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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!
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...
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
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)
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.)
So they want you to report the fact that their licensing system is defective? Sounds to me like they already know.
Your ad here.
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.
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?
No, the forum mods most likely knows that this is a really stupid idea, unfortunately it is the suit guys (EA) that makes these decision so spamming the support center with complaints is likely the easiest way to let them know how you feel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
Never trust any rights given to you in an agreement that can be unilaterally changed by the other party.
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Dungeon Tactics : Free Open Source SRPG
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
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.
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.
Though the ironic bit is that often legit customers require pirate copies in order to actually play the games they buy.
For instance, most games I buy for the PC I usually have to get a no-cd crack. For these internet-required games I could easily see that becoming an increasing priority again.
What moves like this really risk doing is pissing off customers that don't have the savvy to get the cracks thus end up with a broken gaming experience that reduce the chances of them buying again. And stuff like this DRM yeah, works fine most of the time, but when it breaks it is really irritating... in this case people who don't always have internet, who travel a lot, or try going back to the game after EA has lost interest (ever try finding patchs for older games? Even big houses like EA and Activision have sizeable catalogs of games that they just don't bother hosting the patches for anymore)
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.
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Ah, the myth that DRM prevents people from "stealing."
Let's see
1. Put DRM-encumbered DVD in drive
2. Type "dd if=/dev/hdd of=/media/some_hollywood_blockbuster.iso"
3. Burn resulting image file to a blank DVD (or mount it as a loopback device and point your media player at the mount point).
DRM didn't do much to stop us from making a copy, did it? I simply made an exact copy of the original DVD, complete with DRM. After all, that's what my player is expecting.
Let try another experiment
1. Put DRM-encumbered Region 1 DVD in a Region 3 player
2. Oops, won't play
Or
1. Put DRM-encumbered DVD in any player
2. Try to fast-forward through Copyright warning, or commercials
3. Oops, can't do that either.
Let's make a 30 second clip of the movie so we can criticize it, or parody it, or perhaps use it in a derivative work. Oh, right, we can't because we would have to decrypt it with something like DeCSS, which the DMCA prohibits.
The purpose of DRM is to control how the paying customer uses the media they purchase. But if they said that, it might make it more difficult to paint themselves as the victim and convince taxpayers that we should continue to enforce their copyrights while they erode the concept of Fair Use with DRM and EULAs.
It sounds much more reasonable to say "we need DRM to stop people from stealing."
Don't spread their lies for them.
I don't care why you're posting AC
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!
2. Type "dd if=/dev/hdd of=/media/some_hollywood_blockbuster.iso"
3. Burn resulting image file to a blank DVD (or mount it as a loopback device and point your media player at the mount point). 4. Discover that the disc you just burned is unplayable, because you can't burn CSS keys to DVDR media. You end up with a disc full of encrypted data but no key to decrypt it with. DRM didn't do much to stop us from making a copy, did it? I simply made an exact copy of the original DVD, complete with DRM. After all, that's what my player is expecting. Well, yeah, it did stop you in the case of DVDs. You're right about DRM in general -- it is fundamentally flawed -- but the way to successfully copy a DVD is to decrypt it using the key they helpfully provide to you.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Conversely, attitudes like his develop because media companies - like many kinds of companies - are often unethical:
- * They sell software that's full of bugs, and won't even be playable for several patches... or maybe they don't even admit that there are problems.
- * They sell software that won't actually run on any state-of-the-art machine without half of the highly-touted features turned off.
- * They sell software that requires some sort of crappy upgrade that you really don't want.
- * They are trying to strongarm you into moving from a model where you buy software once, to a model where you buy the same software over and over and over and over again.
So rather than trying to leap onto moral high ground, everyone involved needs to approach the issue from a practical perspective. That's the only way to make progress here.Look - iTunes, right? Did Apple sell iTunes to anyone as "The Right Thing To Do?" Of course not. They just built a really damn good product and gave it a very reasonable price. It's a blockbuster hit and a cash cow! No moralizing required! And it even lets users do what they want! Wow!
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.