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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.
And, of course, this isn't unprecented (on the DVD side, at least). Something very similar was done with the evil DIVX format in the late 90's
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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!
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!
Steam makes me do this already, just to play Portal, for example. It's nothing new.
What do you play on the road or in the air?
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...
Summary says: "that it phone home every 10 days" (emphasis mine)
TFA says "After the first activation, SecuROM requires that it re-check with the server within ten days (in case the CD Key has become public/warez'd and gets banned)."
Sounds like it only re-checks *once*, not once every ten days, ad infinitum.
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.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I don't play a lot of games, and I don't play any online, but this was going to be the first one in some time that I was planning to buy. But this just lost me. No doubt there will be a crack that will make it work without checking in, but I'd feel like a chump for paying them full price and then having to crack it anyway.
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.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
once the EA server is reverse engineered its just some virtual machine magic from there to make the game work.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
So we pay thousands on a PC, monthly Internet fees, pay $69.99 for a game yet we still aren't trusted enough so we have to prove we are the rightful owners of it every ten days. Thanks but no thanks.
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
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
is competition good, or is duplication of effort bad?
The more this kind of crap happens, the more I hate the software industry. It's MY computer damn it. If I buy software, I should be able to use it the way I want.
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.)
Is this better or worse than requiring a CD in the drive to play?
Does this mean that neither game will require a CD in the drive? If so, having enjoyed many games on the Steam platform, I'd say that yes, a quick internet heartbeat is much better than requiring a disc in the drive. It would be nice to know what data is transmitted, though.
And I was so looking forward to buying a copy of Spore.
It's things like this and the steep hardware upgrade curve, but mostly this, that has turned me off of gaming.
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?
Method of processing duck feet
You know the thing does more than call. It has to receive some kind of "go" signal to play. It may be well done or it may not be and that will be just one more hole for your non free platform. Consoles, like the Xbox, are connected to your wallet.
All of these gadgets are going to have network access. Big publishers dream of them being non free and pay per play. The last ten years of DRM and non free security dissasters prove better than anything else those dreams are impossibly flawed and that people hate it. Free software and free culture are going to overwhelm them.
No calls now, I'm
I might have bought Spore, now I will make sure to get up to date about the copy-protection before doing so (the link in TFA only confirms the "phone home" for Mass Effect).
If TFA is correct about Spore, the publisher just lost a customer.
C - the footgun of programming languages
This linked article says nothing about Spore that I can find. Unless it is buried on page 15. Even if it is there, I'll wait for something official before I get up in arms about it.
What if I don't have an internet connection? What if I'm playing on a laptop in a location without access to the internet? What if the authentication server gets overloaded like what happened when Bioshock was released and there were a bunch of legitimate customers that bought the game that couldn't play for several days? What happens if the authentication server goes down? What happens when I want to play this game 5-10 years from now?
It's been said before but this does nothing to curb piracy. The pirates will crack this. Meanwhile, the customer who purchased a legitimate copy of the game will have their ability to play it be hampered.
We'll make great pets
They either don't get it or don't care. It's not the act of putting a CD in the drive that people hate. I mean, I'm sure that's the case for some, but probably not the majority of Slashdotters.
The part people hate is the assumption that they're not "authorized" to be using the product they just forked over $50 to get. The part people hate is the notion that they need permission to play their game. The part people hate is the feeling that despite shelling out 50 dollars of their hard-earned money, they somehow don't own the game. And the part people REALLY hate is the thought that some company can arbitrarily take away their ability to play whenever they want just by pushing a button.
We don't care what form DRM takes. We care that the DRM is there at all, and we want it gone. Period.
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
Spore, Mass Effect to require cracks for single player gaming.
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.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
It means that I won't be able to play either of these games, since I'm on dial-up, and there's no way I can justify tying up a phone line to play Spore to the rest of my family and anybody that's trying to contact us.
As an option, this still sucks - I can't wait to be in Alterac Valley and have my game suddenly minimize due to their "phone home" program crashing. Or better yet it makes me much happier I picked up an Xbox360 a year or so ago.
If you're following the "PlayForSure" debacle, you'll understand the danger of requiring a specific server to be online in order to access the content you purchased.
What's to keep EA from turning off the authentication server in 5 years when they no longer "Support" the game.
If you want to be able to play your game at any point in the future, this is a horrible thing: Can you guarantee that in 10 years when you break out that "classic" for some retro gaming that the internet authentication server is still going to be there?
I was really looking forward to this game... Now I'm not even going to bother looking at the box. I don't know why they spend so much time on copy protection, all it does is irritate the users who legitimately buy. The people who pirate, are going to pirate regardless.
Is this better or worse than requiring a CD in the drive to play?
Better
Worse
Cracked exe
Replacement server
Cowboy Neal still uses tape drives
The Bible: Historically verifiable fact from an observers point of view
I wonder how much of the customer base this cuts out. Not everyone who could buy this game has broadband, and it seems silly to boot up your 56k modem to play a single player game. And what of those whose computer has no internet access?
Well, there are two games I was planning to buy now on the "don't touch with someone else's money" list. DRM FTL.
The whole point is that you constantly pull down other user created content that is integrated into your playing experience in real-time?
Will Wright himself pretty much told you the game needs to have internet access when he talked about these groovy features everyone has been oohing and ahhing about all along.
This is not news. Not even remotely.
Damn! I don't have an internet connection!!
I guess that means I'm now forced to download a cracked version just to play it....errr...wait...!
Damn!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
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 was looking forward to playing spore and working on mods for Mass Effect. I guess I'll stick with UT3 and forget about these 2 games.
Eventually they aren't going to want to keep spending money to maintain the verification server, so after a few years, you won't be able to play anymore.
I could understand having this type of verification for online based games, but for single player games? For shame, EA, for shame.
I was looking forward to Spore, because it sounds like a game with near-infinite replayability, and those are the main type of games that I play. If I want to break out Sid Meye's Alpha Centauri, I still can, even though it has been 10 years since it was released. With this game, I won't be able to play it at some arbitrary point in time, based on the profitability of keeping the server active.
I, for one, won't be buying either of these games. I might downloaded the cracked versions, though. They are making it easier to steal than it is to buy. Stupid.
A few pages into the forum, the bioware guy confirms that Spore will use the same system :-(
C - the footgun of programming languages
I'm sure it's fine, no company would ever leave customers in the dark.
What happens when the authentication goes offline, as the MSN music service?
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.
95% won't care that they have to use it to verify their legal software is in fact legal.
So, guilt before innocence, you must prove you are not a criminal. It is unamerican and, sorry for the language, bullshit.
People who take this abuse deserve it.
If the publisher wants to prevent piracy (specifically CD keys and other activation codes) why not just modify the initial activation process just a little?
Possible scenerio: You buy the game. You install the game. You go online to register the game. It prompts you for the CD key, and then, after that, a password that you create. The key and the password are stored together on a remote server, and if someone activates a copy of the game without the corresponding password, the activation fails.
I understand that there would be some re-install issues due to system crashes and what not, but I feel a "help us prevent it" approach would be better than a "lets assume you're a thief" vibe the 10-day method gives.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
Let me tell you a story about two software titles, Rosetta Stone and Sins of a Solar Empire.
I initially had no plans to purchuse Sins of a Solar Empire. I installed the game from my friend's discs, and played it. This was possible because SoaSE doesn't phone home or require any activation. This allowed me play the game, and over come the initial disappointment, and eventually purchused the game. And let me tell you, it was great to be treated like an adult.
I bought Rosetta Stone after being wowed by the effectiness of their online demo. I payed arround $250 for the dutch version, and I feel it was well spent money. However, RS requires the CD, and if you use it like do, which is complete a lesson or two every night,it requires the CD to spin up and down a lot. I thought I'd just make an image, count it as my back up, and virtually mount it to solve the spin up/down issue. I was wrong. It took me an entire friday night and 4 different programs to finally create a virtually mountable image.
Now, the same friend who had lent me his Sins discs so I could install the game had also expressed interest in learning dutch with Rosetta Stone. I initally had told them could use the discs when I was done. However, that weekend I gave them the ISO I ripped and the supporting programs. That's right, Copy Protection turned me into a pirate.
I'm currently pushing this image out to bittorrent. Why? Because I was super pissed at the hoops I had to jump through to make the software usable to me.
I figure if EA is going to treat me like a software pirate, I might as well act like a software pirate. Looks like EA just lost atleast one paying customer of Mass Effect.
I don't like crap like this. I consider it to be consumer-hostile. The majority of the game-buying public, however, has internet access up all the time and doesn't even realize this is going on. And they don't care. The higher-level issues of who-controls-what just doesn't matter to them.
So, game manufacturers will continue to get away with crap like this, because they only turn away a small handful of geeks who care.
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.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Another moronic publisher killing their market. People talk about the death of PC gaming. Well, this is it, and the companies killing it are too stupid to see it.
I know there's a lot of Spore love around (heck, I'm excited, too), but the only way to let companies know that this kind of stuff is going too far is by voting with your wallet-- if enough people don't buy the game, or buy it and return it to major retailers saying it's defective because they don't have a home internet connection, then something will change.
If your "shiny new game" lust overwhelms your outrage, then don't bitch about it here. You have a choice whether you play the game, and your money is how businesses judge their actions.
This statement is solely an opinion. Kindly take it as such in all cases.
I suppose they're assuming everyone who would be able to play their game would already have an internet connection running in their house (especially if they plan on buying Spore.) Still, I'm not too keen on buying a game just to have it stop working on me if I, for whatever reason, can't connect to the internet when they say I should.
Ok, well it looks like I *won't* be buying Spore the day it's released. Or at all for that matter. Meanwhile, Stardock will continue to get my money for their excellent DRM-Free RTSX games.
There is a war going on for your mind.
How to not be a slave to DRM, when these games come out:
- Download & install uTorrent
- Search for game at btjunkie.com or mininova.org
- Click torrent, play game, laugh at fools who paid and can't play because their internet connection is down.
as long as it's crackable i don't worry much. i buy games and then dl a crack for them for many years now. even if i would only play 2 games at a time, it would be very annoying to switch the dvd in my drive. atm i am playing 6 games... i mean, man, i am not a disc-jockey or smt.
but i guess the day will come (soon) when games just don't check the protection online like they would do with the dvd, but download small required gamecontent right while playing the game, like maybe the positions of items and enemies in a level.
So when is the Ray Muzyka or some other officer at Bioware going to make some ridiculous claim that it's DRM can't be hacked?
Second only to StarForce in fucking up systems with driver-level malware. I have no problems with DRM that doesn't get in my face or worm into my system; I buy a new game on steam roughly once a month on a whim. But for Spore, I'll be grabbing a crack post-haste.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
What if DRM is just the excuse for the call home feature and what they really want is marketing data about how long the software installed and where? They could, possibly, transmit other data as well. If they encrypt transmission then you can't tell what information they are sending. If they don't encrypt then a third party can intercept the information and use it for their marketing.
The pirated exe will skyrocket in downloads because nobody wants the DRM, and they will blame piracy as to why their game doesn't sell . . .
I don't buy or play a lot of games... I choose carefully the ones I do want to spend time playing. Spore was definitely one of them, and Mass Effect had a good chance.
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.
Since you can only play the game at their whim, what is it that you have actually purchased?
This is more a case of paying something for nothing.
Its simple really, it just means I won't be buying those games. The company putting them out loses out on my £50 and I keep on playing Warcraft and just play Mass Effect on my housemates 360.
EA just gobbled up Bioware. This is the first PC title that is published by EA+Bio.
I still prefer a single phone home than continually scratching the DVD, but i will surely apply a no-cd crack if they want me online all the time. I already planned to make the Windows part of my machine offline, it is bad enough updates want me to be online.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
What I find interesting about the increasingly restrictive and inconvenient DRM is the fact that you still can't return those products to any store at which you purchased it. They are basically admitting that people will continue to pirate undeterred, and the "copy protection" servers no real purpose other than to alienate and annoy their customers.
You say sharing "pirated" coppies. I fear rogue servers emptying wallets. Non free games, music and movies are not worth that kind of risk.
No calls now, I'm
Quote: At least I hope the *this game requires internet activation to install* to install will be clearly marked on the box and in bigger letter than on Bioshock's box.
