Spore, Mass Effect DRM Phone Home For Single-Player Gaming 900
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
And counterquote
Re:My worry (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD. (Score:5, Insightful)
This sounds like a horrid idea.
Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure how many people actually believe that though.
Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You are the cause of all this pal.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD. (Score:4, Interesting)
First, you're still paying them to do this shit. I realize it's a no-win situation -- if sales go up, they claim people don't mind DRM. If sales go down, they claim they need more DRM to stop those filthy pirates.
But it might be nice if we could actually generate some meaningful statistics, and actually vote with our wallets. Tricky, though, because we're short on options -- maybe because we didn't vote with our wallets?
Second, how many resources have to be wasted building and cracking DRM? BR isn't "fixed", by the way -- both HD-DVD and BR are only really meaningfully cracked by a commercial product, and only as long as their servers stay up. iTunes was "fixed" for awhile now; I think it's broken again. (Oh, and iTunes does have alternatives, though it requires you seeking out bands who are done dealing with the record labels.)
Unfortunately, aside from DVD, the only truly permanent fix is piracy. I can't be sure, if I buy a BR movie, whether I'll be able to rip it -- I can be reasonably sure, but never absolutely sure. The only way to be absolutely sure is to skip buying it and download the 4 gig mkv.
Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD. (Score:5, Interesting)
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
The same was said about things in the eighties about things built in the sixties. The fact is, VCRs are just like DVD players. A bunch keeled over and died every two years. The ones that are still around are the ones that were built well.
And your past was more interesting than your present because your memories are edited too.
Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Bigger Worry: A backdoor is worse than a CD. (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, the myth that DRM prevents people from "stealing."
Let's see
1. Put DRM-encumbered DVD in drive
2. Type "dd if=/dev/hdd of=/media/some_hollywood_blockbuster.iso"
3. Burn resulting image file to a blank DVD (or mount it as a loopback device and point your media player at the mount point).
DRM didn't do much to stop us from making a copy, did it? I simply made an exact copy of the original DVD, complete with DRM. After all, that's what my player is expecting.
Let try another experiment
1. Put DRM-encumbered Region 1 DVD in a Region 3 player
2. Oops, won't play
Or
1. Put DRM-encumbered DVD in any player
2. Try to fast-forward through Copyright warning, or commercials
3. Oops, can't do that either.
Let's make a 30 second clip of the movie so we can criticize it, or parody it, or perhaps use it in a derivative work. Oh, right, we can't because we would have to decrypt it with something like DeCSS, which the DMCA prohibits.
The purpose of DRM is to control how the paying customer uses the media they purchase. But if they said that, it might make it more difficult to paint themselves as the victim and convince taxpayers that we should continue to enforce their copyrights while they erode the concept of Fair Use with DRM and EULAs.
It sounds much more reasonable to say "we need DRM to stop people from stealing."
Don't spread their lies for them.
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Insightful)
2. Type "dd if=/dev/hdd of=/media/some_hollywood_blockbuster.iso"
3. Burn resulting image file to a blank DVD (or mount it as a loopback device and point your media player at the mount point).
Re:Why bother? (Score:5, Informative)
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:Why bother? (Score:4, Informative)
You might want to read the entire USC 17 instead of stopping at Â106. Making a copy without authorization from the copyright holder is a violation in many circumstances but not in all.
For starters, there's Â107.
You need to read up on Digital Certificates (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the one DRM system where they don't have to give you the key with the lock.
Re:I see this as a large statement in the Game ind (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My worry (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Why?
Because in using Netflix, you are NEVER going to have a Physical media for anything you watch from them.
Not that you get to keep forever.
You are renting the item from them for the purposes of watching, not owning.
This is a HUGE difference.
A better analogy would be the one already posted.
That you PURCHASE from your local big box store a Blu-Ray movie, and before it will begin to play at all, you have to have your player hooked up to the internet and
Re:My worry (Score:5, Informative)
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
So it is reasonable that you do not keep it after watching it.
