Spore, Mass Effect DRM Phone Home For Single-Player Gaming

Tridus writes "The PC version of Mass Effect is going to require Internet access to play (despite being a single-player game), as its DRM system requires that it phone home every 10 days. Sadly, Spore will use the same system. This will do nothing to stop piracy of course, but it will do a heck of a good job of stopping EA's new arch-enemy: people playing their single player games offline." Is this better or worse than requiring a CD in the drive to play? Update: 05/07 17:17 GMT by T : According to a message from Technical Producer Derek French (may require a scroll-down) on the Bioware forums, there is indeed an internet connection required, but only for activation, not for all future play. Update: 05/08 04:10 GMT by T : Mea culpa. As reader David Houk points out, the 10-day window is in fact correct as initially described, so don't count on playing this on any machine without at least some Internet connectivity.

My worry

[elrous0 (869638)]

I worry that this portends a day when consoles (and even blu-ray movie players) will REQUIRE an internet connection and do something similar to verify their games/movies. While piracy isn't as big an issue with console games/DVD's/Blu-ray's, it could set the precenent for a world where every piece of media we play would have the equivalent of a "Windows Genuine Advantage" check to function.

And, of course, this isn't unprecented (on the DVD side, at least). Something very similar was done with the evil DIVX format [wikipedia.org] in the late 90's

Re:My worry

[moderatorrater (1095745)]

I worry that this portends a day when consoles (and even blu-ray movie players) will REQUIRE an internet connection and do something similar to verify their games/movies

I worry about the same thing, but there's a counter-movement right now from many media companies where they're trying to add convenience and features rather than regulate them through DRM. These companies realize that DRM just means they're product is inferior to what pirates can put out with a minimum of effort and are trying to combat that.

DRM is always going to be around because companies are always going to try to protect themselves from unauthorized copying. When the measures they take get to onerous, they tend to be scaled back or changed so that people can use the products again. We're at or nearing a peak in DRM technologies, and pretty soon more companies will be giving up DRM than are taking it up. In three years time I expect us to be reading headlines about one of the last companies giving up strenuous DRM in favor of more lax restrictions or no restrictions at all.

Re:My worry

[moderatorrater (1095745)]

I bought Galactic Civilizations 2 and Sins of a Solar Empire from Stardock, and I can tell you right now that it's not copy protection at all, it's just damn convenient. They don't have any copy protection on the cds (last I checked anyway) and they don't have any sort of online checking to see if it's valid (if you don't put in a serial number, it'll still install and play).

What they do is provide you with advantages to buying instead of pirating. The first is that you aren't stealing the game, which is enough for most people. The second is that you can download the game at any time from any where. That's what eliminates the most common reason I download the torrent, because I've lost the CDs and/or cd key. The third is that they let you get the updates and they pack the updates with content. They rebalance, they add to the tech tree, they improve the graphics, tutorials, etc. Stardock just plain does it right and adds value to the purchase rather than trying to take value from the pirate. A pirated version of the game becomes, in essence, just a free demo since buying the game keeps giving you more.

Re:My worry

[tambo (310170)]

I worry that this portends a day when consoles (and even blu-ray movie players) will REQUIRE an internet connection and do something similar to verify their games/movies.

Some software apps do that. They store some of the data on a remote server, and the app has to go get it from the server in order to work properly - which, of course, involves an authentication step.

The pirate groups simply - shock horror! - capture the downloaded content and hack the app to fetch the data locally.

More and more apps are coming with increasingly exotic DRM: physical media locks that require both the media and a drive to play it in (and often don't work with certain kinds of drives); per-machine activation that resist application relocation; limited-time licenses; active internet connections.

By contrast, the hacked, no-CD versions don't have all of the checks and restrictions and foibles of the authentic software. It's an image that you can move anywhere and use however you want. Sometimes, they even rip out the key check, so you don't even have to type in a serial key!

The sad result is that, increasingly, a hacked version turns out to be better than the genuine deal. They just work, anytime, anywhere, no questions asked. More than once, I've found myself downloading a hacked executable to run software that I bought and legitimately own, even in ways that wholly comply with the original license - e.g., because the activation server for some defunct app had been taken offline.