Yes, we have been told that there will be clear labeling on the package.
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.
edit-typos _________________
DISCLAIMER: The above statement was made with the currently available information. Its true right now (check the time stamp on the post) but may not be in the future. Relax. Chill. Enjoy life. Thanks!
Edited By Derek French on 05/03/08 18:47 Please don't type "TFA says" when you only read the first page. It makes you look like a twit.
They will implement some sort of an encrypted challenge-response system that you can't just tap into with tcpdump or ethereal and then echo later.
Now, if you can hack the console and "patch" the running code, you're free again.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I have been excited for two years about this game. I'm not one who pirates games and I'll usually have an internet connection, but the fact that this would be required bugs me too much.
What happens if I take my laptop on vacation with me and I just happen to run out of time.
And thats why I will not buy this game now.
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.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Seriously, stop playing legal and cracked versions of the game. If people won't play a game because of this stuff, it won't happen.
Stop being sheep and put principles ahead of self gratification. The world would be a better place all around.
Sheesh
Why bother with DRM'd stuff in the first place?
Signing etc.
This is the one DRM system where they don't have to give you the key with the lock.
Deleted
I'll wait to hear if it's any good then get the cracked copy that doesn't call home. Never did get Half Life until it came out on the XBox because of similar issues.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
"they'd be forced, by lack of licensing revenue, to stop making consoles all together."
Maybe they need a different approach to the problem. Just because they want to do things in a particular brain-dead, unethical, probably illegal, fashion doesn't mean that everyone else has to acconodate them.
I bet it would be entirely possible for them to come up with a sales model that is ethical and legal and still allows them to make money.
That question on the summary is easy to answer just from a technical point of view: let's look at dependencies:
using a CD:
requires CD (which was used to install the game) and a CD drive (same as before) . possible issue if you have a hardware failure or deliberately don't have a drive in the PC anymore (external drive for example)
using "phone home":
depends on your network routing the right traffic out
depends on your ISP routing the right traffic out
depends on the game company's network routing the right traffic in, which depends on the said company keeping their network up, which depends on the company staying in existance and financially sound which depends on the market for thier stuff and on their managment being good enough and on their employess being good enough, etc. etc.
any of those fail, no game. So, yeah, easy answer. CD wins over phoning home.
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
You just reminded me to cancel my netflix membership! I knew slashdot was good for something ;)
...and inclined to send off some useless email complaints that no one at the company will care about. Does anyone have email addresses for corporate officers of Bioware and EA? I tried JRiccitiello@ea.com for kicks, but I doubt it is any good.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Double or nothing?
... pirated copies of the aforementioned software.
I guess that, as the public in general becomes more educated about the dangers and drawbacks of this (or any) kind of DRM, they will resort to piracy more and more.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
So what if the purchaser does not have Internet? I think that argument comes into play more often than one thinks.
Also, if I'm diagnosed with Internet addiction, does this mean I can sue Bioware for forcing me to fuel my addiction just to play a game?
Now I know people on Slashdot will be on rant alert over this but lets assume that the idea of this is to reduce piracy, personally this is much easier for me. The number of times I want to play a game offline for 10 days is pretty low... in fact I can't remember when I've wanted to play a game and not been online within 24 hours either way. What I do hate however is that I can rip my DVDs and songs and have them working on my laptop but with the games I have to bring a bunch of CDs.
If this means I can play all of the games on my laptop without having to carry the CDs then I'm happy with it.
Seriously this is Slashdot, what is the issue on requiring an Internet connection? Slashdot is a site where people will boldly post that internet access is a basic human right, while healthcare is a private concern.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I have other things I can spend money on, so this'll take a back seat. It disappoints me that I won't be able to play with Spore, but not so much that I'm willing to let them know how much I play it, when, what time of day, what my shopping habits are, and how best to advertise to me.
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.
It ensures I won't buy the game but will instead download a cracked copy.
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.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Not to mention the likelihood of multiple formats of DRM. If this gets big, it's gonna be a hell of a lot more complicated than an HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray scenario.
One of the big things that Spore does actually needs internet access. Now, I agree that you should not need to be connected to the internet to have the game function (well, once it's populated anyway). But, spore populates it's world with creatures and civilizations that other players have made. Without internet access the replay value of the game drops dramatically.
GENERATION 667: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation
Treat me like a criminal, force crappy and crackable/piratable DRM and protection schemes on me, frack off. I was definately looking forward to this game and I buy a dozen or more a year, at least, for PC alone... but Spore is off my list now. I already avoid some other titles/types of copy protections... which means I have not bought a few big release titles I really wanted to play.
My biggest concern isn't anything specific (though this could easily lead to unplayable games when the company goes under, and is frankly just a pain for real customers and probably quite easy to circumvent for the rest). Generally, content producers are beginning to feel like it is their right to control their content at all times, from product birth to death. They want total control, and in the digital world, the consumer generally doesn't own anything. If you check the TOS and EULA, you'll find that all your software is really a service. Pay $500 for Windows Vista? No you didn't, you paid $500 to *subscribe* to Windows Vista, and they'll cancel you any time they want.
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.
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
meh. i like not having to play ring around the dvd player depending on which game i want to play at any one moment. and i'm always online anyway so whats wrong with them pinging the server? heck if you want to play with out the disk with company of heroes it has to log in every time you load the game and i'm fine with that as well.
There are two games that I will NOT be playing. No one has the right to force me to open my firewall for a single person game. No one has the right to pass data from my PC. What this means to them? Less income.
Oh, EA, when won't you use the slippery slope as a water slide?
This will be even easier to hack around than kludgey DRM garbage like Starforce (or whatever) is. That's not to mention the fact that I still like to play games that are 10+ years old. Will they still be maintaining the verification servers for Spore and Mass Effect in ten years? I sure as hell doubt it. Bad. Fucking. Idea. On so many levels.
From the article:
I don't see a suggestion that it dials home every 10 days, just within 10 days of initial activation to check that the activation key isn't compromised. Am I missing something?
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Is this better or worse than requiring a CD in the drive to play?
Oh, you'll still have to do that, too. What, you thought because they had ONE annoying thing they'd stop the old annoying thing?
Anyway, with Spore's "Massively Singleplayer" stuff, who *isn't* going to have it online when you play it?
Why should the law limit HOW someone manufactures a properly working product?
While I understand your frustration with EA's actions, I find the idea of the people or a government telling someone what to make and how to make it reprehensible to the extreme.
You don't like it, don't buy it.
So what do I do if they shut down their authentication servers for whatever reason? I mean they could go out of business or be bought out or I might be trying to play the game 10 years from now for nostalgia.
This is an damned stupid idea! The backlash against 2k for the Bioshock online activation should have given Bio a clue. I understand that they need to protect sales against rampant piracy in the early stages particularly when most sales revenue is accrued. But to ask the infamous question; what happens if Bioware is hit by the proverbial meteorite? Bio may not care because post Bioware is post Bioware, but it may surprise them to hear that their fans do not like playing russian-roulette with software they feel they have acquired a right to play. 2k eventually realised this and promised that at a certain point they would release a patch that removed the Online Activation. They would do this once the game had accrued the majority of its sales in the post release hype period. Fair enough, I was willing to take my chances that 2k would not get hit by the proverbial meteorite in the first year post release, and I too wanted to see a great developer reap the just rewards of a superb game, so i bought a copy. Bioware/EA have managed to take this one stage further into the realm of utter distaste by mandating a 10 day re-activation, are these guys completely stupid? Understand. These. Words: I. Do. Not. Like. Being. Beholden. To. An. Internet. Connection! Particularly. Not. For. A. Single. Player. Game! It is understandable in a MMORPG, after all you cannot play, period, without an internet connection, but it is utterly distasteful in a single player game. Now, here is the real question: Are Bio going to bow to common-sense and promise their fans that they will remove all online activation after the peak sales-period, i.e the first year? Or are they going to alienate their hardcore fans, many like myself who have been Bio fans since BG1, by using in perpetuity an utterly repugnant copy protection system? Kind regards A registered Bioware Forum fan since 18th Oct 2001
assuming i have a laptop that can support these games, how do we play them on an airplane? Will EA pay for my web/wi-fi access fees while traveling in order to authenticate?
For users it certainly is not - continual expenses for connectivity vs. one-time price for somehow obtaining right CD.
On the other hand, also ISPs/telcos should be quite happy with that. Especially if the "phoning home" needs to transfer quite a lot of data. :)
hany
ill buy spore, and then acquire a crack to get rid of your stupid phone-home sh@t. one would think that after all the reaction to the crap sony pulled, the industry should have had gained some sense of what consumers think. but apparently no, there are total idiots lingering in the industry still.
Read radical news here
They really do know how to make one feel good about downloading their game instead of paying for it, don't they?
Shame, heard it was a good game.
... you have a problem.
I was really looking forward to playing Spore too. Oh well.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
Looks like another EA product that I WONT BE BUYING.
So that's now Bioshock, Mass Effect and Spore. I wonder how many more will get added onto that list in the future.
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.
Realistically, how many people play games without having an internet connection? I usually play games on my desktop, which is physically plugged into my router all the time. Even when I'm using my notebook I am almost always within reach of wi-fi, because I need email and web access. The game needs to phone home three times a month, so there's an extremely good chance that it won't need to check while I'm gaming in the middle of a field or on a bus.
Of course, I don't understand why the software needs to phone home after the installation has been verified. I suppose they're worried about people porting an image of an authorized copy, but that could be handled by checking for significant hardware changes on startup before phoning home. The only thing I can see their DRM system preventing is widespread piracy of copies with identical authorization keys, and even that is dubious. If I have a legitimate copy that has been pirated by my roommate, I still possess a legitimate license.Ten years is WAY too optimistic... Try August.
Nothing wireshark to sniff it and then writing a tiny daemon to listen for the outgoing server call and responding with a successful response can't fix. Even easier than modifying the executable to bypass the check for the CD.
And no, I didn't RTFA so not sure if they mentioned passing encrypted keys or what not, but still, not going to be the end of the world. Probably be more fun making it work than actually playing the game anyway.
That's a lot like finding some of these things now.
Find a Divx disc with a movie on it? You're out of luck even if you have a player.
There's also MovieCD, 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 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?
After reading this I will now NOT purchasing this game, which before today, I was excited to buy.
The reason is simple. Authorization makes some sense where you are providing a service, so for instance version management. It even makes some sense in a optional voluntary situation (where you want automatic patches).
However to make it mandatory for a single player game? Thats BS. I am sure someone will find a hack around this about a week after release, in which case perhaps I might download that. What happens when the discontinue they DRM service? Your game doesn't work. So not only are they supposedly preventing piracy (I see this really only making it worse, see above), but they are also puting conditions on how long you use their product.
Mass Effect 2 coming out? Well maybe we won't let you play the first one anymore. Its one thing to stop supporting software so that it slowly becomes obsolete and unplayable (usually an OS problem). It is another thing entirely to disable someone else's software that they bought. Heck there are tons of folks out there that make hacks and patches to keep old games running on new machines.
I still enjoy Masters Of Orion 2 on my Vista machine. Just think if your old favorite games had this type of DRM, brutal. Not to mention if you are anyplace for a prolonged period of time that has little or no internet access. Sorry no gaming for you.
Anyway I will be voting with my currency and saying NO to Mass Effect now.
Not to mention the fact that just in the past year or so people have gotten shafted by companies selling DRM videos online, then just up and stopping their DRM server for whatever reason. People that spend hundreds of dollars on videos now cannot watch any of them. Why would anyone pay into a system like that again. I know I would not.
I can see DRM methods like this absolutely sucking for dial-up users. Having to authenticate the game once every 10 days or so doesn't seem too bad (except for the fact that DRM is DRM no matter what way you look at it), but I shudder at the thought of having to connect - any maybe even stay online while I play, holding down my phone line - every time I want to play the game.
(And don't say, "get highspeed" - there are many places, especially in rural Canada, where it's impossible to get anything close to decent highspeed for a decent price, even if the equipment to use it is readily available.)
--- Mr. DOS
2) Read all 6 faces of the packaging carefully. Does it say an internet connection is required, and does it clarify its intent with said internet connection?