Re:My worry (Score:4, Interesting)
Screw 5 years, what if I install it on my laptop and want to play it while I fly from LA to London or any other starting and ending points???
Re:My worry (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My worry (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FFS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:FFS (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:FFS (Score:4, Insightful)
Email to EA it is then. Their loss, and they might as well know about it.
Re:FFS (Score:4, Informative)
Re:FFS (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:FFS (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Damn it, we won this war back in the late eighties when we refused to buy copy protected CDs. WTF is wrong with you people? Don't buy into to this idiotic shit!
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Worse. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet another brain-dead attempt to prevent piracy...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How about EITHER the game checks every 10 days, OR demands a CD be inserted at least every 10 days? I can't see checks going away any time soon (Arguments about them being a waste of space aside), and in the absence of requiring neither I'd prefer to be able to do an online check so I don't need to drag CDs around, but still be able to do a CD-based authentication if I have no network.
Annoying (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Annoying (Score:5, Funny)
I've never seen a more useless company than SecuROM.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And then we went through the same fucking cycle every time they released a new expansion pack for NWN.
Not sure why this is modded as funny (Score:3, Informative)
I've had similar problems, Civilization 4 Beyond the Sword said my disc wasn't valid. I took it back to Target in case there was a problem with that particular disc (media errors do happen) but no, it just didn't like my DVD drive. Ya well, a patch
Re:Annoying (Score:4, Informative)
The person this is going to hurt is some guy who goes out and buys the game but doesn't have an Internet connection. He won't be able to play, but there'll be a dozen downloads on BitTorrent and hundreds of pirates will be playing just fine.
Re:Annoying (Score:4, Insightful)
No, that's not correct. It does "hurt the pirates" and for the good schemes it can be statistically proven to be true. The developers of, I think Heros, published some very interesting statistics on their experience with StarForce if you want to find the figures I'm thinking of, but I've seen similar stories repeated by other game devs.
Look. Very few high-budget games are released without DRM. I know this is an emotional issue for a lot of Slashdotters, but the number of people here assuming they're smarter than, well, almost every game publisher in the world is pretty sad to see. Do you really think they pay for expensive DRM systems over and over again if it loses them money? Even if you assume some of them are completely dysfunctional, we're not talking about a few publishers. We're talking about the vast majority.
DRM does work. It does not last forever, but it was never intended to anyway. The success of a PC video game DRM system is the time-to-crack. For good schemes this can be measured in months. For bad schemes it can be measured in days, or even be negative.
The majority of a copies of a game are sold within the months following its release. After a year, sales of a typical game are minimal and if you lose them, well, no big deal. So if your DRM scheme holds up 6 months, that's 6 months with no piracy. It's well understood in the industry that the DRM cracking problem comes from people who just don't want to pay for the game. Very few are pure hearted people who conscientiously want to make backups of their disks. Some of those people will never pay for the game, ever, and some of them will pay for the game when it becomes clear that a crack isn't coming out anytime soon (because they want to play the latest thing, with their friends, etc).
So, holding on for a few months can increase sales quite significantly. It's a simple economic equation - how much do you pay for the DRM vs how many extra sales do you get as various wannabe-pirates "time out" and decide to buy the game anyway?
Of course it's not 100% business, there's an emotional aspect to it as well. Consider a developer at Infinity Ward and his perspective [blogspot.com]:
If you want to see what a good DRM system can achieve compare the piracy rates of console games vs PC games. Obviously due to its nature the PC versions will not get close to such low rates anytime soon, but the contrast is remarkable (I've read a game developer blog where they searched for torrents of their game for XBox 360 vs PC and the difference in number of torrents/downloaders was huge).
Worse. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:5, Informative)
I need my games most when I CAN'T get to the network...
I wouldn't mind (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Even if there wasn't a timer, unless the server somewhere is providing some critical component of the game itself that can't be replaced, then the game will be cracked. It's that simple. Once people figured out how to create their own WoW servers, then it was possible to play a cracked version because they no longer needed the service provided by the real servers.