Yet we're still dealing with this, twenty years after similar schemes proved inane on the Commodore 64. I fully grok that developers don't give a damn if they're making users' lives harder for no reason. But it puzzles me that they don't understand that it's worse for them, too: it wastes development resources on snake-oil protection schemes, and it diminishes consumers' view of the company name. But they just don't seem to learn.

- David Stein

Re:My worry

[arkhan_jg (618674)]

I just cancelled my pre-order for mass effect PC in the UK. I went through the new securom nightmare with Bioshock, and ended up returning my game for a refund. I'm not going through this again.

Here's the problems:
Bioshock didn't ship with a complete game on disc, leading to hours waiting for overloaded servers to connect and deliver up the missing parts on launch day. EA servers are well known for struggling when there's heavy load so I expect there to be similar problems.

Bioshock securom shipped with two lifetime activations. Reinstall windows? New activation. Replace motherboard? New activation. New user account? New activation. Every time after that, ring up tech support, spend a while on hold, then proving you own a legitimate copy by sending a digital photo of disc plus serial number to tech support in the US, while from the UK. Expensive, slow and very very frustrating, especially since the techs initially wouldn't even help for the first few days. It tooks months in the end for the 'release an activation' tool to come out, and that's a nightmare in itself.

3 activations? Given the amount I upgrade my gaming PC and reinstall windows, I'll be out of those in months if not weeks. I'm *not* jumping through hoops on the phone every time to reinstall my legitimate owned game because I've upgraded hardware and reinstalled windows more than 3 times in the lifetime of owning the game. And before you ask, my legit copy of windows is VLK licenced, and doesn't require activation.

Now the new and worse activation nightmare. Activation every 10 days? So I decide to install on a gaming laptop. If that laptop doesn't have an internet connection at the time I want to play, I won't be able to, because it's been sat unpowered in the bag for a fortnight, and I don't have an internet connection. Heaven forbid I want to play mass effect on the train, or on holiday.

Putting 'internet required' on the box does not excuse this rediculous scheme. They're going to massively inconvenience thousands of legitimate gamers wanting to play their own property when they choose, and they simply won't be able to. I won't buy a single player game that's deliberately crippled to stop me playing it unless I check in with the licence servers before I play. I've better ways to spend my money.

Pirates, on the other hand, will be playing a completely unencumbered game without any problems. It took less than 9 days for the bioshock DRM to be patched out and the cracked version to hit the internet. Legitimate paying customers are still massively inconvenienced by the DRM and stupid hoop-jumping, while pirates get a simple and easy experience.

I can't think of a better way to kill sales of the game and drive people to piracy than this new even worse version of securom than Bioshock.

And spore? I was really looking forward to that game, even more than mass effect. But I'm not going through the frustration I had with securom on bioshock again. No damn way.

Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD.

[moderatorrater (1095745)]

Back door or not, this could be exploited almost more easily than other DRM just by setting up your own computer as the answering server, or for more advanced people, setting up a network box as the server. I can see whole floors of college dorm rooms sharing pirated copies and having the answering server set up in the nerd's room.

Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD.

[Reziac (43301)]

And there may be your solution for when a company dies and takes their DRM with them, along with your purchase's bought-and-paid-for usefulness.

Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD.

[Necroman (61604)]

Exactly what I was thinking. What happens 10 years down the line when I try to play a game or watch a Movie that has some funky DRM on it, but I can't because the company is out of business or has shutdown the DRM server.

This sounds like a horrid idea.

Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD.

[GospelHead821 (466923)]

Clearly, you're not allowed to do that. The company went out of business because you and the rest of their traitorous customers failed to buy enough of their software to keep them afloat. Obviously, if you can't even be loyal enough to do a little thing like keep a company in business forever, then you don't deserve to play their games.

Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD.

[tambo (310170)]

Just imagine, you spend $20.00 on a DVD. Then you have to go on the Internet to register the DVD and provide a credit card that can be billed when you watch the DVD. Then every time you pop the DVD in the player it runs a check to verify that you have registered the DVD and have a valid credit card that is charged $5.00 every time you play it.

Already cookin', chief. [arstechnica.com]

"Software-as-a-service," a/k/a/ "software rental model"... translation: you never own anything - you pay and pay and pay and pay and pay, and if you stop paying, they turn off your rig. This is the holy grail for companies that don't really feel like developing new software, or in updating their software with appealing new features that you might actually buy. They'll just sell you the same thing for eternity.