3) If the packaging does not clearly delineate the internet connection as described in the parent article, purchase it.
4) Open the packaging, break all the plastic wrappers and such. Make it look like you tried.
5) Return it in less than 24 hours and tell the clerk you do not have internet access, and therefore the game is unusable.
If enough people do this, then the retailers *might* get the clue, and it *might* get back to the retailers, and they *might* reconsider a poor technique such as this.
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
So how will my game be able to be played?
I was actually planning to buy Spore (first game I'd have bought in a long time -- all I play is WoW, and no, I don't pirate games), and possibly Mass Effect too, but now... forget it. You just lost definitely one, and almost definitely two sales, EA. Yeah, I know that's a drop in the bucket, but that's the most one person can do.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
But if I have to be treated like one in order to play games, why not become one?
Seriously, I have never pirated a game or used hacks/warez to play a game. Never. I also refuse to keep upgrading consoles to play games (a video card is different since I can use it for more then gaming).
But, to be honest, the thought of using pirated versions is becoming more and more tempting.
Is that what you wanted, Bioware? Is it? YOU are pushing me towards it. Either that or simply not purchase your title.
On a side note, do you really think I am so fucking lazy that I cannot be bothered to put a disc in my drive? That is why I bought a PC with a drive in it.
Didn't play BioShock, won't play these either.
Every 5 to 10 days; "Yeah you're still not a pirate. Go ahead and play. But we're watching you. You should kiss our ass a little more, do you realize how lucky and privledged you are to play this game?"
Somehow computer game companies have survived since the 1980's without this sort of copy protection. We don't need it now.
1. The three activation limit could take care of any public/warez keys. The only logical reason to phone home is to stick it to the jerk that made the key public and ensure that he can't play either.
2. They seem to be asking for sneakernet piracy among friends. The game does not require a DVD check, so I could give it to two of my friends, who could play forever for free.
I've got some questions to the Bioware staff about this on their community forums, but no one has responded yet. I must be missing something, otherwise it feels like no one has thought this through.
As I understand it, SecuROM makes you unable to delete 16 bit executables on your hard drive. Further, I'm guessing the call-in is some kind of hidden service on your computer. ...
And this is why we can't have nice things. This is why PC games are dying. I was going to buy Spore. Now, I can't. I can't buy the demo, I can't buy any of it. Because I am not putting an infection vector or rootkit on my system.
You can't take the sky from me...
Chess
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.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I thought part of Spore was that, yes it's a single-player game, but other player's created creatures eventually become part of the universe that you play in. How is that content going to get on your computer without an internet connection? Also, how does Spore pay for the server that sends you that content if you use a pirated version?
This seems like alot of grousing over something that is a necessary part of the game.
I see this as a large statement on the Game industry as a whole. Good games being released with reduced content just because there is a push to get it out the door (KOTOR II) and other games like Mass Effect and Spore that have to require an Internet Connection. I recently considered purchasing Bioshock and before that Half Life until I found out that these games came with a malware backdoor to my system that reduced the quality of gameplay on the system for other games I had. I am considering purchasing a separate gaming system just to play these games with these malware attachments, but until then I am happy playing the older games that I have PURCHASED. All these systems do is to alienate the consumers willing to purchase the product. Does nothing at all to the supposed group being targeted as the 'cracker' will always break these schemes and play the games free anyway.
I have found that in the last 2-3 years there is a wealth of shareware single person titles that rival these commercial companies and I would rather support these shareware titles then install known malware on my system regardless if it is the latest FAD (Bioshock is probably heading for game of year so exagerating a little by calling it a fad). Once consumer demand stops being led by the nose and these companies realize that the money they could be making is going to these independant game manufacturers they will either 1) get laws passed making them the new 'enemy of capitalism' or realize that may treating their customer as a criminal is not the way to make the money.
Someone mentioned that is this different then having a cd requirement. Yes. I personally care less about that requirement. I purchased the game and have the CD. Entering in a 'registration code' acquired in an offline manner is acceptable but my game systems do not have the latest security patches on them as I gear them toward playing the games at optimum and actually only buy new game systems once every 7 years and usually don't have issues with not being able to play the latest titles due to the optimizations steps used. I will NEVER connect these systems to the Internet just to play a game.
But then again I am weird and still love to play nethack which I started playing in 1989 and still play occasionally to this day.
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
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
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".
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Well, that's two games I won't be purchasing. Ever.
Funny thing is it will probably take a week for hackers to work around this. Then the illegal copied version will be not only cheaper, but a superior product.
I already detest DVDs for the same reasons:
The alternative to a DVD is to download a DVD rip DRM unencumbered, no FBI warning, no forced previews - hell, no previews. No user prohibited actions. I could store it easily on any media I choose - such as carry it to a friend's house on a thumb drive. I could fast forward and rewind more easily than a DVD. I could store it on a big fat network drive with thousands of others. I could stream it anywhere I have the bandwidth to watch it. It's easily transferred from media to media - as fast as you can copy files.
Tell me again why I should buy DRM encumbered games? They're decent products that are subsequently and deliberately made inferior in the eyes of many people.
They couldn't compete even if they were free.
Question everything
I really hope this doesn't turn into another Steam-esq system for Spore. What a nightmare. Everytime my little brother calls me for a quick game of TF2, I start it up, and without fail it takes 5 minutes for Steam to load, and then, even if I have updates turned off, it still starts updating the game AND the steam platform. 40 minutes later, still can't play yet. So much for a quick game.
Though, I believe Spore will have to phone home to get new species to populate your world with and to send your creations out to other players right?
But, the sad thing is many people don't have 'net access at all, or maybe I want to play "on the go" with my laptop? So the fact that it's getting harder to find games that don't require 'net access, is one of my number one problems with the current direction of the gaming industry.
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..
which is totally what she said
I wrote this in Evil Avatar's thread:
1, not everybody has internet
2, there WILL be times when you want to play and you have no internet connection(like vacation)
3. What happens when EA shuts down the server for any reason? Say, EA goes bankrupt, now your game is completely useless.
4. More people are going to pirate the game now, hell the pirated version will probably be better.
5. People like ME who have had the game prordered for TWO FREAKING YEARS, are now going to get a refund for the game.
6. Hope nobody has any plans to upgrade, reinstall your OS after you install this or it will stop working thanks to the limited activations.
7. Its ads ANOTHER black eye to EA(EVIL ALWAYS), they just seem determined to piss on the customer fan base every chance they can.
I also want to emphasize the part that people are skipping over, besides the 10 day check you ALSO have only three activations you can use. So, if you install it more than three times, or upgrade/wipe your computer more than that the game WILL STOP WORKING.
Yeah, right. If it's not explicitly specified in the EULA, it's worthless. And even if it is in the EULA, it's still worthless!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Rem SPORE.BAT
@ECHO OFF
DATE (DATE-10)
SPORE.EXE
DATE (DATE+10)
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
1. Relies on company to stay in business and servers to stay online. This happened before with phoning software - and those are long gone.
2. relies on reliable internet connection
3. potential for hack/hijack if protocol weak. This is unknown because closed source.
4. relies that servers are secure.... (see previous).
Points 3 and 4 are rarely issues, but still should be mentioned.
The next step is this: when you want to listen to your over priced cds your stereo will have to check every song for authenticity with the RIAA, so if your stereo isn't tcp-ip enabled and connected to the net, it's going to be a very quiet romantic evening with your significant other.
Privacy is terrorism.
From the get-go it was said spore would automatically download content for use the in game world. It was porported to be a psuedo mmo. Adding some verification to an mmo is nothing new, and nothing substantial if you are downloading constantly from their servers. WOW is much more intrusive.
Because he's telling the truth. NWN was particularly problematic and indeed if they determined you were having legit problems, they'd send you a version with no SecureROM. They kept tweaking it with various patches, and eventually gave up and just patched it out.
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 from GCW fixed that.
You'll also notice that many trainers/cheat programs tell you that you need to get a no-cd patch. The reason is that the copyprotection these days gets real paranoid and if something tries to debug the program (which is how many trainers work) it'll halt execution. So just patch the protection out and the trainer works fine.
They lose me as a paying customer. I'll still play the game but now I don't have to pay at all. Brilliant move. Corporate foot meet consumer bullet.
I was in error: The check-in is part of the executable, and it is _in the first ten days_, not _every ten days_ as I have heard the rumor.
There is a fundamental flaw in any business plan that requires a vendor to believe its customers are thieves.
I like playing old games. Within the last month, I've found my old versions of Sid Meier's Pirates and Tribes 2 kicking around. I've not played them for years, both fantastic games. However, the chance of me finding the CDs for them after a couple of house moves and a few years is close to zero. It was in fact esier to find NoCD patches for them. In that respect, not requiring the CD would be a bonus. And with the ubiquity of internet access, it's not a problem.
;)
The problem does potentially arise when a phone-home gets made redundant - case in point the DRM on microsoft's "Plays4Sure", which now means people will have a bunch of media they can't play anymore. A system would have to be in place, with guarantees of longevity, so that I can play Tribes 2 for many years to come, without having to find the damn CD
A phone-home is not a breach of your rights, no need to get so uppity about it. Aside from the whole "well if you don't like it don't play it" response, perhaps those foaming at the mouth about it need consider whether their response is of the same magnitude as the problem.
I get single player games for my laptop. Especially when I'm away from internet connections. Like I can be for up to 3 months at a time. The games keep me sane. Guess 'Mass Effect' and 'Spore' are off my 'Must Buy' list until someone creates an anti-mothership (drm-no-call-home) patch.
Dumb Restrictive Marketing sucks...
you download the crack and continue playing.
In fact it's the first thing I do when buying any game, wait for the cracks and NOCD patches to hit gamecopyworld and then go buy it.
you have to violate the EULA to play the games sanely anymore.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I've been eagerly anticipating Spore for quite a while now. If this report turns out to be true, though, and the game requires this kind of frequent check just to allow me to play it, then I have no problem not playing it. I only buy games, I don't pirate them. And I only support companies that treat me like a paying customer when I am a paying customer. It's rather insulting that EA would assume by default that I am a thief and then treat me like one.
Just wait for even more users get off dial up when get to 99% of the us being able to get high speed internet then you will likely see a lot of more of this.
Step 1
Connect game, run some packet sniffer and grab the packets sent to the server, find out what is transferred
Step 2
Edit hosts file
DRMserver.com localhost
Step 3
Enjoy your game never having to phone home.
This is what happened with games like Somavision, and the like.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Your only recourse to prevent even more of this in the future is to refuse to buy this game at all as long as these usage restrictions remain. Buy it under these conditions and you're only screwing over yourselves on every future game which will also incorporate the same, or worse, restrictions!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
They'll simply strip the checks from the executable. There's no need to emulate the server, just modify the game so it doesn't ask. This is made easier with commercial protections because since they are 3rd party stuff being added to your program, it is easier to track down what parts are them and what parts aren't.
That's how a lot of it is done already. Though you do see cracks that emulate the disc or use a VM to fake out the protection, most don't bother and simply remove it and leave the executable minus the crap.
The smart choice is: Don't buy the game.
Just because stealing is easy doesn't mean it is the moral choice.
I did not buy Bioshock, nor will I be buying any of other products with invasive copy protection. I won't be stealing their product, either. I'll live a quite happy life without supporting EA's bad choices, nor will I lower myself to piracy out of personal greed.
All about me
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's happened before.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
But you still need to be online for the updates/upgrades. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Don't play PC games. Save your time and money and get some fresh air. Let's see how the publishers like THAT model.
The only thing PC copy protection seems to do is to stop legitimate users from playing the game. Whatever copy protection method Spore uses, it will be cracked - before the game is on store shelves, most likely. The only people who will be hindered at all are the ones who paid for it legitimately.
I bought Overlord and had it not work due to copy protection. A quick visit to gamecopyworld.com and oh look it works now.
I'm done buying games with annoying copy protection. Now, I read what people say about the game's copy protection, and if it's a problem at all, I wait until the game company removes it or the game ends up on Steam. Steam usually removes other copy protection in favor of the Steam protection, which is much nicer and as another person said only requires an initial validation.