These are just the facts of life, and the game publishers are simply pissing people off with these stupid attempts to prevent something that th
Doctrine of first sale (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The is no first-license doctrine. Software is more akin to a service or a lease. In most cases you do not have the right to sublet rental property or to transfer licenses without explicit permission, as it is never your property.
I am not saying you have to like it, just saying
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not just technological measures - it's legal measures, too. They've successfully developed the legal fiction that, even though you bought a CD with some software on it, you didn't really buy a CD with some software on it. No, you bought a license to use the software subject to certain restrictions... that thing in your hands is just a tool to help you exercise the rights that you bought.
The upshot
Bastards (Score:4, Insightful)
This is bogus. The problem with gamers is that they don't care about standing up for important principles and only care about shiny new games.
Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo should all be forced, by lack of customers, to open up their platform and allow people who bought these devices to actually control their property. Software vendors who do this crap should have every game that requires internet access returned to the store for a full refund. (More damaging than *not* buying it.)
Re:Bastards (Score:4, Insightful)
If they did that, they'd be forced, by lack of licensing revenue, to stop making consoles all together. You're talking about a completely unrelated issue, anyway. Ever read up on the video game market crash?
Honestly, this is not going to affect Spore at all. 99% of people have an internet connection, 95% won't care that they have to use it to verify their legal software is in fact legal. The people that don't have legal copies will either get one, hassle with it, or give up because it's too annoying. Copy protection measures like this are annoying to me because I don't plan on buying the software, but at least it isn't as annoying as having to dig through all your cds to make sure the right one is in the drive. Take a step back here. This is a method of copy protection that is less annoying to 99% of legitimate users than the current system of making sure you have the disc in the drive. EVERYONE here is in that 99%. What's the problem?
Re:Bastards (Score:4, Interesting)
Why?
DRM. He had all kinds of problems with games refusing to recognize his CD drive, or stuff like Starforce crashing his machine, or all the other issues that these systems cause. He wasn't a pirate. He just wanted the games to work, and this stuff caused PC games to not work for him.
Now he avoids the hassle and just plays console games.
On any one game, its only a few people here and there. But think of how many games he would have bought over the next 10 years that he now won't. Think of all the other people every time it happens. Those numbers pile up into real money very quickly, and THAT is what is really killing PC gaming.
Great. Just great. (Score:3, Interesting)
Now that I think about it, I won't even bother with even getting an illegit copy. Why even patronize the product at all anymore?
gamecopyworld is your friend (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Please don't. In fact, please don't buy Spore at all. If they're stupid enough to pull this kind of anti-customner crap, how can they possibly be smart enough to make a decent game?
DRM is a sign that the product sucks so much that its creators don't think it's good enough to pay for.
Don't buy a product so bad its creators think nobody would pay for it.
Naturally... (Score:3, Insightful)
watch the pirated exe skyrocket in downloads (Score:3, Funny)
I was going to buy the games... (Score:4, Insightful)
Unlike the old days, I do actually purchase the games I play a lot. Of all the security methods, I've always found a crack for my legitimately purchased software so I don't have to have the CD/DVD in the drive. Steam is about my limit for DRM techniques. If I absolutely *MUST* have an internet connection to play Spore or Mass Effect, then I absolutely WILL have a crack to play it. The fact that this is required really leads me to think it might just be less hassle to download a pirated copy and forgo buying it at all.
Are they losing a sale because I am pirating the copy? No. I won't buy it because of it's DRM. I will play the game and I will enjoy it - however, there's no sale lost because, if there were no other alternative than buying the DRM laden game, I wouldn't buy it.
Like many other people, I am happy to fork over my money for a game I can copy freely or use how I wish. I am not happy, and will not fork over money for a game that is hostile towards me in terms of my freedoms. A perfect example of how DRM generates a pirate and costs a sale, whereas no DRM gains a sale. How many sales are gained due to DRM? I'd imagine very few compared to how many are lost due to DRM.