Of course, two other trends will also have to occur:

1) Consumers are used to owning software, and won't voluntarily walk into a rented-software model. So they'll offer rentals as an additional option alongside purchasable software... but the MSRPs for purchasable licenses will slowly climb into the stratosphere [msdn.com], until cheap rentware doesn't look half-bad. Sort of disproves that whole "lipstick on a pig" thing, doesn't it?

2) Want to just run a hacked version, and do away with the messy activation stuff? Nope, sorry, won't run on your new Trusted Computing [wikipedia.org] machine (which is kind of a funny name, since you can't trust it at all to do what you want, isn't it?) It only runs software (and music, and movies, etc.) that's been cryptographically signed with a limited-duration certificate. But you do want to play Halo 4, right?

Folks... I've gotta fess up. After 20 years of running MSIntel systems (dating back to MS-DOS 3.2), I am closer to jumping ship and Ubuntu-ing out than ever before. There are dark clouds on the computing horizon, gentlemen... there's a storm a-brewin', and it's gonna cloudburst probably around 2014 or so. "When did Noah build the ark? Before the rain..."

- David Stein

Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD.

[jythie (914043)]

In the EA thread the support person tried to address that by saying that if they went out of business they would first product a patch to remove the DRM.

I'm not sure how many people actually believe that though.

Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD.

[billcopc (196330)]

Of course they say that, but that doesn't mean the acquiring company will actually follow through on those promises.

Game houses rarely "go out of business", they bleed for a couple of years then get blob-sorbed by a big media conglomerate like Vivendi or Sony, and you already know how those big guys love to "do good".

Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD.

[tambo (310170)]

Game houses rarely "go out of business", they bleed for a couple of years then get blob-sorbed by a big media conglomerate like Vivendi or Sony, and you already know how those big guys love to "do good".

RIP, Origin. :(

And Maxis (Robosport!), and Infogrames (Alone in the Dark!), and Infocom (Zork!)...

Equally sad is watching the steady decline of a formerly excellent game company... like id software.

Come to think of it - back in my Commodore 64 days, I used to adore games like Archon, and Mail Order Monsters, and M.U.L.E. ... all created by this spunky little upstart with the initials "ECA"... otherwise known as Electronic Arts.

Actually, I still play M.U.L.E. occasionally via CCS64. In fact, I'd rather play M.U.L.E. than any game by EA released in the last decade.

Oh, sorry, we were discussing DRM crapware - carry on... ;)

- David Stein

Re:You are the cause of all this pal..

[n0nsensical (633430)]

Honest gamers like me have securom installed by their purchased games because people like you will pirate them at the first opportunity. ... I bought Bioshock, it installed securom, it works fine, I wouldn't even know or care that it was there. Anything that stops leechers pirating games is fine with me.

Except copy protection DOESN'T stop people from pirating games, that's the whole point. If you didn't pay for the DRM it wouldn't exist either.

Re:You are the cause of all this pal..

[jythie (914043)]

Though the ironic bit is that often legit customers require pirate copies in order to actually play the games they buy.

For instance, most games I buy for the PC I usually have to get a no-cd crack. For these internet-required games I could easily see that becoming an increasing priority again.

What moves like this really risk doing is pissing off customers that don't have the savvy to get the cracks thus end up with a broken gaming experience that reduce the chances of them buying again. And stuff like this DRM yeah, works fine most of the time, but when it breaks it is really irritating... in this case people who don't always have internet, who travel a lot, or try going back to the game after EA has lost interest (ever try finding patchs for older games? Even big houses like EA and Activision have sizeable catalogs of games that they just don't bother hosting the patches for anymore)

Re:You are the cause of all this pal..

[tambo (310170)]

People with your attitude (I don't like the terms of sale, so I'll just take it) are the entire reason DRM exists.

Conversely, attitudes like his develop because media companies - like many kinds of companies - are often unethical:

• * They sell software that's full of bugs, and won't even be playable for several patches... or maybe they don't even admit that there are problems [afterdawn.com].
  
• * They sell software that won't actually run on any state-of-the-art machine without half of the highly-touted features turned off.
  
