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What Modern Games Are DRM-Free?
IceDiver writes "I used to be an avid PC gamer. However, I have only bought 1 game in the last 18 months because I am sick and tired of the problems caused by the various intrusive, and sometimes damaging DRM schemes game publishers insist on forcing upon their customers. Once burned, twice shy! The EA announcement that upcoming releases will include SecuROM, along with verification requirements and major restrictions on installations left me wondering which recently released or upcoming games (particularly major titles) are being released without DRM? Are there any? How has DRM affected your game purchasing? Will EA be negatively affected by their DRM decision?"
The ongoing DRM controversy was stirred by the recent launch of Spore. We discussed the public outcry from Amazon's reviews (which were subsequently taken down and then re-posted). EA's response to the outcry was to say that only one percent of accounts tried to activate the game more than three times, which is the limit without help from their customer service. Meanwhile, their efforts to find a "balance" between preventing piracy and not hampering legal users may not have been as successful as they hoped. According to Forbes, a P2P research firm found that illegal copies of Spore had been downloaded over 170,000 times already. So, is it time to create a whitelist for game publishers and developers?
Multiwinia doesn't have DRM as far as I know :) That's a pretty cool-looking game, I gotta say. Introversion does an AWESOME job with their games, in all reality.
Plus, they run on Linux natively! :D
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Try Sins of a Solar Empire, one of the best games of the year that has no copy protection. So far they have sold 500,000 copies of it which is huge considering the modest budget.
Sins of a Solar Empire made by Stardock is a recently released DRM free game (their other games are DRM free as well).
We've discussed Stardock's anti-DRM policy before.
No affiliation with Stardock, just a happy customer.
Good Old Games has just entered beta. They are offering older games for $5.99 - $9.99, completely DRM free. They've got some great games in their catalog, including Fallout & Freespace.
Being DRM Free is one of their major selling points.
re: Half-Life 1 and my original key being stolen.
Same thing happened to me. I sent in the CD case liner (which includes the barcode proof of purchase -- according to the instructions you were *not* to send in the original box or jewel case and for games older than a certain date, the receipt was also not necessary) and a check for $10 (the processing fee at the time, October 2007).
I received my CD liner intact back from Valve soon after having all of the HL1 games activated on my account. It went through pretty quick.
They also never bothered to cash the check.
You are aware you can just run Steam in offline mode.
Amen brother. EA and the other gaming companies have been pissed off for years at Gamestop, EB Games, etc that they resell their games used to customers and they don't get any slice of the pie. The gaming companies at one point wanted to make reselling games commercially illegal. They were like why should we only get 1 sale when 4-5 people have bought it from EB Games, played it and sold it back to be resold again. That has really been pissing of the computer game companies and they have slowly been working to make that less and less possible.
If you want to know if it working, just look at the historical data. EB Games used to sell a ton of used PC games, not so much anymore due to online activation keys and other forms of DRM. The PC industry has slowly been able to kill the resale industry of PC games, and now they want to do the same exact thing to console industry if they can.
Game companies want to make it illegal for you to give away or sell your old games you don't play anymore because it cuts in to their profits for them to sell another copy instead of someone getting or buying your old copy. Have you actually read some of the EULAs that they make you agree to? Most of them do not allow you to resell or even give away your game to someone else, only you can use it and play it. It has *ZERO* to do piracy and 100% to do with killing the resell industry.
Don't believe me read some of the old news articles on this and ask the game companies what they think of the used game resell industry.
You're not paying a licensing fee, you're paying a subscription fee. The former lets you use your software while the latter lets you use Blizzard's servers. Big difference. WoW keeps working just fine if your subscription expires, you're able to log on to private servers without any issues (admittedly, Blizzard would love to stop that too, but they haven't been able to sue the private server projects out of existence). The only thing you lose is access to the official Blizzard servers.
With complex and polished open source games in almost every genre being available, it's quite surprising how much people spend on commercial games from companies that treat them like criminals. Wikipedia has a good list - I've not played more than a small fraction of them.
[1] This doesn't quite count as open source. The game is all GPL'd, but a number of images were things the author 'found on the Internet' and are used without a valid license. It was removed from the OpenBSD ports system last week because of this, as the author refuses to address the problem.
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Half Life 1 is 9.99 on Steam.
There's a pack that contains HL1, 2, Portal, TF2, CS:S, CS.. pretty much everything Valve put out. I bought it for like $70. That's about the price of ONE brand new game.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Couldn't get past the snaky rep who basically said they won't talk to you.
I called the bank and had them issue charge backs
Funny, in my experience "Sort it out now or I report you to the bank and let them sort it out" is a pretty effective way of getting problems solved.
It's not particularly diplomatic but then neither is getting the bank to issue a charge back.