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
Our library system has more kids movies than NetFlix (if you count VHS and DVDs) Between that and over the air broadcast using a lifetime subscription Tivo, we get as much video content as we can consume, for free.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
If record players still exist now, VHS players will still exist a decade from now.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
EA patch so we could play.
EA's track record for patches.
MOHAA release Jan 2002 rv. 1.11
Patch released to fix a few bugs.
Expoits found to crash servers. Ranging from model manipulation (default game install no outside software needed) to outside crashes
Fix promised never released.
2005 MOHAA community released server crash fixes for model flaws
No fix released for other crashes, also player spoofing vuln discovered allowing 1 player to take up every empty slot on a server DOS'ing it. No patch ever released.
As of today almost all MOH series contain the same flaws as the original.
The only time EA cares about the consumer is that initial lure to P.O.S (read Point of Sale) after that caveat emptor
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
ahahahah, EA sais "please shoot me in the leg!!!" Here they go, the idiots, once again promoting game enhanchments by craks.
I had a experience back in time with a purchased game that refused to play on my system because of a DVD-Rom driver. I quickly learnt that a pirated copy will often work better than a original (and that it comes cheaper). Now It sounds like this experience is going to be experienced by thousands of honest costumers of EA.
No, I don't think so. I'm not going to disable the firewall, nor am I going to punch holes in it for every misbegotten piece of software that wants to open a network connection for some non-essential purpose.
For those who don't secure their network - they'll have another non-essential port open and listening for a message from some authorization server somewhere. Systems running these games will be easy to detect and if the developers did their usual "adequate" job there'll be exploits available to take advantage of the flaws.
If nothing else, you can expect some griefer to send "unauthorized" messages to shut down your copy of the game.
So here's what I've decided to do: I'm not going to buy their games. Their price is just too high...
That's why I pirated Bioshock to play and bought a boxed copy to have on my shelf. It's a great game and the team deserves that I buy a copy, but I also don't want to have to install even more DRM crap on my machine.
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat." Lily Tomlin
Just imagine when EVERYTHING is networked... Imagine the message scrolling on the networked 'fridge door when you get home from work... "We're sorry, but your software was unable to be authenticated. Tempererature reset to 23C at 9:21AM..." I fear for the future...
Wonder how well that works over dial-up?
Not if the answer server needs a message signed by EA. Look up public key cryptography.
My wedding video was severely decayed due to a bad tape, 5 years after my wedding. No worries there.
Is this better or worse than requiring a CD in the drive to play?
They should bring back dongles, but in a more useful form.
Get a USB thumb drive maker to create a line with an extra feature to imprint a serial number. Sell the software on the thumb drive instead of disks, keyed to the ID on the thumb drive. Run directly from the thumb drive, without requiring any installation.
Well, sounds like Steam. I love Steam. If that protection means no CD in the drive (and, possibly, buying through the Internet), then I'm all for it.
So what if it can't be played off-line? It can't be played without a computer either, so get in line and get on line.
(8-DCS)
And then another little rant: DRM = Digital Rights Management.
1. Don't I have digital rights?
2. Who is managing/protecting my digital rights?
3. Who's digital rights trump who's? Customer comes first or not?
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Worse, the only ones hurt by them "going out of business" will be the honest customers. The cheaters who hacked it or tricked it will continue their merry playing.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Wikipedia entry for "Windows", year 2018. "Microsoft Windows was the name of several families of software operating systems by Microsoft. Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS. Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal computer market with 90% by 2004[1]. The last client version of Windows is Windows 8 which was based on the much derided "Vista" version released in 2007. The last adopted version of the software was Windows XP, service pack 7. Without the support of its windows product line, Microsoft soon ...."
Me and my father have probably together bought over 500 games since the days of the Commodore 64. Even back then, the pirates were better off:
A store bought a game took up a whole tape and was slow to load. If pirated, you could fit dozens of games on a single tape and they all had fast, home brewed "turbo" loaders.
The only difference today, is that the corporations have gotten greedier.
Granted the investments may be bigger, but then again, the budget title and indie scene is thriving so well that that it's broken into the mainstream (with Microsoft and Nintendo offering indie titles for purchase online, and even then there's cell phones and the iPhone with their breed of titles).
So I wonder, if we legitimate users get fed up of being treated like thieves by the companies, will the situation only get worse if we stop paying them?
With the amount of money the industry (despite piracy) have generated since the 80s, the corporations have gotten so big and powerful, that they have the power to put the blame where they want, and DRM and the DMCA proves that they can essentially lobby consumers into a situation that I would like to call being a slave to capitalism.
This highlights a feature of nearly all copy protection schemes -- your legitimate users wind up with a less desirable product than do pirates. The pirates will defeat the DRM and play without it. Only people who bought the product will suffer.
/end rant
Go EA! Be the next RIAA. Your customers are serfs and you are their lord. Make them feel your awesome power!
Collector's Edition
Well, I am past the stage of being angered by such evilness. Let them go ahead, it will only make more people aware of the totalitarian tsunami we are experiencing since 911. And hopefully some of them will realize that this machine has to be stopped. Drop out of the system before the system eats you. So, can't wait to play Spore :))
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
I can see whole floors of college dorm rooms sharing pirated copies and having the answering server set up in the nerd's room.
;)
Well, it's easier than that, because -
Wait. Back up a sec. Did you really use the term "nerd?" Really? In a year after 1998, and in any forum outside a playground, let alone Slashdot? Hmm.
Amazon may have a book recommendation for you.
Aaaanyway - in the scheme you propose, you have to (1) allocate a machine to serve as the Jolly-Roger Activation Server, and (2) hack all of the other apps to redirect their activation requests to the avast-matey machine. Why bother with that mess? Just hack each app to get rid of the activation check. Hell, you might be able to hack the app once, deploy it on a fast network, and have everyone just use that...
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
I'm pretty over it. I have the money. I have an internet connection. It'd be nice if there was a way to authorize it over the phone if you didn't have access to the internet, but oh well.
I think its much worse, what happens when they don't see the business case in running the servers (like MSN music did recently)?. If I take care of my CD I can still play the game in a few years.
Visit http://www.crunzh.com/ for free software. Mac/Lin/Win
It's not about your "digital" rights or any kind of rights. You do not have any, anyway. It's about their rights. You are just a sheep.
They call this 'bitrot' iirc.
In that case, do we need a DRM service run by a trusted third party, like a bank?
Suppose that all DRM worked in a single standardised way, and the online activation services were independent of both the publisher and content creator. In that scenario, the chances of you losing access to your content are similar to the chances of you losing access to the money in your bank account. There would be no "Microsoft has decided not to support MSN Music any more, so you are shit out of luck" or "You can only install this game on three computers". If they licensed the content to you in the first place, you'd always be able to use it, reactivate it, and shift it around. Equally there would be no "You must buy all your music from Apple" or "This video can't be played on Linux", because the system would be standard and therefore interoperable.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Of course they wouldn't actually do that. They would have to produce a patch for every game they released with this form of DRM, after a few years this is going to be too expensive for a company that's going out of business (And it would be really hard to justify the cost, releasing the old games from DRM is not going to produce any more money for the failing company)
How many days (hours?) until a clever person with free time ("free time"??) plays around with Wireshark and learns what he needs to whip up a little Perl script to spoof the "home" in the equation. A little entry in the hosts file to redirect it to localhost where the script says "all is well, check back in 10 days".
I hope it doesn't use the system clock, because you could just freeze/rewind it. I would totally LOL if that works.
-- There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, And those who don't.
Never trust any rights given to you in an agreement that can be unilaterally changed by the other party.
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
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
We are sorry, but Big Name Sports 2k12 validation service has been discontinued. Please upgrade to Big Name Sports 2k13!
Dungeon Tactics : Free Open Source SRPG
I refuse to buy any games or other types of media in general that do this type of stuff. If more people would just not buy the damn stuff, even if they really want to. It would send a message to the producers and their parent companies that this sort of thing is not tolerated. Sadly, not enough people do that and the makers of these games and movies get a message entirely different. That treating your paying customers like criminals is acceptable.
It's even simpler than that.
All a crack really has to do is comment out the function call that initiates the check. A 2-character edit, right?
Absolutely, I buy all of my games yet nearly every one of them gets its protection removed one way or another since I hate switching discs around when I want to change games, and also hate the risk of an accidental scratch every time I have to take one out. The routine is something like this: Get home with game, begin installation, look for official patches while waiting and start downloading those... Then while the game is patching, I attempt to create a working disc image to mount with Daemon Tools/YASU, and if that doesn't work then I go looking for a crack for the patched game. I prefer disc images to cracks since you never have to worry about getting an updated crack when there's another official patch for the game. Although full disc images take up a lot of space, HDD space is dirt cheap these days. I've got around 75 games installed at the moment and only three of them still require the disc.
I'm sure a lot of people will refuse to buy Spore and Mass Effect because of this.
I suggest that people here buy about $20 worth of EA stock. Write letters to EA mentioning that you're a shareholder and express concern that the DRM will result in less sales. When the sales figures come out, claim the DRM has resulted in the sales not being higher than they could be, and file a shareholder suit against EA, requesting that the judge require EA to strip out the DRM.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Hmm, you know i downloaded bioshock to try it out, fully planning on buying it if it was worth it (the thousands of dollars i've spent on games alone will bare that out) but it was an "ok" game, so i was waiting for it to hit bargain bins to fulfill my obligation.. but now i'm not so sure..
It's funny because for me the game just worked, i downloaded it, installed it, played it, etc.. but it seems people who bought it had a lot harder time than me... go figure.
Hence the reason for introducing this "service".
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. That is brilliant! The companies selling these won't go out of business, they will have a guaranteed revenue stream from all those DVDs out there.
I wonder if they have patented this idea yet? Need to check and file one right away if they haven't.
I'm not sure how many people actually believe that though.
I do... hahaha I really think that a company going out of business will consider supporting a product in a way that'll neither earn much extra revenue nor drastically increase the value of any assets.
No way I'm supporting them if they are putting this restrictive crap on there. Sorry EA.
How many of you pay upkeep costs to maintain (an internet connection | a vehicle)?
When I use my (internet connection | vehicle) to acquire something I want which is necessarily only accessible using such a connection, like (email | groceries), fine.
If I am required to (drive to the store | use my 'net connection) every ten days to re-activate my (food processor | offline, single-player game) - an item with no intrinsic need for (extracurricular driving | an internet connection) - I think the costs should be billable to the manufacturer.
Sure, you can put a label on the (appliance | game) that says "(reliable means of transportation | internet connection) required", but it's required because you want to require it for your benefit, not because it is an intrinsic requirement for (items which process food | offline single-player games).
I'm not interested in using my resources to cover the expenses incurred by requirements which exist solely for your benefit. Your bill for this 10-day-span's (driving | connection), and associated costs such as printing and postage, will be arriving shortly.
That works only if there is a predictable "conversation" between client and server. If the client sends an encrypted key that changes each time, to which the server responds uniquely, you won't be able to simply replay the packet stream or design your own server. Not to say that this can't be done, but it will be a much more challenging proposition.
However, when EA shuts down it's servers, you'll be out of luck without a no-Internet hack. (There will likely be a no-Internet hack for older, popular games though.)
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
No, this is a job for the government. If anyone has the power to defeat copy protected games, it's them. Vote Fairlight in 2008!
My Sig: SEGV
Government bailouts.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
For the record, I'm with you. One of my favorite C64 games was "Strike Fleet"
From what I remember the CD check for Tribes2 was removed in one of the later patches. But your point is still valid. CD checks were always pointless and only served to inconvenience the paying customer while pirates got a superior product.
I don't consider phoning home as a breach of my rights. I do consider it an inconvenience that outweighs my desire to play the game. I will not pay good money for a product that is designed to prevent me from using it.
Offline for 5-10 days? Sorry, you aren't allowed to play me anymore. Can't afford internet for a while? Sorry, you paid for me but if you can't also keep paying to stay online you're not getting to play me anymore. Installed me on 3 computers? Too bad, I don't care if you paid, I'm sure those computers do not belong to you and you can't install me anymore.
I'll keep putting my money on companies that want my business. Stardock is a good example.
Really, if you want to show these jokers who's boss, just shut of the console, or the PC and go play outside. People, you can groan and groan all you want too about how the game industry is trying new and better ways to make your life miserable, or you can just stop giving them so much money. There are a millions things to do in this world that aren't playing video games. Try a few out.