• * They sell software that requires some sort of crappy upgrade [gamespot.com] that you really don't want.
  
• * They are trying to strongarm you into moving from a model where you buy software once, to a model where you buy the same software over and over and over and over again [arstechnica.com].

So rather than trying to leap onto moral high ground, everyone involved needs to approach the issue from a practical perspective. That's the only way to make progress here.

Look - iTunes, right? Did Apple sell iTunes to anyone as "The Right Thing To Do?" Of course not. They just built a really damn good product and gave it a very reasonable price. It's a blockbuster hit and a cash cow! No moralizing required! And it even lets users do what they want [tunebite.com]! Wow!

- David Stein

Re:You are the cause of all this pal..

[hairyfeet (841228)]

Yeah, come back and tell me how you feel after Starforce burns your DVD burner up. While I don't condone piracy,as a pc repairman you'd be surprised how many gamer rigs I've worked on that were running like absolute crap only to find some game DRM was killing the rig. So I'd uninstall and clean up the crap,explain to the guy all the steps he'd have to go through if he wants to install this game in the future without boning his machine,only to get asked "Why would I go through all that when I could just get it off of(insert Kazaa,Limewire,etc)?". And while in the past I would say you are supporting continuation of the game series by a company who made a bad choice when fighting piracy,today i just don't know.

This is the way I see it: Say you go into a coffee shop every morning for a coffee and donut to go with your morning cigarette. After going there for years and not having a problem,suddenly the cashier starts slapping you in the face every time you pay for your stuff. She says "sorry,but it is our policy since we found out others were stealing our donuts." Of course it doesn't matter that it isn't ME who was stealing their donuts,I'm the one getting slapped in the face at the checkout. Now how long do you think I should keep paying for the privilege of getting slapped when just down the street is one of those thieves who'll give me my coffee and donuts for free with a smile instead of a slap. I'd be pretty damned stupid to get slapped day after day after day,wouldn't you say?

The point is in reality all retail stores have to deal with a certain amount of loss due to shoplifters. While they do little things like tags to cut down on it,they would never agree to strip searching the customers at the exit or kicking them in the balls to "teach thieves a lesson" because it would drive away all their business. When these comapnies put all this "phone home" crap or rig screwing Starforce garbage they have just lost any chance of selling their product to me. Would I pirate Mass Effect? No,but I like having the pretty boxes lined up on my gaming shelf. But after having to fix so many DRM broken gamer rigs for customers I can understand why some would. You can only be slapped in the face so many times before you just get tired of it.

And before someone screams "but they didn't have to buy it!", we all know from the way the industry is shaping up we are going to have a handful of giant conglomerates doing 95% of all the AAA through C titles,while everyone else goes to those simple lunchbreak games like Popcap. So if you want anything other than "match three" styles games you'll have no choice but to go to one of the giants and they'll all have DRM up the butt. And I have no desire for a PS3 or other console,because I'm a keyboard and mouse guy and have been since the days of ROTT and Redneck Rampage. At least with music there are still plenty of choices if you don't want to go with RIAA crap. With games it is getting really hard to avoid the DRM. But that is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD.

[somersault (912633)]

It's not like they'd need to, someone is going to produce a 'patch' to remove the DRM a couple of days after each game's release anyway..

Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD.

[residieu (577863)]

Never trust any rights given to you in an agreement that can be unilaterally changed by the other party.

Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD.

[Moryath (553296)]

That's a lot like finding some of these things now.

Find a Divx disc [about.com] with a movie on it? You're out of luck even if you have a player.

There's also MovieCD [wikipedia.org], good luck getting those to work.

Certain MMORPG's were shut down - imagine if they'd let their server source loose? Might be room for some interesting single-player implementations or even local-player setups.

Then there's Blizzard, who actively fucked over [linux.com] people making local-type servers for games like Warcraft and Starcraft.

DRM alone doesn't cause this either - a lot of earlier (Directx 4-5-6ish) games have a TON of problems getting set up on modern systems, or glitch horribly when you try to run them. There are also a few titles you can't even install because they try to access the hard drive directly and don't understand the FAT32 and NTFS formats.

And consider the following ironic thought: what are the chances that, 10 years from now on your (10th? 15th? 25th?) anniversary, you'll be able to find a working VHS player to watch your wedding video?

Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD.

