EA Denies DRM Problems With Sims 2

Fizzlefist writes "For the past 2 weeks there has been an uproar on the Sims 2 forums concerning the inclusion of Sony's SecuROM DRM software in the latest expansion pack, Bon Voyage. It seems paid customers have been having problems since day one of release, but EA is only now, 5 weeks later, issuing an official statement on the matter. A lot of what's in the statement is outright fiction with proven reports of issues with disabling of disc burning software, optical disc drives, printers, cameras, system slowdown and even system crashes. Fan responses have been cold to say the least. Interestingly enough, the expansion pack was cracked and up on the internet less than 24 hours after its release."

no patience for this

[fermion]

I was the biggest fan of all the sim stuff for the longest time. I had multiple versions of simcity, simfarm, the sims. That ended when they introduced the need to have the original CD available to run the game. I was used to having the game on my two computers, and play as I wanted to. I know this probably violated so license restrictions, but I don't care. I bought the game to enjoy, and that is the way I wanted to enjoy it. The fact that I paid for the game, and could not play it without keeping up with the CD, was intolerable. When the Sims came with the limitation, that was the last sims I bought. There are is much competition for my money, and if someone is more worried about the people who don't buy that the people who do, that is someone that I have no desire to deal with.

Re:It sounds to me that they want to help.

[Jarjarthejedi]

I agree with pretty much everything you said (despite my dislike for EA as the life-sucking vampire of the game industry, You made battlefield '42! Where's the good games EA!?). The one part I draw question to is your final question, it's much more likely that the problems stem from the DRM rather than the DRM-free versions for the simple reason that extra code tends to add extra problems. Cracker's are very good at what they do* and it's unlikely that anyone grabbing one of the cracked games would have the types of problems they're having, and would report it to EA ('What's that? You're having problems? Well lets just check your CD Key...oh what's this? Cracked version, BANNINATION).

I mean, cracking is by no means perfect, and is illegal to boot, but tends to produce higher quality products than the un-cracked versions, one of the big DRM criticisms (and my personal favorite, people don't seem to understand that they could run their favorite programs without the CD if there was no DRM, they seem to think there's some kind of hardware issue that requires the CD, or that it's too much data to write to the hard drive (sometimes the case for the new DVD games).

*I've more than once considered grabbing cracked versions of games I own, mainly so I can run them without the CD...I'm considering getting a cracked BF 1942 as I lost 1 disk, have the other and the key, and can't do anything about it :(

What the DRM providers don't want you to know...

[Dmala]

I work for a software company that prides itself on its lack of intrusive copy protection. Almost a month after the latest release of our flagship product, I am still unable to find it on any torrent or warez site. It almost seems like, without the technical challenge of cracking the protection, the warez d00ds don't even bother, or at least give it a very low priority. I've never heard of any software with intrusive protection that wasn't cracked within 24 hours of release.

Re:What the DRM providers don't want you to know..

[Dmala]

We're a niche market, to be sure, but there's plenty of demand. All of our previous releases did eventually get posted.

Re:no patience for this

[poetmatt]

Sure.
Cracked versions of EA games (madden NFL 08, fifa 08), or use an emulator like daemon. Not that I like EA one bit, they've dived far off the deep end the last few years and I hope they rot in hell ever since buying exclusive deals to shut out competition [gamespot.com] and also decided to treat programmers like slave labor [slashdot.org]. Non MMO hmm how about Steam gaming? At least they finally have begun to get things right, essentially. /pirating EA for life if its even worth playing, to play with friends in front of a bigscreen //not going to support a jagoff company thats also known to abuse their employees [slashdot.org]. Bad ethics all around.

Re:It sounds to me that they want to help.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. That takes me back to the old days of EA software on the Commodore 64. Games like M.U.L.E., Archon, Pinball Construction Set, etc.

I used to buy all of EA's games, but they had the most annoyingly long load times from floppy. These were slow 5 1/4" drives, and we were used to the very long cassette load times from previous years, so taking more than 15 minutes to load a game was bad, but not unexpected. I can still see that color changing EA logo on the screen and hear the weird clicking of the drive.

But then I found cracked copies. Broken versions of the same games that loaded in a minute or two rather than 15 to 30. No copy protection. Those weird clicks? That was a non-standard kludge of a DOS thrashing around looking for the proper keys. EA punished their paying customers to such an extent even all those years ago.

I still bought their games, but then found the broken versions to actually use. The broken copies were better.

Re:no patience for this

[A Friendly Troll]

Company of Heroes doesn't require [the disc], and is A-list.

Unfortunately, that is not true anymore. With the recent release of an expansion (Opposing Fronts), Company of Heroes was retrofitted with DRM and now requires you to either login to Relic Online or use the DVD for authentication. The game also sends various statistics back to Relic, and you cannot opt out of that. It gets worse: if Relic's authentication servers are offline, you have to *disable* your network connection to have the game check your DVD. If it detects a network connection but cannot connect to the servers, sorry, you are not allowed to play.

CoH on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] also says this: "Patch 2.102, released on October 12, 2007, revealed that the preceding 2.101 patch introduced a requirement of having the game patched up-to-date if the user has an active internet connection - users are not allowed to play the game at all until they download and apply patch 2.102, as the game never even enters the activation phase."

Reading Relic's forums [relicnews.com] confirms the above.

Company of Heroes seems to be the first game ever to be retrofitted with DRM... I hope enough people get to read this.

Re:Aren't they ever going to learn?

[someone1234]

According to the FA, DRM appears to be helping pirates.
Who wouldn't pay $5 for a working DRM free copy of their favourite game?

Re:What the DRM providers don't want you to know..

[WNight]

The thing is that it's the company who gets to say who's a pirate trying to crack the game and who's not. I got Diablo 2 when it was newish and had no end of trouble trying to use it as I only had a burner and had a ton of debugging software on the PC. It wouldn't run on systems with burners or cd emulation software, or debuggers that it mistook for either of those.

As always when a game is annoying I got a crack and it worked perfectly. But I wrote to Blizzard about it to see what they'd say. Their suggestion was that I reinstall windows entirely, then buy a new CDROM (not a burner) in that order. I emailed back and said I had tried a fresh install (not that rebooting to a stripped down OS just to play their game would have been reasonable anyways but the burner was still an issue), but that buying new hardware was unreasonable as mine met the specs on the box. I asked for a debug build (even with my name in it) without protection, as it was obviously their protection making it unworkable. They said no. I mentioned hearing that there was a crack which fixed this problem for others. They told me it was illegal, even if I owned the game, etc... They wouldn't even offer a refund, as the fact that the game worked on other computers was proof to them that it wasn't broken. (What error shows up 100% of the time?)

Long story short, I owned the game but they put me down as a pirate. The game didn't break anything but the copy protection was obviously the only reason it wouldn't work on my PC.

I'm sure that UbiSoft was technically right... 20% of people were trying to do something like crack the game just to get it to work. Who else emails tech support? People who've tried and given up. Of course many of these people, like myself, are going to try a crack to prove that the game works and that it's the copy protection breaking things. This is just them sweeping that under the rug by labeling all of those people as pirates. If you have Daemon tools installed for any reason you're immediately a pirate in these peoples' eyes.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Corporate Statistics.