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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."
Well, no, it didn't last, but that was mostly a business/marketing issue. StarForce was, if anything, too successful. Too successful because their stuff did actually work, in that when integrated well, it could be months (as you observe) for a crack to be posted. Well, after 6 months of no crack, most people who want the game will have bought it. You might lose the long tail, but dems da breaks. It will be marketed by the DRM companies as a success.
This didn't go down well with a lot of people who were used to getting games for free, as you might imagine! I guess many of us will remember the anti-StarForce campaign that eventually resulted in Ubisoft withdrawing their usage of it in favour of a less tainted brand. The campaign mostly revolved around the allegation that StarForce could break CD drives or cause other nasty technical problems. It wouldn't entirely surprise me if that were true, because these programs do a lot of very bizarre and nasty tricks in order to find emulated CD drives.
Nonetheless, two facts stick in my mind. One is that the company making StarForce offered significant cash rewards to anybody who could send them a machine that was broken in the way being described. AFAIK nobody ever claimed the prize (instead the claims about what broke started shifting). The other is an interesting post from an UbiSoft employee defending their copy protection on the forums. In it they gave a statistical breakdown of the problems reported to their tech support center. As UbiSoft make some very popular games, they had a sample size big enough to be meaningful here.
They found that something like 0.1% of the problems reported to them were tracable to StarForce, and of that 0.1%, about 20% were people who had in fact attempted to crack the game and then had the balls to ask for tech support when it didn't work. That sounds absurd, but when I worked for a commercial software company, we also saw people trying to get (free!) tech support using pirated copies of the program. The rest were mostly people who mistyped their CD Key, or actually did experience blue screens/crashes etc, but their numbers were low enough to be more or less what you'd expect from a population of Windows machines.
Now it's a complex story, and I don't doubt that some people saw very bad problems with StarForce. But I'll take hard statistics derived from 500,000 samples over anecdotes I read from anti-DRM bloggers any day.