[p0tat03 (985078)]

Most of your examples are completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. DirectX 4 games don't run so well on modern systems? Well gee, I suppose you want your old NES games to run on a Wii? Or you demand that old DOS games be maintained for compatibility indefinitely? There's a HUGE line between a product becoming incompatible with time, than to disable it artificially through DRM.

Or Blizzard... They stopped people from producing their own server... while the official service was still running. They did not disable the advertised game experience in any way whatsoever. Questionable or not, this is NOT the same at all as DRM.

And the formats you're talking about are NOT unplayable due to DRM, they are unplayable due to being an old file format that nobody uses anymore. This is, again, completely different from disabling features via DRM.

Technology changes, you can't avoid that. Accept the fact that, unless you want to keep a basement full of old hardware, there will always be files and content you cannot get to in a decade's time.

Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD.

[tambo (310170)]

What happens 10 years down the line when I try to play a game or watch a Movie that has some funky DRM on it, but I can't because the company is out of business or has shutdown the DRM server.

You'll scoot on out to GameCopyWorld, or whatever equivalent of it exists in 2018, and you'll get yo'self a NoCD-hacked executable. Or, you'll just fire up your GigabyteTorrent client, hit an oldwarez site, and find the hacked-to-smithereens version.

Either way, you'll be able to run Spore there in your DosBox v500.0 emulator under Microsoft Windows 12.5 on your 1,024-bit processor. And it will work just dandy, even though the internet by which the original wanted to activate itself will have ceased to exist five years prior.

Why do I know that? Because you're posting on Slashdot. The odds that you have the technical wherewithal to defeat these lame-brain schemes are very good.

But for the average user (who - *gasp* - might never have visited Slashdot) will be out of luck. And that's very sad.

- David Stein

Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD.

[multisync (218450)]

What happens 10 years down the line when I try to play a game or watch a Movie that has some funky DRM on it, but I can't because the company is out of business or has shutdown the DRM server.

Which again demonstrates the true purpose of these schemes: to prevent you from enjoying the media you purchased ten years down the road. They don't want us listening to our old music collections, or re-playing classic games. They want us to buy the flavour of the month today, and again tomorrow. They want us to pay something every time we listen to a piece of music, watch a movie or play a game.

DRM is always about access control, not copy protection. CSS exists to prevent you from playing a movie in a region not approved by the studio, or from skipping past commercials. It does nothing to stop you from making a copy. The DRM in this game essentially forces the player to ask permission every time he wants to play the game he purchased.

At the company's whim, that answer may one day be "no." I'm sure this is written somewhere in their EULA. If it isn't, what the hell, they can change it at any time they like without notice.

Re:Why bother?

[tambo (310170)]

Making an unauthorized copy is a violation of the copyright holders rights.

Even in America, where copyright is more heavily imbalanced in favor of owners and at the expense of the public than any other nation in the world - even here, you're wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use [wikipedia.org]

Fair use exists to protect many actions that a purchaser of a copyrighted work might take, even if it's unauthorized. The DMCA may have warped some of that, but it's already eroding under court challenges, and it will continue to do so.

- David Stein

Re:My worry

[Dog-Cow (21281)]

That analogy is completely flawed. People have been renting videos for decades. People are well aware that when they stop paying, the video goes away. I really doubt there are any Netflix subscribers who believe that Netflix are selling the movies to them.

Re:My worry

[Clovis42 (1229086)]

As a Netflix user, I can affirm that you do not know what you are talking about. Netflix's instant view capabilities are an added bonus to an already nice system. They don't even charge extra for it. The whole point of Netflix is that you are renting movies, so no one thinks they are "buying" a movie when they watch it instantly. You don't even pay per view, you pay a monthly fee, and that fee can be really low if you want to mainly watch the instant view movies. I don't know of a better way to legally watch movies cheaply. If Netflix suddenly goes down, all you lose is the last few days of that month's subscription.

Now, this system in TFA that is being described is a Bad Thing, because when those servers go down I can't play the game I paid $50.00 for. This is the first thing I've heard that makes me second guess buying Spore as soon as it comes out. Then again, I play plenty of Steam games, so I guess I'm not really that worried.

Re:My worry

[somersault (912633)]

Airport Security: Someone's subtly transporting 'Spores' eh? If you'll just step this way, sir..

