paid DLC in exchange for registering and then logging in. This is certainly more pleasant than having content you paid for locked behind a login screen, but again it doesn’t sit right with me to be bribed into yet another account.
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Even Sega Is Testing the Waters
In January, SEGA posted a notice that its own account was launching with all sorts of perks and, of course, cross-platform linking. Now this is really starting to feel like what happened with streaming. At first, we basically just had Netflix, and it had everyone’s content. Then we got some competition, which was fine, but now every content owner has its own platform and wants you to subscribe to that. It’s very annoying.
I think of SEGA as the king of pick-up-and-play games, but now even they are bringing in the same unnecessary friction to their games that we’ve seen elsewhere. At least it seems pretty optional, for now.
Just Let Me Play, I Beg You
Look, I have no issue with companies offering a game account when there’s a legitimate reason for it. For example, cross-saving only works in Cyberpunk 2077 if you’re logged into your RED account, and cross-platform multiplayer in Baldur’s Gate 3 depends on a Larian account..
If there are good reasons for it, but it’s also optional, then my complaints are much less vocal. That said, I also feel there’s a slippery slope here, where it starts with an optional account, moves on to a mandatory account for some things at least, and then ends up with yet another launcher I have to install on my computer for a company that sells maybe a dozen games total.
These days playing PC games means installing the game, then waiting for a patch, then waiting for the shaders to compile, and then being prompted to create or log in to an account. At which point, I might just walk over to my PlayStation 2 and CRT TV, switch it on, and be playing something 10 seconds later.
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