You just log the connection to the server with any packet sniffer, and you recreate it locally, modifying your local DNS config to reroute the connection to the server to the localhost.
If they are really secure, they will send a random number or the time and date that they will send to the server that will sign it with their private key, which could be verified with the public key. You just have to replace the function call (that you find with strace) with a constant and you're done.
My supposition: 3 days before it gets on gamecopyworld.com
In the UK, we have the Computer Misuse Act, which (if I have this correct), protects against dependable functionality being withdrawn without adequate notice of the terms of service. It mainly protects against aggressive Shareware, critical business failure, and anti-consumer practices.
Undoubtedly, the new feature described in the article is the first step of a soft conditioning process, that teaches us to accept the temporary functionality of software, leading to subscription-based activation as the norm.
Future direction is a question of whether or not the public will have their way, of being allowed to purchase use of software without expiry.
The new Company of Heroes has a similar copy protection scheme, although even worse. It actually requires you to create an account on their servers, and then login to it every time you play. If you don't have internet access, it'll spend 30 seconds trying to figure that out, ask for the cd, and then spend another 30 seconds reading from the cd to verify you really have it. So you either have to have an internet connection every time you play (and get auto-patched every time you play as well), or you have to spend a full minute waiting on the game to allow you to play. I suppose the one good thing about it is that you can play without internet access, even as onerous as it is.
If I hadn't liked the first Company of Heroes game, and didn't care about THQ, I would've just pirated the second game, and used a no-cd/no-internet patch on it. Stupid copy protection measures like Spore, Mass Effect and Company of Heroes drive people to piracy, just to get around them.
Which is why you shouldn't pay for programs that come with these shitty, draconian DRM methods. I pirated Bioshock, I'll probably pirate Spore and Mass Effect as well. If you don't like what they're doing, the best way to let them know is by not giving them your money. Not that it matters, both games are going to sell by the crate anyway, but at least you won't be bleeding from the asshole when they decide that Spore has been obsoleted by Spore 2 and replace their Spore activation servers with Spore 2 activation servers.
No they won't. Don't fall for this shit. The first patch that fixes this "problem" will come in a few days, if it isn't already out. It will be posted to piratebay and other torrent sites.
Really DRM and shit like this isn't really a big deal. There is always some one out there that will always fix these bugs and shit. DVD; fixed. HD-DVD; fixed. BR; fixed. iTunes; fixed. evilgame bullshit; fixed.
Let them try this shit, someone will fix it for them. Problem solved.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Fantastic. I'll buy both games, as I've wanted to play them, but I'll never open the boxes. This is probably the best excuse to use a cracked version of the game via P2P I've ever seen. I'll gladly pay for the games, but I won't use the actual software in the box.
I had a strange issue with Dark messiah of Might and Magic, which used a copy protection scheme (although it was SecuROM, not this stuff). I installed the game and tried to play it (I got the game with my new GPU), but it told me to "insert the ORIGINAL disk, not a copy". Gee, Sony, you aren't very good at lightly insinuating that I'm a pirate, are you? Well then. After deciding to give up on it for the evening, I put in my GTA III disk, and the same error message came up, asking for the original disk. It wasn't a Windows error box, it wasn't a Rockstar error box, it was a window that was unified in look between the two games and definitely ignoring any theme changes within XP. It looked like a malformed Windows 98 message box.
I sent a nasty letter to Sony stating that they either tell me how to remove the software or they send me a new computer. They sent me instructions, stating how to get rid of the software and that re-installing that game or any other game that used SecuROM, it would give me the same results. I said, "That's fine, The Pirate Bay is still operating."
I ended up registering the serial number on Steam and I can now play the game whenever I want without a disk, assuming Steam isn't having issues.
Steam is probably the best antipirate measure I've seen, since it's not as invasive. It's not sneaky and underhanded. It does require you to connect to the internet, yes, but it's not EA or Ubisoft. I still trust Valve to a certain extent.
So. Who here thinks they will artificially inflate the minimum system requirements for Mass Effect because they are far too lazy to do a proper PC port?
Read page 2 of the linked thread. It is every 10 days.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Spore *is* an online game. ...even in single-player mode.
Pure comic genius. This is why I love slashdot so much. Stories like this still make it now and then.
It's a Massively Single-Player Online Game. It uses the internet to connect to "SporeHQ" or whatever they will call it to upload your creatures and download others, thus allowing your universe to mingle with the creations of others and allowing for a virtually infinite number of scenarios.
This is also why they are releasing the first-stage editor months before the game is released. They need to *populate* that database from which they will seed the new universes.
that Spore would require a more persistant check than once daily.
One of the main draws, for me, was the ability to populate the game universe with the creations of other people(A single-player MMORPG, as they say).
Is this not the case, anymore?
Or is this just bitching about there being a "Legit Check" every 10 days, among all the other connecting that should be going on?
http://www.ea.com/information.jsp
On the Xbox, even though you purchase an annual subscription to Xbox Live, you still can't play multi-player titles without accessing EA's servers. To my knowledge, EA's the only company that works that way. Thus, several great titles quit working online, even though I still have an Xbox Live account. This is a really clever way to get you to upgrade.
I'll never buy another EA game again.
Make love, not reality television.
Um... Spore is an online game. The phrase Will Wright has been humorously using for years now is "Massively Single-player Online Game."
Though Spore happens to be single-player, it's designed around its ability to connect to the internet to constantly download new content. This is essential to the game, it's not just an added bonus feature. Really, it's the same "copy-protection scheme" used by World of Warcraft or any other game that relies on connecting to a central server: If you don't have an account, you can't access the online content that the game relies on.
Find out when what the address is that it connects to. Change your host file on your computer to it points to a local machine and have it emulate the check.
NExt question!
I know most people are probably oblivious to the downsides, so this will eventually be the way of things digital.
But the MSN music service should be a stark lesson about "buying" any media than needs outside authorization to use. Even if the company is not out of business and has mountains of cash lying around is no guarantee they will continue to run Authentication servers.
I was very interested in buying spore. But it is game over now. Mass Effect I wasn't interested in, but I was a big Bioware fan and this will probably end my purchase of their products. I don't buy many games, but i did buy BG1,BG2, KOTOR, and the NWN (+SoU,+HotU). No more Bioware for me. Well luckily they can't turn off my old games.
I am picky about games, I buy good ones and I often play them years later. Yesterday I got a new 2560x1600 monitor and fired up my 10 year old copy of Total Annihilation to see that it brilliantly runs in 2560x1600! If it had authentication requirements, I would no longer be playing.
The choice has always been there for me to support companies I like, by buying their products, or to download them for free. I have plenty of disposable income and know how to use bit torrent.
This pushes it to the point that the purchased product behavior is so egregious, that there is no way I will buy it. Now my choice will be download it for free, or do without. Either is a loss for the companies pushing this scheme.
I figure I can just keep playing NWN forever, there must be 10 000 modules out there now. I won't need to buy the latest graphics card either. Win-Win.
I guess I should thank them for saving me money on game and hardware purchases.
I wouldn't call a 10-second movie and a The End screen "reduced content." They completely sidestepped the ending for KOTOR 2.
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.
I don't care why you're posting AC
We used Bnetd to try to set up a local ladder for play with my friends, without a whole bunch of other people's handles getting in the way. Nothing serious, and the cry about authorized CD keys... I really don't give a shit about that.
Because of bnetd, there was no incentive for people to buy Warcraft III because they could just pirate the game and still enjoy internet mutliplayer at it's fullest.
If you really think that was the reasoning, you're certifiable.
They could have also potentially lost significant revenue to people who bought the game but still played on bnetd servers because they used Battle.net to advertise.
Which maybe, perhaps maybe, they should have realized there are some people who don't want to have to play on "their" network. Bnetd was awesome for the potential of setting up a local ladder and even the possibility to do that at a LAN party.
I would like to know what prevents someone from running a keygen for the purpose of activating every key the can find as many times as they can. At some point will this disrupt the legitimate players causing them to call for support? Can this method activate keys that haven't been purchased so that when the person gets home with their shrink wrapped box, they can't play their game until the call support? Will support give them a new key or tell them to go buy the game again?
They probably track where the IP address of the activation, but if "its a conversation on a normal port" means HTTP, the requests can be run through proxies.
The company I work for owned a copy of 3D Studio Max that was a few years old. After a particularly bad virus hit our network we had to reinstall on a couple of machines and of course we ran into an issue with the ridiculous copy protection scheme they use.
Soooo we called into the company that handles our licenses and it turns out they stopped dealing with 3Dstudio Max licensing. After numerous calls to different entities within AutoCad and over a weeks worth of effort we did eventually get new codes.
Of course after the first day, and without telling the boss, we had found a crack and patched our copies of Max to work without the license. DRM would have put our company a week behind on a project.
The cracked versions are more reliable and portable so we've never bothered activating the codes we had to battle to get.
What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.
If more people would just stop buying crap like that it would go away.
If no developer gets paid because their game is shunned, they won't sell their game to a publisher that requires DRM.
Because if you just harm the publisher, they can sort that out by diversifying: My Little Pony: Steam Edition won't be made and so little girls will still demand that game without DRM or their parents have to deal with it not working.
But if Rare or whatever development house makes a game that doesn't sell, they are sunk. So we need to tell them why we're shunning the game.
And maybe they'll get wise.
Just when I was considering purchasing Mass Effect. Guess not.
No sig for you!!
No, this is a job for the government. If anyone has the power to defeat copy protected games, it's them. Vote Fairlight in 2008!
Coincidental that you point that out. Did you see this article? San Diego Republican Boss is Former Game Piracy Ringleader
And not just any piracy group - Fairlight. Yeah, that Fairlight! Wow! Man, those guys were The Shit back in, like, 1990. Zero-day apps with full cracks, with trainers, and cool cracks with 3D demoscene graphics and great chiptunes...
Man, can you imagine waking up every morning and saying to yourself, "I used to be part of the bleeding edge of the warez scene, but now I spend my days defending the Iraq war and bending over for the RNC and the Moral Majority?" Can you imagine how much that stings? How the mighty hath fallen...
But, yeah - here in the U.S., we're hosed. Public interest is great and all, but it's a little short on campaign contributions... as opposed to, say, Big Media. So no serious politician can get any traction with a "fair use" or "balanced copyright" policy.
Look, there's only one logical solution: we're all gonna have to move to Sweden and vote for Piratbyran. Time to start brushing up on our Svesish...
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Come on now.. As if producing a patch to remove the DRM on their games would be at the forefront of their minds while they watch their company dwindle to nothing...
XenoPhage
Technological Musings
According to the linked forum, there will be a max of 3 activations.
I don't know how many times I've reinstalled NWN on my machine, but it was WAY more than three. In fact, when I first installed NWN, I had horrible frame rate problems (eventually fixed by installing on C: instead of D:), and I reinstalled that game more than three times on the first freaking day.
I will never purchase software that uses an activation scheme. These software companies are saying "Pay us money, and buy our product, but our product will phone home and ask if it's OK for you to use it. Don't worry, though, because we'll make sure our server says it's OK." Talk about a shady deal...
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?
Pretty good. VCRs, in my experience, aren't like DVD players, that kneel over and die every two years. The age of the built-like-a-tank non-disposable consumer electronics is over, it seems.
While I completely agree with you, I wonder how much of an issue this is in practice. Exactly how many 10 year old games are you playing today? Is it even remotely likely you'll still be playing Mass Effect in 10 years?
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.
Yes, activation which will happen every 10 days.
Say you wanna play the original lemmings today, are you going to have any problem with copy protection, licensing? No. Either spend an hour and crack it, or spend 3 minutes online and find a crack.
DRM is defeated and outdated within days of being used.
I remember starting back in '92 using my legally owned copy of lemmings to learn how to crack software. By todays standards that copy protection is ancient. In 10 years our current Copy Protection & DRM is going to look just as primitive.
Having said all that, most normal consumers would NOT do any of these things. Most consumers would simply be screwed. This is happening right now with Microsofts MSN Music store. They are shutting down the DRM servers, and they are screwing a whole bunch of their customers. Details of this can be found here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080422-drm-sucks-redux-microsoft-to-nuke-msn-music-drm-keys.html
discounting your usual Vista FUD, how does this "principle" square with your dishonest use of sockpuppets to shill your own posts? is that a "principle" you exercise as well, or you just don't give a fuck as long as you get your way?