Re:My worry

[Toonol (1057698)]

Just like nobody plays games from the 70s and 80s?

My kids play SNES games on the emulator every bit as much as they play their Wii. That's not nostalgia, because they weren't around to play the games in the first place. They are just good games.

FFS

[ShedPlant (1041034)]

For goodness' sake, you must be joking! I've pre-ordered the game but now I'm considering leaving it on the shelf and playing a pirated version. Sounds way easier!

Re:FFS

[Firehed (942385)]

And they've just ensured that I will NOT be purchasing a copy. Not buying and then playing a pirated copy (which I tend to do with a lot of my existing games for a similar reason), but a transfer of $0 from myself to them in exchange for a copy of the game.

You hear that, EA? You just ensured that I will not be purchasing Spore, which up until this news was at the top of my buy list.

I'll keep the money set aside for when you change your mind. In the meantime, I'll be playing a Swedish [thepiratebay.org] version.

Re:FFS

[Clovis42 (1229086)]

While I pretty much agree, it is worth noting that Spore is essentially a network game. You're not really supposed to play it offline. A major point of the game is getting a totally new selection of user created content everytime you play. Playing Spore offline would take a lot away from the game as it's been described. Still, this plan doesn't sound too great.

Re:FFS

[malkavian (9512)]

The problem with a lot of people doing that is twofold. First, they pay the company for producing a flawed product.. And secondly they open themselves up to copyright infringement (hey, you've paid for the copy with the DRM in there, but you now have a second, that you've NOT paid for), and if perchance the download figures for that copy become available, you can bet that the industry figures will be crowing about how piracy is running rampant.

Personally, I was looking forward to playing Spore. I don't buy many games these days, as I don't have time to play them.. But I buy everything that I consider worth the cash, and that doesn't play me around.
Anything with DRM in it like that.. Well, that's a sale that was a guaranteed bit of money in their bank that they've just lost.

Yes, there were elements of Spore that made use of a network connection to make gameplay more fun.. But it wasn't integral to the whole concept.
For me, not a problem. I'll just find something else to spend the cash on and entertain myself with. Though I'll probably feel a tad miffed that EA have deprived me of something that I was looking forward to, and give me even more of a negative view of the company than I already have.

Turn everyone into criminals?

[EastCoastSurfer (310758)]

It will just make the people who would normally not look for cracks go and find them. These people will then see that they didn't have to buy the game in the first place and EA will turn their paying customers into non-paying ones. Great job!

Re:Turn everyone into criminals?

[Jafafa Hots (580169)]

You're right. Before I read this, I was eagerly awaiting the release of Spore.

Now I'm eagerly awaiting the release of a crack for Spore.

Worse.

[Carik (205890)]

It's worse than requiring a CD. I can easily carry a CD with me. I can't easily carry my network connection with me. And since I had been thinking about getting rid of my home network connection, it may mean I won't buy the game, or can only play it at work. What's the point in that?

Yet another brain-dead attempt to prevent piracy...

Annoying

[Danse (1026)]

Mostly because it won't do a thing to prevent piracy. I really don't understand how they can keep coming back to this idea of requiring a CD in the drive or an active internet connection for single-player games. It makes no sense and only inconveniences their customers. The pirates just replace the executable with a cracked version and have no trouble at all.

Re:Annoying

[m.ducharme (1082683)]

Never mind, if my past experience with SecuRom is any indication, replacing the executable with the cracked version is going to be SecuRom's solution to any bugs in their DRM scheme. I know when I had problems with SecuROM not authorizing my copy of NWN, and wrote to them about it, they shipped me a little reporting tool (my box was almost exclusively used for NWN at this time), analysed the data, and sent me a link to a patched .exe and told me to replace my nwn.exe with that. What a waste, I could have downloaded the crack (which was probably SecuROM's own patched .exe) and ran that.

I've never seen a more useless company than SecuROM.

Worse.

[Elemenope (905108)]

Is this better or worse than requiring a CD in the drive to play?

Worse. The state of my CD/DVD drive is my business and basically under my control, while my Internet connection is dependent upon staying in the good graces of a ISP company that may or may not have their shit together on any given day.

agreed Re:Worse.