Much, much worse (Score:3, Insightful)
Plays for Sure! (Score:4, Insightful)
And what happens in 5 years when I want to pull it out and play it again? I'm sure it will play right? Just like all those people who bought music from Microsoft thought "Plays for Sure" meant it played for sure.
Stardock shows how to do this properly (Score:5, Interesting)
- 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.
Some DRM Free Alternative to Spore (Score:3, Insightful)
Softball
Kickball
Baseball
Soccer
Checkers
Go
Hockey
Football
Water-Skiing
Camping
Sex
Having coffee with someone face-to-face
Remote control car races
Whittling
Gardening
Lacross
Golf
Paintball
Play a musical instrument
ALL the above are DRM-free sources of entertainment. Seriously people I swear some of you don't realized there are other forms of entertainment besides sitting in front of a computer... Let them add as much DRM as they want, once they are all out-of-business from a lack of customers then DRM goes with them. Life is not digital, there is ebb and flow in the security vs. freedom. We had that useless "4th word on page 8" protection nonsense since the old gold-box D&D games. DRM has always been around in one form or another. I swear kids these days think they invented everything... It will get worse, then better, then worse again.
Anyways, the very fact that the term Freetard is growing shows a backlash building to a degree, not so much towards pro-drm people, but the useless crap nerds complain about.
The veneer of trendy is starting to wear off the geeks as people once again realize that life is not a scene out of Tron, we do not live in our computers. Pay cash, write a letter with cursive, and remember that not every source of entertainment must come from a computer.
The pirates today are losing their edge, no longer rebels against over-priced software, but viewed increasingly as parasites that are damaging small game developers and empowering large EA type shops pumping out the same crap year after year.
This is why gaming is moving to a service-like structure rather then a product. WoW, EQ, etc are all services really rather then a game-in-a-box. Soon all single-player games will requirer a monthly subscription to play (small as that fee may be) with central hosted servers to provide content. It's the old razor sales angle used for consoles, printers, etc... Give the game away and charge a use fee instead for content.
I would like to thank all the warez teams in the 80 for bringing about "Software as a Service", as suggested by Bill Gates back in the 90s, a reality.
The work around... (Score:5, Funny)
Rem SPORE.BAT
@ECHO OFF
DATE (DATE-10)
SPORE.EXE
DATE (DATE+10)
Enjoy,
A Better Key Strategy (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I buy a single player game I want to be able to play it without asking permission first.
Remember Divx. No not that one. The other one. People who payed for life time unlimited viewing now have coasters. Steam can do that to you at any point.
Re:Summary has it a bit wrong, again (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Summary has it a bit wrong, again (Score:5, Informative)
"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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember, companies and governments are not huge homogeneous decision making machines. I personally have to implement systems for my bosses that I KNOW are insecure or will perform poorly, but once it's bought or the decision has been made, it's my job to get behind that and make it work as best as I can, even if I d
Re:Summary has it a bit wrong, again (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the forum mods most likely knows that this is a really stupid idea, unfortunately it is the suit guys (EA) that makes these decision so spamming the support center with complaints is likely the easiest way to let them know how you feel.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I got burned on Half Life 2. I bought the game on release, and was unable to play the game for 2 days because steam was down. I made a decision at that time to never buy another product that requires online activation.
I have not played bioshock, or the orange box due to this.
I will not play spore or mass effect due to this either.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't support their DRM but this isn't really comparable to the issues with PlayForSure. Microsoft were distributing someone elses product on the proviso that it was protected with DRM. EA are distributing their own product so they can patch the game at any point to remove the DRM. Microsoft couldn't do the same with PlayForSure because the record labels who own the copyright would never have ag
Speak for yourself :P (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"For clarity, though, an internet connection is not required to install, just to activate the first time, and every 10 days after. You can be completely connectionless for 9 days and encounter no problems playing Mass Effect. And you don't need the disk in the drive to play."
Every 10 days after. The game will be checking every 10 days. If you've been 10 days since its last check and it can't get online, it won't run.