This is a new one for Slashdot I think. They updated the summary with new information, and in doing so made it wrong.
"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."
From page 2.
Taco's link is to page 1, but he didn't keep reading to see the newer information. You do in fact need to re-authenticate every 10 days if you want to keep playing.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Is the leading quote: "DRM system requires that it phone home every 10 days." going to be fixed? It's completely wrong. 1. You must activate online. 2. The software then wants to activate one more time. It starts trying after five days, and will shut down at ten days if it hasn't gotten through by then. 3. That's it. After the second check, you don't ever need an Internet connection ever again. Now, I'm not saying I love it - but it's a pretty reasonable measure to keep keys from being shared. It's also a heck of a lot better than "every ten days", which could be onerous. This error has gotten a lot of unnecessary attention. In addition to slashdot, it's also on Fark, and probably a variety of other places that all source to slashdot. Fix it already!
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
No sig for you!!
And how are we supposed to patch a the Wii and Nintendo DS versions?
Non-MMORPG games requiring servers is just plain frightening.
What we need is an organization that protects and advocate for the rights of gamers around the world! Maybe such organization already exists? Can they ban EVERYONE? What we need is to hit them where it hurts the most. We should collectively turn to the Pirate scene. The big publishers need to wake up and relearn customer satisfaction.
http://masseffect.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=628724&forum=125
Q: Why does MEPC need to reactivate every 10 days?
A: MEPC needs to authenticate every 10 days to ensure that the CD key used for the game is valid. This is designed to reduce piracy and protect valid CD keys.
Q: What happens if I want to play MEPC but do not have an internet connection?
A: You cannot play MEPC without an internet connection. MEPC must authenticate when it is initially run and every 10 days thereafter.
How many 10 year old books are still read today?
If games are somehow less culturally significant than books, then why do they deserve copyright protection at all?
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Already cookin', chief.
"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, 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 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
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
It depends on how the overall protection works. Is this a replacement for the CD-check? If not, then I personally think that is a horrible idea. Now in addition to having the CD-check, I have to have this. However, if this replaces the CD-check, I'm fine with it because I think its less hassle than the CD-check. For the CD-check, every time I want to play the game, I'm required to insert the CD. But the new systems checks once every 10 days.
Is it not the responsibility of these companies to reward their customers and punish the pirates rather than punishing the customers and hoping to punish the pirates, who in turn find a way to circumvent the protection anyway? If these companies are planning on implementing these assumptive forms of copy protection (i.e. they assume their customers have and will always have an internet connection to activate the software), they need to have a plan in place for what happens if/when A) their customer does not have a connection, or B) the company no longer maintains their servers. There needs to be a clause somewhere stating that the company has a "no-DRM" patch in place and will deploy it either A) after a specific sunset period (i.e. 5 years) or B) if the DRM servers go dark. Having the game phone home more than once after being installed is absurd. If I install it, and if I phone it home, and if the game is confirmed to be good, why the hell should I have to verify that with you every 10 days? Will something actually change that it needs to be reauthenticated?
I stopped caring about copyright holders rights when the government decided that limited was longer than the average American lifespan. I couldn't have said it better myself. Then again, neither could our founding fathers:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" (emphasis mine).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
The point of using a server for validation is that the server can know something the client doesn't. When the client knows everything, it becomes easier to crack because the necessary information is available, just obfuscated.
If I were implementing this, I might do something like:
No amount of packet sniffing will break this scheme unless you can break RSA signatures. The only three ways to circumvent it are:
Of course, that's only in my example. A more complex scheme may be used.
All and all, if the client can play the game without an active internet connection, you should be able to crack the DRM. It's when an active internet connection is required during gameplay that we're really going to be in trouble.
My wedding video was severely decayed due to a bad tape, 5 years after my wedding.
People, people, people. It's 2008 already. Digitize all of your shit and think up a solid backup scheme.
I've experienced three bad hard disk crashes in my lifetime, with loss of masses of documents... and that was back when hard drives were one gigabyte, tops.
Never again. Four 750gb drives - two at home, one at the office, one portable - same stuff everywhere. All encrypted, and with frequent synchronization.
With today's storage costs down to $0.25/GB or less, you really have no excuse. Consider it a geek imperative. =)
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
...for them.
Spore was on my list of "certain buy" games, and that list is pretty short these days. It just got unlisted. I'll get the better, more convenient and more customer-friendly version of it, which will be released by some warez group. I'd be happy to pay money for Spore (and a few other games), but I'm not moving into 1984-country in order to do so.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Well personally, I used bnetd to play Warcraft III without having to buy it (I'm sure I wasn't the only one). I didn't end up paying for it until bnetd was gone. Bnetd was cool, but you have to admit that people were using it to playing pirated games to their fullest. Regardless, you can play Blizz games on LAN all you want. It's not that hard to set up local tournaments without software.
Abaddon: An Xbox 360 Indie game
I always translate DRM as Digital Restrictions Management whenever I talk to anyone about it. It's a more accurate expansion of the acronym. I would claim to have coined the term, but I've seen it a few different places.
God is imaginary
That's where I really want to play my addictive games. During a long trip.
How do you think pirating Bioshock helped? You just lost ALL moral authority to whine about the action of anyone here. If A developer spends 5 million dollars making a game, you bet their ass its up to THEM the terms on which they sell it. If you dislike the copy protection and fear you will have a seizure and your head will explode if you have securom installed, then DON'T BUY THE GAME. But do not be under ANY illusion that you are IN ANY WAY entitled to play the game anyway.
People with your attitude (I don't like the terms of sale, so I'll just take it) are the entire reason DRM exists. Honest gamers like me have securom installed by their purchased games because people like you will pirate them at the first opportunity.
Yet I bet in your head, nothing is your fault, its all those evil bastard game devs making games you want so badly you will steal them rather than stick to your principles.
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.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Plenty of people still play Starcraft, Fallout, Planescape: Torment, Panzer General, Diablo, a lot of the old Jane's flight simulations. I still play the old Win95 versions of Axis & Allies and Risk 2, the newer versions aren't very good. There are active modding communities still making additional content for a lot of those games, because there are no modern equivalents.
It's no secret that the game industry is cyclical, and unfortunately that means for some genres it will be years before we see another quality game, if ever. Turn-based strategy games, for example, have almost completely died due to the popularity of real-time strategy games (thankfully the Nintendo DS has brought back some great turn-based games!). I would gladly pay several hundred dollars for an updated version of Jane's Longbow 2, but nobody makes that genre anymore and possibly never will. It's nearly impossible to run now because it was coded specifically for the original Voodoo3D, and even the best glide wrappers tend to be flaky when I've experimented.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I pre-ordered Mass Effect. I can say that I legally purchased it. I'll be damned if I'm going to install it though. I'm gong to wait for the version released by some cracker group and I'll install that. I just want to play the game.
When will these publishers learn? THE FUCKING BREACH IS IN YOUR SUPPLY CHAIN YOU DOUCHE BAGS! and every single time, your DRM is rendered a big expensive fucking useless pile of shit. One that I, as an actual purchaser of games, have to put up with.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
They also state repeatedly that they would release an update to rid the game of the DRM if the servers or EA/Bioware ever go down.
and yet they insist on treating me like I do.
I would urge everyone here who has a problem with big brother EA watching what you play (god knows what information EA gets with this check procedure, play information, PC stats, passwords...) to write to their representatives and tell them you want to maintain you first sale rights! Tell them this is wrong and its time for a law putting a stop to DRM.
When I looked at this comment thread there were more than 550 comments. Complaints here are not going to solve anything. It takes just the same amount of time to send an email to your representatives as it does to complain here. Just imagine what they would do if they got 550 comments complaining about DRM from the top CS and IT people in the world.
COMPLAIN WHERE IT MATTERS.
Totally agree with you.
:P
And usually its when the first ISO image hits the tubes. In most cases, its several days before the game is available to be bought. I guess it pays to be a pirate
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
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.
This won't effect me, since I always use No-CD Cracks/Activation cracks on my single player games that try to inconvenience me. The same thing will start to appear for these games, they will just be called No-Internet cracks or something instead.
Except that DRM doesn't work. That's the trouble with ideas like what you're proposing. Those ideas all assume DRM does work. They have no foundation to rest on. Exploration and discussion of the finer points of DRM is rather like hypothesizing about magic and sorcery, except that people who do the latter know it's just a game.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
You forgot "Hang out on Slashdot writing snotty and supercilious comments."
Yes, we're all aware that those other forms of entertainment exist. They're not the subject of this story, and some of us like to do some or all of those things AND play computer games. Some of us prefer to do the latter without an Internet connection, some are concerned that they'll be left unable to play legitimately purchased copies, some are concerned about unnecessary system vulnerabilities, and some simply find the idea of having to continually prove we paid for those copies repulsive. All of those are legitimate concerns relevant to the topic.
Listing alternative ways to spend time which don't have anything to do with the topic at hand, i.e. computer games with DRM requiring Internet access, just marks you as the kind of person who logs onto HBO.com's forums in order to mention that you watch very little TV and normally only PBS.
Now if you'll excuse me (or even if you won't) I'm going to take my kid to the pool, then to the movies, and then to the video game store.
Unless the company's name is Interplay, or Acclaim.
Bioware being bought out by EA is exactly why we have this silly DRM in the first place. I'd bump you up to the +5 Insightful you deserve, but I'm a mere AC poster lost in the sea of /. regulars.
Someone throw me a lifeline!
No, just like politicians, they want to know how much it will annoy you, and how much they can get away with.
If there is a large backlash they'll forgo it on the next game. If only a "limited" number of people complain, they'll gladly do it to you again (and again, and again...)
...challenge for pirates. ...annoyance for consumers.
Seriously? Why do this? Although now I see that an internet connection is only required for activation, what good will it do? The program inevitably sends a signal to a DB somewhere, and those signals can be monitored using WireShark, cracked, and then pirated games with modified activation code will be released. This doesn't solve anything, it just offers another tantalizing challenge for pirates.
Yep, because the thing a company that is going out of business worries about the most is keeping happy the customers that bought a product long ago. We all believe that, right?
People use cars to drive faster than the speed limit on roads. Does that mean we need to ban cars or roads? Have fun walking to work.
Oh, that's right - you don't work, you just sit in your parents' basement all day drinking mountain dew and jerking off to badly photoshopped Seven of Nine porn.
Playing games on a LAN, and setting up a ladder system that will equitably work for months of play? Two entirely different things. We enjoyed having a ladder system, thanks.
Despite being a single-player game, Spore uploads and downloads creature / building / etc. designs from a central database. This seemed to be a core aspect of the game, as other creature in the world were derived from this central database.
Of course, nothing is certain, but this is the way it was described, and there has been no indication that this will change.
I agree. I was really looking forward to Spore too. After reading the forum posts from Derek and others, it's clear these are games I can't support. One-time activation is not so bad, but continuous activation (every time you run the game) with a 10 day window where you can play without having activated is just ridiculous.
This is like buying a plant. You need to water it every 5 days. This isnt a problem becaues you have water, and if you dont have water for 5 days you are dead too.
This game needs internets every 10 days. I'm not a scientist but everyone knows that if you don't have internet for more than 6 days you die.
I guess EA will continue to not get my money. I was planning on buying spore. Not now.
It's too bad the publishers are planning on ruining Spore this way. I was really looking forward to playing that game. And, from the looks of it, Spore was going to be such a ground-breaking game, too.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
We're up to, what, the fourth Battlefield game? Yet, EA/Dice have yet to successfully complete a single one!
--- Do you believe in the day?
One day my internet connection went out. I had nothing to do but play games. I couldn't load up my EA BF2 game because, you guessed it, I had to login to a server, just to play a single player map. Now with BF2142 you can't even play the cool levels unless you are logged on to a group server and fighting other people. I bought a game so I could just play it, nothing more. When did we get into this aspect of gaming life where you pay $50+ (USD) so you can spend more $$$ on other things: internet connections, and patches-- patches because you either have to wait 2 hours for a download or pay upfront to filefront.com so you can access a preferred server. Group play through the internet is an option, and should not be the norm.
but not with the DRM.