[Essron (231281)]

dont forget air/sea travel, airports, bus stations, cabins, e-mail-less vacations.

I need my games most when I CAN'T get to the network...

I wouldn't mind

[AsmordeanX (615669)]

Given my horrible luck with CD/DVD based protection systems I wouldn't mind that much if it phoned home from time to time assuming normal privacy concerns are met.

As a person with cable based internet there isn't a time when I'm not at home.

I think PC gaming is heading toward the persistent online authenticity check system. People look at games like Crysis which has been pirated to an extreme then WoW which was virtually immune to piracy for nearly two years and even now it requires a fair amount of fiddling and you can't play on the real servers.

I'm surprised at the 10 days though. That seems kind of long to me. Sounds like something a cracker could exploit. If there is a timer there is a way to stop it.

Doctrine of first sale

[eison (56778)]

I hate how publishers have finally used technological measures to achieve what the courts won't grant them. This should be flat out explicitly illegal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine [wikipedia.org]

gamecopyworld is your friend

[thermian (1267986)]

I always buy my games (who needs to download multiple Gb files anyway, it's boring), but I hate these stupid copy protection schemes.

Most of the time I find someone posts a crack or workaround to gamecopyworld though, and they tend to work.

Not for freetards though, not one of them comes with a serial, you still have to buy the games.

I'll try Spore just as soon as the drm is bypassed, not before. I refuse to believe that I, as a legally purchasing game player, need to be watched by the content owner.

Stardock shows how to do this properly

[Tridus (79566)]

Stardock has this stuff figured out. Here's how life works if you buy Sins of a Solar Empire:

- You can install it from the original media, a copy of the original media, downloaded from Stardock, or whatever. The game works without a disk, and without a key. It doesn't phone home. It treats you like a customer, not a criminal.

- Registering with Stardock (putting your key in once) gets you access to updates on the website. Oh, if your CD gets lost, you can also download the entire game again for free from Stardock.

- You need the CD key once to create an online multiplayer account. Unless you want to play LAN, in fact two players are allowed to play LAN games with only one copy of the game between them. (You can probably do more then that without technical hurdles, the license just explictly allows it for two people.)

Take a good game and put all that on top of it, and as a paying customer I feel good about buying it. I like buying games, it means more games get made.

In the case of Mass Effect, buying the game means I can't use it while I'm moving, when I'll have no Internet. Of course the whole point of buying it is to play a single player game while I'm moving, since I won't have World of Warcraft due to having no Internet.

But the pirated version will work just fine for me. So as a paying customer, I get treated WORSE then someone who pirates the game. I'm failing to see how this does anything but encourage me to pirate the game.

The work around...

[NullProg (70833)]

Rem SPORE.BAT
@ECHO OFF
DATE (DATE-10)
SPORE.EXE
DATE (DATE+10)


Enjoy,

A Better Key Strategy

[statemachine (840641)]

Dear Game Industry,

If you are going to require that my copy of your game must phone home to be activated AND phone home every N days, even though that excludes extended periods of offline play, please let me suggest a way to ensure that my legitimate key will not be used by someone else either inadvertently or through piracy.

I propose hashing my key with a password of *my* choosing, and you storing it upon activation. When someone else tries to play with my legitimate key, you'll know it's not me, and thus you won't simply ban that key. If legitimate key/password hashes started phoning in simultaneously from around the world, then at least you'd have a better case for banning that key from further play.

Do not, under any circumstances, have the game software locally store my password. (And don't store it in the clear on *your* servers.) I don't want some unknown (but plausible) trojan/hacker stealing it from the disk (I prefer them to have to work for it). When time comes for reauthentication, just have the software ask again for my password.

Perhaps with this new authentication scheme, you'll find that you won't need my copy to reauthenticate so often, if at all past the initial contact. No one's going to be able to reuse my key (gotten from a keygen or other means) online unless I give out my password. Obviously, this won't cut down on cracked copies that don't phone home, but it will cut down on the resources you need for authentication and the frustration level for your paying customers.

Sincerely,
statemachine

Re:Steam

[Ford Prefect (8777)]

Steam's a bit different - you can switch it to 'offline mode' (which happens automatically if it can't connect to the Steam servers), and it won't need to phone back again. You only need to be online to initially decrypt and update the game.

