I’m going to try and bring this blog back to life because the things I’ve been Going Through over the last year are finally starting to let up. And let’s start with a trip back to the forgotten year of 2019. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was still limited to Crimea, Donald Trump was still tweeting whatever weird bullshit came to mind, and nobody could imagine the CDC fucking up its response to a disease that affected cishet white dudes.

More relevant to this post, though, 2019 was the year that Gearbox Software’s Borderlands 3 came out. This addition to the long-running series of “looter shooter” video games, despite generally good critical reviews, met with significant backlash from potential customers for two reasons: it used the controversial Denuvo DRM (which has since been removed), and it was being released on PC as an Epic Games Store exclusive.

Continue reading “Pandora’s SOC: Analyzing 2019’s Borderlands 3 DRM Scare” →