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
Yes, it was called DIVX.
There are worse things to learn than Svenska. You could be learning Magyar or heaven forbid, Esperanto!
:)
But as far as Fairlight goes, I still find releases from their group all over the place. I used to collect cracktunes/chiptunes by Fairlight, Razor1911 and other groups because often those were far more interesting than the software that they accompanied
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
This part's for Moryath:
Huh. Right up until the ad hominem attacks, I was nodding along with you. Makes me kinda sad that, despite having the moral high ground *and* the right arguments, you had to resort to attacking the guy who disagreed with you, rather than stay on topic and defend yourself.
Congratulations, you just brought yourself down to the GP's "mountain dew and masturbation" level. Right up until that, I was agreeing with you.
Ahem. Now, to get back on topic:
It's simple math. One game company's game, plus DRM, minus my wallet equals not much difference to their bottom line. Try division, though... One game company minus two-thirds of their customer base... it's the square route to "wow, we screwed the pooch."
Unfortunately, the real world works like this:
They'll see lots of pirate activity on gamecopyworld and bittorrent, without the corresponding sales revenue to back up that that many copies of the game even physically exist. They'll chalk up their lost revenue to piracy (at a mere $2,650.00/copy, if I look at other 'lost-revenue' statistics for my educated guesswork), and never even consider that their DRM is killing their sales. They'll pump a few more games out this franchise's pipeline, and see increasingly dismal returns on their investment. They'll continue blaming the pirates, while continuing to make crappy product with unnecessary and broken DRM.
Wait a minute. This is EA we're talking about. These are the guys who we made the butt of jokes about re-releasing the same game over and over, with players' names changed to "update" them to the latest sports season.
Who cares?
Yeah, they may have actually made a decent game once or twice, but they told us *years* ago that we didn't matter, we were just mobile wallets, ripe for the taking.
This entire argument (or even article), in my mind, is akin to someone saying "Yeah, don't buy Sony stuff, they have that rootkit thing. Now shut up, I'm playing GTA on my PS3". We already knew they suck; the real question becomes "why haven't they folded yet?" The answer is the same reason gold farmers dominate the MMO market... people are still giving them money.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
This should be way easier to hack than the CD check. And once the hack is complete you won't need the CD or the Internet.
That's a good point -- how much of the absurdly high price of Vista (and the too-high price of XP, compared to all M$ OSs before it) was geared toward pushing SaaS instead of retail purchase?
Back in 1999, at the Win2K launch, M$ tried to pawn off this idea onto a crowd of some 1000 corporate IT types... who all developed identical angry frowns. The idea was NOT popular. Since then the price of OSs has skyrocketed.... suddenly SaaS looks much more tempting.
Once you pay the danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane...
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The update is misleading,
the actual quote mentioned that the the connection will only be needed for the activation, but fails to mention that the activation expires every 10 days, so beginning on the 5th day the program will attempt to connect otu the the secure rom servers to renew the activation.
So technically the internet connection will only be needed form every 5th day to the day the activation is renewed and on day 11 if the activation has not been renewed the game won't run.
I went over to the link given and read this from Derek French.
The certainly means that a call back is required before future play past the 10 days grace period.
Windows 6 == Vista.
Windows 7 == Successor to Vista.
Troll better.
That's not going to work unless the patch exists before they go out of business. Is anyone really going to stay on a single day past the death of the company to do that?
And if it's created before the death of the company, there's always the chance it'll be leaked.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Why wait ten years, MSN music store did it this year. The DRM nightmare is alive and well. It's not going away without the content you paid for.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If you don't like a product, or how the creator makes it work, show them by not buying it, telling them you don't like it and telling everyone you know.
As soon as you resort to breaking the law because you refuse to purchase it on the creators terms, you show them you are immature, and unreasonable.
Will you stomp your feet and cry too???
If you decide to break the law, it's your fault, and your responsibility, and no one else's.
How can we teach these companies that DRM is undesireable, if few will tell them, and so many are willing to break the law and play the games anyway?
Wouldn't it be more effective if we supported all the games without DRM, and not the ones with DRM?
Not so much, once you realize they're no longer a game company. They're a game engine company.
The day they made that announcement, I looked at my computer monitor, then at my high-precision gaming mouse, then at my Voodoo3 SLI setup, and I cursed a long, blue streak that made my dog cower.
(Figuratively. In reality, I just shook my head and went off to play Unreal Tournament again.)
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Super Mario Brothers, SMB3, Zelda, Paperboy, Offroad, Excite Bike... probably about 20 or so at least that I still play. Thanks to emulators, I can play almost any NES or SNES game on my phone, giving new life to these old games. Maybe in 10 years we'll be playing Mass Effect on our personal portable holographic systems...
Why are (..ok were) so many people eagerly anticipating Spore? Gimme the highlights cause it didn't seem all that cool or even unique.
I'm probably wrong.
The new legal hack is, you make a system which is supposedly a "generic system" that just happens to be very compatible with some commercial product. You include no copyrighted anything in the actual distribution. This lets development proceed more or less as any other open source project.
In fact, pvpgn is even in Ubuntu's "universe" repository. As I understand it, Universe is stuff that they wouldn't mind distributing with Ubuntu itself, but they don't feel like supporting, so it's maintained by the community instead. Contrast this with "restricted" (proprietary) or "multiverse" (questionable legality in some countries).
And, of course, there are places where you can get all the materials needed to turn a pvpgn server into a pretty-much compatible Battle.net server. For something like pvpgn, that's probably really all contained on the actual game discs -- kind of like Quake3's code is open, but the actual Quake3 maps must be pulled off a CD.
There are even open source "Generic MMO servers" which just happen to be exactly the same model as WoW -- give it some data from a WoW install, and some server-side data as a database dump from completely separate projects, and you've got a private WoW server. (It amazes and irritates me how many man-years go into making the perfect WoW server clone, instead of building a better game from scratch.) 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. I'm not entirely sure, but I bet some of these would actually work pretty well under Wine -- although at DirectX 4, you're actually getting into territory where it might make sense to just put Windows 98 in a VM. 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. DOSBox. Problem solved.
Unless, of course, there's DRM, which makes the problem doubly hard -- they might be something stupid enough to require the exact original media, so you may not even have all the data necessary to play the game -- or it might not even have been possible to copy it to your hard drive at all. 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? Well, they make standalone VHS->DVD converters. And if it was really 10 years from now on my 10th anniversary, what are the chances I have it in VHS format at all?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It is a big deal. Those of us who want to stay legit cannot do so. I wish not to break my Civ4 CD with its constantly spin up/down while in the tray, so I have to get a hacked exe.
/. were not greatly affected. But the 1000's of average users in my area were having their Internet connections shutdown because the virus had unknowingly infected their systems and started flooding the Internet. (Which changed the tune of my ISPs stance on supporting routers, because most consumer level routers have a basic firewall.)
With this new call home feature with a return acknowledgement (which means an open port) will allow a loosely designed piece of software to accept a hackers acknowledgement, opens the backdoor, allows the script kiddies in, and BANG, we have the Melissa virus all over again.
True enough, those of us on
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
What do the publishers hope to achieve by having this check? I can't fathom a situation where the first activation would succeed, but 50 days later, the fifth activation would fail. Can someone enlighten me?
This would actually probably be the hardest way to go about doing this.
You need to trick the game into connecting to the wrong server. That's the easy part.
The game, though, likely has the public key part of a public-key-crypto system. The server will send a challenge encrypted with the secret private key, which authenticates the server to the game. In order to convince the game that you are the server, you need the server's private key, which will be almost impossible to get.
This isn't like cracking the blu-ray key; with DRM schemes, you have a disc encrypted with a key, and you have a player which has to know that key in order to play the disc, so the secret key is stored somewhere inside every player. Here the secret key is stored only on BioWare's servers.
You can alter the public key used by the game, to work with your private key, but if you're going to alter the game, you might as well just remove the part of the game that connects to server altogether.
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.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I very much doubt there are any games for which this would work. Someone else already posted -- all it takes is a little decent crypto, and this would be pointless without truly absurd measures in place -- like a virtual machine which could run exactly the same operations the game did, in exactly the same order, pretending to be exactly the same time of day, etc.
It's easier to just disassemble it -- which means neither one is going to be available to Joe User.
The only way I see this working is if the game is designed to operate in some sort of offline mode, in which case, editing the host file is probably the simplest way to block traffic, to make the game think it's offline when it isn't. In other words, almost as easy to just unplug the Ethernet cable from the back of your machine.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
For some reason, everyone seems to hate Steam. This is one feature I like about it.
I can buy a game online, and then I can download it anywhere I have that username/password. No questions asked. (Unless it's Bioshock. Fuckers.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
At this point, buying a game from EA says "Abuse me at will" I learned my lesson from BF2, a great game hobbled by terrible support from EA.
Well, Tivo representatives have said that if they were to go out of business, they would release a patch to use their systems as manual recorders. (Only the Series 1 Tivos support subscription-less usage, and even that is IMHO only due to wording that some people thought was confusing on the original packaging.)
I am altering the EULA. Pray I do not alter it any further.
</vader>
If you don't give them your money, then you shouldn't benefit by enjoying the games.
Someone wrote into the HDTV and Home Theater Podcast with a suggestion to use "Digitally Restricted Media". The co-hosts use that term now whenever they remember it.
I will enjoy the games. If they want my money, they can have it. If not, they can implement bad DRM.
Console versions don't tend to include DRM apart from the console's native stuff anyway, which is fine by me. No activation or anything like that, just can't copy the CD (note that Microsoft at least offers a low-cost CD replacement program for scratched 360 discs no matter what wrecked 'em so the "no copying" thing isn't so bad)
Sure, they're often still pirateable, but it's hard enough that the developers don't tend to care (they leave that in the hands of the console manufacturer)
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
The solution is simple - don't buy it. We had a chance way back when sports and movies became pay-per-view to kill the idea, but we blew it. Too many people rolled over and paid for a football game, a boxing match, or a movie that they just *had* to see.
Paying customers can use cracks too, so it's not that big a deal. Why should pirates get to have all the fun playing with cracks anyway? All PC gamers should get to enjoy the fun of applying a crack from a random newsgroup site. They are actually doing you a favor!
I wasn't terribly impressed when my neverwinter nights modules started doing this - it was slow and unwieldy.
I've been looking forward to Spore, to a point of putting off putting a new system together until I see it's requirements, but if I'm going to have to put up with this kind of BS slowing me down, I may not bother.
It's just not worth the mess of having to deal with it - I'm having fun with Ubuntu, I have older games I still haven't beat, and I appear to have suddenly hit a "This program requires resources in excess of your current 'Fuck It' limit. Increase 'Fuck it' limit? [Yes][No]" Error.
[No]
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
It's simple really. Make a PC versions with so much DRM that more people will pirate than buy it. Claim the PC market is dead with figures to show it. New releases will be console only. No more problems with pirates.
Game over for PC titles, literally.
Barbara Felden claims prior art on the flip phone, sues Motorola, Nokia.
This sounds like a horrid idea. Precisely why the "pirated" version is a better value (even if you had to pay for it).
Doom, quake, and occasionally HL, BG, BGII, Planescape:torment, Fallout 1&2, Strife, Total Annihilation and Starcraft. So 10
If you bothered to continue reading the source thread, this check occurs every 10 days repeatedly. It is not just 2 checks. It is a series of checks that last forever.
Methinks that patching old software will be the first thing cut from the budget of any sinking software ship.
People refused to buy DIVX players, because the movies required that call in to activate etc...
I think game developers will find that gamers are equally capable of boycotting titles that require inane internet connectivity to play single player mode. If I ever find a person wiling to buy such a game, I'm going to do my best to convince them that it's in their own best interest to boycott clueless developers, and how easily they can get a nice cleanly hacked warez version of the game, if they only wait for the hacked version to come online.
if anything this kind of stupidity will increase piracy because of how stupid it is to require internet to play a video game in single player mode. The pirate version not only won't need internet IT will cost less. giving it 2 really big advantages.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
For everything they come up with, someone will come up with a way to break it.
