Bethesda Softworks: Premier Game Rental Corporation.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, is stunning. No question about that. I'm not prepared to write a blog post about how wonderful Skyrim is; there are approximately seven-hundred thousand, six-hundred and nintety-four and a half blog posts on that exact subject, if you're interested. What I'm interested in talking about is the fact that I don't seem to own my copy of the game.

I don't have a job, because I'm too young. Therefore I was required to pay for half of the game while my dear brother payed for the other half. Our plan was to install the game on both our seperate computers in order to avoid dividing play-time between us. That was when I discovered the Steamworks digital rights management system. All I knew of it before was that your game was automatically installed onto popular games libary Steam, rather than as a seperate program. Fine. Then I was informed by no less than Pete Hines of Bethesda Softworks that "one copy means one game". Basically, either me or my brother could install the game, the other one was as stuffed as a teddy bear who'd just eaten a large meal and been told he couldn't install Skyrim on his computer. Fortunately, my brother (who does have a job, therefore rendering him one million times more responsible and less likely to commit crime, according to most members of Parliment) bought a copy for himself, meaning that we could both hide away from the bleak coldness of real life. I've currently spent 168 hours doing so.

But the thing that rankles with me is the issue we had. We both bought the game. Surely that disk is now our property, to do as we will with it. If you want to stop us uploading it to Piratebay, put some software on it that stops that from happening. Don't **** over customers by forcing them to shell out for two games just because you're worried about piracy. The "One copy, one game" rule implies that we had rented the game from Bethseda to install and now we must give it back and never look at it again because IT'S THEIR'S. When I voiced a rather more modest version of these opinions to Mr Hines himself, I was called "selfish", "Self-entitling" and "a wannabe pirate" by onlookers, who had obviously bought the game for Xbox 360 or supported SOPA. The two of us had a right to both install the game, because we both payed money for it. In fact, they actually lost money on this transaction, because my brother ended up buying the game through Steam itself, giving a portion of the money to Valve, the Steam developers. Oopsie daisie.

I was only joking about the SOPA support. Imagine if people actually agreed with it! Imagine if Congress did! Ha!

Now leave me.