I see adverts on TV telling me how awesome the next generation of Internet browsers will be and online its easy to find sites where you can legally watch and download TV shows, movies and music. Finally, you have the wonders of Steam and Origin that let you download and play games without having to go through all that trouble of leaving your house. To someone who is new to the Internet it seems like a wonderful, fun filled place.
Except its not.
I'm not going to pretend things were better when you had to 'dial up' to get access to the Internet; obviously it has come forward leaps and bounds since then. But what I am going to say is that the Internet was an awesome place only 5 or so years ago. Why? Well, I'll tell you:
1) Games Didn't Rely On the Internet (as much)
This seems like a strange one. Online gaming was just as popular a few years ago as it is now and if you bought a game, chances are it still needed to connect to the Internet to activate. So what has changed?
Well, now it is very easy and appealing to buy a game online because you can just click on a 'Download' button, pay for the game and have it downloading straight away. At first glance, this appears to be far quicker. I can tell you, it most definitely is not.
Whereas before you could just download the game from the CD and then activate it (which took a maximum of 15-20 minutes) now you have to do one of the following:
- Download Steam or Origin (10-30 minutes)
- Download the game (Steam seems to take anywhere between 24 to 48 hours to do this, Origin takes about 6-12 hours)
- Activate it
- Update it (anywhere between 30 mins to 12 hours)
Or, if you have bought the game:
- Upload the game from the CD (15-30 mins)
- Download Origin or Steam (10-30 minutes)
- Activate the game
- Update the game (30 mins to 12 hours)
Now, I know some people have super-fast Internet that may reduce these times, but I have a good, standard Internet connection and these are the speeds I look at. You see, its got less to do with the speed of your Internet and more to do with the servers available to you. In the UK, we have only a couple to choose from, and all of them are painfully slow.
Not only this, but in order to get these games in the first place, you have to sign up to any number of services and clients in order to get the damn things in the first place. Each game company seems to have a preferred client and each one requires a number of personal details before you can use the service.
But the altogether worst thing about these clients that allow you to download games is that they're putting game shops out of business. As such, it is not as easy as it once was to go out and buy the CD, you now either have to order the game from Amazon or Play.com (and wait for it to be delivered) or download it. It's hard to judge which option is quicker.
It is important to note that I recognise that some games are simply too large to fit onto a CD and that is why we download them online. But why, oh why, do the companies providing these games not improve their server speeds to accommodate for this?
This game now takes 2 days to download. Fact.
This leads me onto the next problem:
2) We Don't Actually Own Anything Anymore
Here is my second gripe. You spend half your life downloading the game or movie or music and then its available to you. There's a problem with this though. You may have paid a lot of money for these services but they don't actually belong to you. Many of these sites have terms and conditions that basically tell you that you don't own the products and that the service can be revoked at any time. In turn, even if you do own the product, if that company goes bust and their servers go down then you can no longer play the game.
For music, iTunes pesters you every time you switch computers (often telling you that you have a limited number of computers you're allowed to authorise) and despite paying for the music, you can't give it to other people to listen to.
In the gaming world, if you switch to a new PC then you will have to go through the ridiculous download times all over again. Oh, and if you own the CD, you have to find ways to 'trick' your computer in order to download from the CD and not from the painfully slow gaming servers that are set as a default download. Bear in mind too, that each time you're downloading for these ridiculous time periods, you will barely be able to use your Internet for anything else.
I still have games from pre-2000 that I play on a regular basis and I have to thank my lucky stars that these were produced before the Internet really took off or I would not be able to even access them now. Truly depressing.
In some ways, it is worse with movies. You download them and you 'rent' them for a period of time and then they are taken off you. Often, finding a site that even allows you to properly download a full film is difficult (and companies often try to trick you into downloading something that is not the actual film) and as a result, piracy has become a serious problem... because the simple fact is it is far easier and quicker to illegally download a film than it is to buy the damn thing.
In real life 'The Matrix' would have terrible lag. Everything would be bullet-time
3) You Better Have a Big Hard Drive
Gaming is always likely to take lots of space, though having an option to run smaller games from CD would be nice, however for things like music and films, you don't have any choice but to fill your hard drive with some of these massive files. If you try to move them to CD, the format won't be recognised or won't play. It is a massive pain in the dick to even get your music back onto iTunes in the event that your computer goes down. The only way to do it without causing a migraine is to move the music from a folder in your iPod and fiddling around with a number of settings before the computer can import it into your iTunes library.
Like I said, a pain in the dick.
4) Companies Own EVERYTHING
I remember a time when Youtube videos streamed within seconds. Now, they've improved the quality of them, but as a result you have to wait a seemingly ridiculous length of time to actually watch the full video. This can mean you have to watch the video in 'bits' whilst the damn thing buffers. It actually reminds me of how things used to be with dial-up Internet.
Of course, this loading time is assuming that you haven't already had to sit through an advertisement for something completely unrelated to your video. The least they could do is develop a way for the video to buffer whilst they are forcing you to watch their tripe. I hate the fact that advertisements load 10 times quicker than my actual video, regardless of the length.
The other problems with companies owning everything is that you're spied on all the time. I've been on forums before and had some random advertisement pop up telling me that I can meet some beautiful girl in my local area. It then shows some tanned, blonde girl sitting in front of a palm tree with the announcement "Hi, I'm Chelsea, 23 from Stoke-on-Trent."
Bullshit. Show me a fat tart stuffing her face with oatcakes and I'll believe you.
I remember the days when the worst advertisements were pop ups. Nowadays, you have all manner of crap to sift through when you're surfing the net. You have the aforementioned ones that spy on you, you have the ones that pretend to be something they're not (Click here to download!) and you have the ones that try to get you to fill in surveys or that fill your screen and make you wait 10 seconds before bypassing them.
I hate advertisements and a few years ago, there was a lot less of them.
Ahh, the good old days.
5) Everything is Blocked
A few years ago, the Internet was a lawless place. This was not always a good thing, but in a weird way, it kind of governed itself. Many people who downloaded illegally did so out of desperation and some would only download to 'taste' the product before going out and spending hard cash on it.
In fairness, downloading illegally did do good things for the entertainment industry as it forced the greedy companies to reduce their prices to a more realistic level. Prior to online downloads, I remember CD's going on sale for between £15 and £30. A ridiculous amount of money for 12 songs, and hardly any of that profit went to the artists. Now, thanks to illegal downloads, you can pick up music CD's relatively cheaply.
Obviously, this 'lawlessness' had to come to an end and whilst some of it had to happen to adhere to the law, much of it is just taking things too far. Multiple download sites have been shut down due to 'copyright infringement' making it ridiculously hard to get even legitimate downloads of obscure TV shows or films. In turn, sites like Youtube blocked any videos that were deemed to breach copyright or any number of other random laws.
The worst thing about this is that in blocking the most well-known sources of entertainment, they are simply driving people to go to the truly dodgy sites that operate with absolutely no regard for the law. It seems far easier to block something than it is to create a new service to fill the much-needed void. It is also hard to see where this will end, with sites like Wikipedia being called into question due to the way their information is displayed and linked to other sites.
I genuinely believe that the golden age of the Internet has passed. Soon, we will be looking at a strictly-enforced place which kills high street stores, is painfully slow, is in your face and is strictly monitored to prevent you from getting anything for free. Indeed, I believe that everything which makes the Internet great may soon be in jeopardy.
... And this fucking game is still only at 89% after almost 30 hours of downloading.
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