As I understand it, Trusted Computing will be based on chips hardcoded into the system, no? What prevents anyone from developing a modchip that circumvents the system but doesn't stop stuff from running?
And I really hope I do not get any unreasonable "it's too hard to crack" answers. It's Treacherous Computing, not PGP. Hell, CSS was supposed to be unbreakable and that was cracked.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Please, please, pirate the game I've been working on for the last two years: http://www.singularityfps.com/
expandfairuse.org
If you did, you'd notice that the copy doesn't work.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Record players have a following, as a matter of fact they are bigger now than they have been over the last several years, as the people who like records aren't the type to embrace things like iTunes so I see them here to stay. It's more like a audio cassette tapes, a technology that's been totally outclassed and no one really ever liked in the first place. Can you even buy an audio cassette player anymore?
More reason to get a pirated version.
After? With how early most pirated content is released before the official release date, there will be patches to remove/disable this sort of BS before the thing is even legally released.
Anyway, how is this significantly different from current no-dvd/cd cracks?
People with your attitude (I don't like the terms of sale, so I'll just take it) are the entire reason DRM exists. Honest gamers like me have securom installed by their purchased games because people like you will pirate them at the first opportunity.
Yet I bet in your head, nothing is your fault, its all those evil bastard game devs making games you want so badly you will steal them rather than stick to your principles.
Actually, DRM exists because legitimate consumers seem to be willing to put up with arbitrary pain-in-the-ass DRM restrictions. DRM will always be broken given sufficient demand for a product, so the only real effect that copy protection has is the imposition of additional annoyance to legitimate users. Brad Wardell of Stardock is probably the most authoritative voice on this topic:
"The reason why we don't put CD copy protection on our games isn't because we're nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count. We know our customers could pirate our games if they want but choose to support our efforts. So we return the favor - we make the games they want and deliver them how they want it. This is also known as operating like every other industry outside the PC game industry."
He's on the right track, which is why Stardock games consistently sell well. I don't want to hassle with copy-protection, being able to backup CDs, or any other nasty shit that comes out of DRMware. If I'm aware that a program comes with something evil or makes me jump through hoops, I definitely won't purchase it, and thus the producer will get none of my money. It's no coincidence that Stardock.net and Steam account for the majority of my game purchases in the last year or two...
So, I don't give a shit about people who pirate software. What ticks me off is DRM that wastes my time as a paying customer, simply because corporate kleptobots think they can get away with it. Stop encouraging them.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
I know this is already modded to the max, but it's absolutely true. I buy every Civ game. I love them, and I'll buy Spore. But you can be sure that I'll hit up gamecopyworld for a no cd executable of it, because I'll be damned if I'm going to dig around for the CD or make sure my router is behaving today or whatever EA tries to do to make it inconvenient to play. That said, I don't blame them for trying. But it's a waste of resources. It won't get anyone who wasn't going to buy the game in the first place to buy it.
To say that I hate the idea of software-as-a-service would be to severely understate my feelings. Software companies want to be like the utility companies. This is why I don't own any rental/pay-per-use/subscription based software, including games. Even though there are many MMOs that I would like to play, I don't play any of them. I won't use software that is subscription based. The funny thing about the DRM mentioned in this game is it's only going to hurt legitimate users. This stuff will be cracked before the game is even on the shelf. And as many have brought up, what happens if the company goes under? As their last act are they going to issue patches to remove the DRM? I own hundreds of games, many of which are by developers long since gone. This kind of DRM also kills used game sales, which publishers want anyway. This is why I hate Steam so much. Once a game is activated and linked to an account, it cannot be linked to another one. You cannot sell it. This might not mean much to people that can buy new $50+ games all the time, but for people that often buy used games, it will mean a lot. This may not be so important with games, but when it comes to productivity software, it will only further help to increase the digital divide. One last thing.... Pay to play DVDs was tried but thankfully killed, and it cost Circuit City what $200 million dollars that it spent on DIVX. My only hope is to see other initiatives die just like this and cost their companies massive losses. What do I do about all of this? Like most people here, I use software on a daily basis. I work as a junior software engineer. I try to use free, open source software - from IDEs to web browsers to office software. I got a CS degree because I love software, and I get great pleasure out of the idea that software can better lives. The money that I get paid helps, but I am motivated by love of the field and how it helps people. As I learn more about software development, I try to see how I can donate my skills and time to help push free, open source projects.
c'mon, now... Spore 1 activation servers going offline because of spore 2 going gold master? That won't be for at least thirty years...
You don't need another machine. You just need your own to listen on the port and fake a response.
Hasn't this already happened with Microsoft Reader? Since you can no longer activate a copy to open drm'd content you could be stuck with worthless files which you spent hundreds of dollars on. Not to mention those media sites that have since died.
Please sign the petition to stop this madness!
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?copyprot&1
This phone-home thing is fine. Just two more games I wont buy. Phone-home = don't buy. They'll get the message eventually.
Since apparently it only phones home at startup (?), just keep the game running indefinitely. There, solved the whole issue with losing network connectivity at a later date or the activation servers going offline. Don't everyone mod me up at once please.
...now if only it would run on an OS that reliably runs for more than ten days in a row...
Mandatory dig:
Ask who bought play4sure music from Microsoft,
Their servers are gonna shutdown before the end of this year.
That's it. I had enough.
I'm buying the playstation 3. Period. NO Windows installation, NO driver update, NO DirectX reinstalling, NO malware / spyware / trojans / viruses.
Just pure and simple PLUG&PLAY.
Nothing happens. Just like the poor saps who bought DRMed music from Microsoft, where the same situation prevails with the recent shutdown of their DRM server. You try to run the product that you have paid for and own and
Konami!
Bubble Bobble was my favourite C64 game when growing up... (And the funny thing is, the old C64 version had better playability than the current Wii version...)
Because it's less likely that your CD/DVD will magically disappear, but with a server it could be DDoSed, the company could go bust or not pay their bandwidth bills.. that kind of thing!
which is totally what she said
Damn kids these days...
Actually, this happens, and EA does it. You may have meant it as a joke but its not.
Here's a list of thier dozens of titles including 2006 and later games they've disabled online services for already:
http://www.ea.com/information.jsp
That's true!
Plus:
What happens twenty years from now when I decide to indulge in some "classic gaming" and, because the server no longer exist, this game no longer works??? As annoying as looking-up words in the Pirates manual can be, at least that old 1985 game still works. But Spore/Mass Effect's new "phone home" DRM is built-in obsolescence that will make the Spore/Mass Effect games unplayable in 5-6 years.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
somebody with a MacBook Air.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I remember reading something about the plan for the 2nd or 3rd generation Trusted Computing chip was to directly integrate it into the processor.
That would make it kinda tricky to release a modchip unless the processor plants in asia starts spewing out "bootleg" processors without the Trusted Computing module at nighttime and processors with the Trusted Computing module during daytime.
YOU are the reason game developers have to go to these measures just to ensure that people don't rip them off. It's disgusting how immoral and inethical people can be, grabbing something for free and purposely shoving the thought out of their minds that they're flat-out ripping someone off.
Again, you pro-PirateBay tards on Slashdot are the reason for these measures.
"Sufferin' succotash."
There are ALOT of really solid DVD players. I still have my Sony (*spit*) $1200 DVD player (forget the model #. DVP-1000?) and it is built like a tank. Later I bought a Denon DVD player that was $1000 and it too was a brute. The $49 DVD player from Wal-Mart will perform and last like you might expect. THere were VHS players that were like this also. My JVC VHS player ($500 when i bought it) is still going strong when i need to and is much heavier and more solid than any of those DVD players are WalMart/Target/etc
So, instead of being paranoid and believing your computer may decide on its own that it won't let you run your stuff, you'd rather use a platform where you already know the stuff will never run?
Yeah, that's the big lock-in feature for Windows - I've got hundreds of apps that run only there. However, that is slowly becoming less of an issue as open-source apps start dominating.
As time passes, more and more great apps are popping up that surpass, or at least become equivalent to, my chosen Windows apps:
* I already use Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird almost exclusively for internet access.
* Many other utility/tool-like apps (Winamp, uTorrent, VirtualDubMod) are also available for Linux.
* Many Windows-only apps (Photoshop CS3, WinZip) are either runnable under Wine (not a great solution, but an acceptable one) or have alternatives that work just as well.
Thus, even the huge lock-in advantage of Windows-only app compatibility is steadily eroding. It's an interesting time to be a software consumer - many, many choices out there!
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
I stopped buying computer games years ago because the CD requirement was such a pain. 10-15 years ago I probably spent $100-200 a year on games (when games typically cost $30 or less). Then it started to drop. For the last 5 years, the computer game industry has received ZERO dollars from me, primarily for this reason.
While this is true, take into account all the failed attempts to protect copyrighted materials, even MS attempt at XP and Vista, which have both already fallen prey to being cracked. Encryption or not, only be a matter of time before someone pops it like a grape.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Awww... looks like I'll have to pirate Spore, then.
5 or 10 years down the line... or less. They'll release an official NOCD/NoCallHome patch. A number of games have done so.
jp10558: You completely missed the point of my post and latched onto the Sony stuff to whine about. One sentence, out of approximately 5 paragraphs intended to illustrate my point about DRM's effect on the (paying) customer base. Makes me wonder how much Sony is paying you, that you found their name in *one sentence* and blasted me with roughly 5 paragraphs over it.
If I take you at face value and assume you're not a shill, however, you do bring up a valid point. It is hard to point at any specific instance of $company and say "this is bad, but the rest of $company is ok", and it's a lot easier to just say "$company is bad." This may not acheive your goals, if your intent is to get them to change their behavior in a specific aspect.
Since you brought it up, I actually have issues with Sony's business practices, not just their music division. Here are my arguments for boycotting them in general, not just the BMG portion:
Their latest gaming console gives me grief in two ways:
Firstly, I can't imagine the nerve it takes to tell consumers that your console is backwards-compatible, then drop the backwards-compatible version from the market (Check out the PS3 scene, where the "chipped" (read:older, actually backwards-compatible, not software-emulated) version of the PS3 is on eBay for nearly (or in some cases, *over*) a thousand US dollars, and is actually selling at those prices).
Second, it takes real gall to claim that a video game machine is worth $500, when all it does is play games. For approximately the same amount of coin I would spend on the *retail* PS3, I could buy a decent gaming rig... which would also surf the net, send/receive email, play movies, etc. I'm not limited in functionality on a pc. Yeah, dollar for dollar, it's not going to play games quite as well as a shiny new PS3, but then again, I can throw a hundred bucks at a video card next year, and it'll play *next* year's games. Show me how the PS3 even comes close to being upgradeable in that fashion. Let's not forget backwards compatibility: that pc can play games that are 20 years old, in addition to the latest titles. Oh yeah, and it does my taxes, documents, business communications, my son's homework, and much much more.
Their movie and music divisions have other issues:
We all know about the rootkit fiasco, so I won't bore us with all those gory details. I will, on the other hand, question the ethics of a company that would allow (even a "wholly separate subsidiary") the distribution of malicious software on a music disk... This is equivalent (in my mind) to giving me a kitten that will let the neighborhood thieves into my house when it thinks I'm not home. Who's to say my new wide-screen plasma TV isn't waiting patiently for an unsecured wireless access point, hoping to phone home and tell them my viewing habits? Will my stereo tell them what radio station I listen to, what CD I just played? How do you know your PlayStation isn't telling its masters all about your online gaming activities? (What does he play? How long? When? Who are his online buddies?) Call it paranoia, but I don't trust Sony's products not to spy on me or break my equipment (Yes, I consider my CDROM drive not playing anything but Sony/BMG audio disks (and not even all of those) to be malicious destruction of my property. The "inadvertant" security hole they gave me, wherein any other (properly crafted) piece of malware found a comfy, undetectable home in my pc due to their software's sneaking onto my machine? I'll chalk that up to (potentially criminal) negligence, and accept their position that it was "an unintentional side-effect").
My refusal to buy Sony products is, at this point, merely self protection. As for "sending a message", if there is a message, it reads something like: "Because of your policies and practices, I don't trust any of your products anymore, and won't have them in my house". That message seems fairly clear; Sony has lost me (and as many of my friends as will listen)
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