Re:Summary has it a bit wrong, again

[Rasit (967850)]

Sounds like it only re-checks *once*, not once every ten days, ad infinitum.

No, it rechecks every 10 days according to the mods at the main Mass Effect forum. http://masseffect.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=628724&forum=125 [bioware.com]

A: You cannot play MEPC without an internet connection. MEPC must authenticate when it is initially run and every 10 days thereafter.

Re:Summary has it a bit wrong, again

[ThreeGigs (239452)]

Update, as I read farther into TFA:

"just to activate the first time, and every 10 days after"

Now it's saying something different!

Also:
Commenter: "Sure, I have an always-on net connection but what happens if I don't play for 11 days and the moment I want to play my connection is down? Are you saying I'm not going to be able to play my perfectly legitimate purchased copy of the game, even the retail version, until I get permission?"
BioShock rep: "That is correct. And I would suggest that you contact EA Support the moment this happens (once you get your internet back) to report the issue. If there are people having problems with the system as designed, then Support needs to hear about it so they can help us evaluate it for the next game title."

Re:Summary has it a bit wrong, again

[Malevolyn (776946)]

So they want you to report the fact that their licensing system is defective? Sounds to me like they already know.

Speak for yourself :P

[Moraelin (679338)]

Speak for yourself. Some of us are more pragmatic than fighting ideologiocal fights, just for some noble ideal sake. _I_ for example am not a paladin, and I'm not on an anti-DRM crusade just for the common good and freedom. I still think copy protection sucks, from a very pragmatic point of view.

1. To start with the least evil, I have whole bookcases full of games. I'm also not an OCD case, so I don't usually feel a need to sort pencils by length or CDs alphabetically. It sucks to have a game on the HDD and have to freaking search for the CD to be allowed to actually play it.

2. It _has_ happened to me before that a CD or DVD gets scratched, and then I'm suddenly locked out of a game that I bought fair and square.

3. I've also had more annoying mis-fortunes due to piss-poorly programmed copy-protection schemes, which suddenly decide that I'm a pirate when the original CD or DVD is right there in the drive.

E.g., the old Gangsters was launched with a nasty bug: they assumed that noone will ever have more than one partition (WTF?) or more than one CD drive, ergo, the only legit place for a CD drive is "D:". If yours was, say, drive "E:", it would automatically assume that you're a pirate. But here it gets interesting: if it thought you're a pirate, it wouldn't even say so. It would just raise the difficulty through the roof, to the point where nothing you did ever succeeded, and all your gangsters were thrown in jail within 1-2 days. You wouldn't even know that you have a bug, or that you've been mistakenly flagged as a pirate, or anything. The game devs just took it upon themselves to virtually kick you in the nuts as righteous punishment.

E.g., the Die Gilde ("1400 The Guild" for you 'merkins) used to have a massive CTD (crash to desktop) problem. The game would just close for no reason, when you expected it the least, without any error message or anything. The a dev comes and posts something along the lines of, "maybe the copy protection thinks you're running a CD emulator on that machine. It's supposed to do that, if it detects one." Now I didn't even have anything like that on my computer, but I'm left wondering. Was it a different bug in the game itself, or they had shot themselves in the foot with a buggy copy-protection?

Incidentally, that opens another, very pragmatic, concern: who the heck gave them permission to decide what I'm allowed to run on that machine? The copy-protection didn't even check if you actually run the game from a CD emulator, just whether it finds one on your hard drive. While the former may be even hand-waved through as protecting their own investment, the latter is simply unbelievable. They decided unilaterally what other software I'm allowed to run on _my_ computer. Mind boggles. I don't use CD emulators, yes, but the precedent is set. What else can they try to forbid me to run? Games from a competing publisher, maybe? I mean, seriously, wtf?

Etc. The practice of altering gameplay in some way or another if they think you're a pirate, is actually more widespread than you'd think.

4. I have had once the mis-fortune of being left without a connection for a whole month and a half, by the retarded ISP and the lying retards at their tech support. (I could go into a whole whine, but let's just say that they _lied_ to me again and again for a whole month and a half.) So the prospect of games which need to phone home every 10 days kinda rubs me the wrong way. Can an ISP glitch leave me not just offline, but also unable to play single player games? I consider that to be a very pragmatic concern.