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DRM Shuts Down PC Version of Gears of War
carlmenezes writes "It seems that the DRM on the PC version of Gears of War came with a built-in shut-off date; the digital certificate for the game was only good until January 28, 2009. Now, the game fails to work unless you adjust your system's clock. What is Epic's response? 'We're working on it.'"
Oblivion has no such retarded online authentication. By all means we should dump on the games that treat paying customers as pirates but be careful to make sure you criticize the correctly guilty parties.
Such a thing does exist in the pro audio world. The most popular is called the iLok from PACE Antipiracy. It is a little USB dongle that you hook to your computer. It then stores licenses for your audio software, over 100, from multiple vendors. When you buy software it either comes with a code, or a SIM chip that is the license, and you transfer that over to their key.
Ok great right? Well not really. The first thing is that it isn't cheap, to either the people implementing it or to you. It has a fairly high per unit cost, which of course the vendors pass on to you. However for you there's a direct cost too. You have to buy the dongle. They are $50 each. It works in the pro world, since $50 isn't a big deal if you are already spending $1000 on a virtual instrument, but you'd find it rather a turn off for gamers. Yes you only need one to hold many licenses, but $50 is still a lot when you are talking games.
Then there's just the implementation problems. You go and do some searches online, you'll find lots of people have lots of problems with the iLok. It is trying to do tricky shit, and that causes problems. For some it works great, however for many it is a ton of headaches.
The question also becomes what happens if you lose the iLok? Some companies are good about it, and will authorize PACE to send new licenses to your new iLok. However many are paranoid since you could always "lose" your iLok to a friend and get a new one and then get more licenses for free. So some companies refuse to give you new licenses, you have to buy them all over. Well, that means a single dongle can have a whole lot of money worth of licenses stored on it. You get in a situation in games where someone nicks your dongle at a LAN party and you are out $1000 in games.
Used sales are also a problem. Companies don't like for you to sell their games used. They'd much rather everyone has to buy a copy. With a dongle, they can enforce this easier. While they certainly could make a mechanism for you to transfer licenses, they wouldn't have to. If they didn't, well you are SOL. You'd either have to sell ALL you games at the same time, along with the dongle, or buy a dongle per game, which would be expensive and inconvenient.
Now after all that, the question is ok, but is it useful? Answer? Not really. iLok protected apps are cracked all the time. So you can go through all this trouble and people can STILL crack your shit and release it on the Internet. The fact that you use physical hardware doesn't help. The dongle only really can do two things:
1) Provides authorization. Here the program checks with the dongle to see if it is allowed to run. It's a handshake sort of thing, and often uses good crypto... But what happens if you simply remove the jump to the code that checks? The program never goes and looks for a license and just runs, thus the dongle is bypassed.
2) Has a decryption key for the program. The program itself is encrypted, and a loader goes, checks the dongle, gets the key, and decrypts it to run. Ok great, except then all you do is go and dump the decrypted program from memory and use that, or intercept the key and use it on an emulated dongle.
Regardless, the dongle can't do anything that can stop this kind of thing. The crackers simply strip out all the calls to it and then they've got an app that runs without it. Or they make a virtual dongle that sends all the proper responses. Or they hack the dongle's drivers. Whatever is easier.
The real answer, I think, is for companies to realize people will copy their software, but it just isn't a big deal. It happens, get over it. Don't hurt your legit customers because of it. There are some pro audio companies who have dumped iLok and they report they've seen no decrease in sales. Personally, I'm not surprised. The people who download their apps aren't likely to pay for them in the first place.
Why didn't you just contact Steam technical support?
Yeah, I'm basically paying twice for my mistake, and because of DRM, but hey, this is why DRM sucks. It's not that much different from Far Cry 2 hitting 5 unique installs and telling you that you can't install it anymore, except there is no workaround when I have no internet connection.
What are Steam tech support going to do for me over the phone when I don't have an internet connection? Provide me with a way to force Steam into Offline mode when it doesn't want to, i.e. a way of avoiding the DRM? Unlikely.
To be honest, the entire experience was a wake up call, and as I said, I'm in the process of reverting my mistaken Steam purchases into disc copies, at which point I'll probably remove Steam altogether and be done with it. If it ever becomes so big that a game can only be purchased on Steam, then I suppose I'll have to give in. But when that happens, the DRM has won, and it will be too late anyway.
I've already turned away in disgust. For many years I would happily buy one or more games a month, transferring the disk images to my PC with Virtual CD so I didn't have to hunt for one particular game disk amongst hundreds. (Same reason I won't buy a console.)
... one blockbuster title every couple of years. I don't download any, I just don't bother any more. Instead of playing games I now spend a lot more time watching DVDs (which I believe can be) ripped and transcoded onto my file server.
Then I ran across the first Starforce game, in the form of some crap called Trackmania. I uninstalled it about ten minutes later and haven't seen the disk since. Then I bought GT Legends, because I'm a big fan of classic racers, and that came with Starforce too. I put up with it for a week, then bailed.
After the tenth time manually uninstalling and reinstalling my CDRom from the hardware control panel due to it suddenly insisting on running in PIO mode, it was adios to Starforce and no more games buying.
I've only bought two games in the past few years: Oblivion (plus the addons, which happily run in Virtual CD), and GTA IV. I knew GTA IV was DRM'd up the wazoo, but it was a must-have game for me.
And that's what my games-buying has been reduced to
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
My response is http://gamecopyworld.com/
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
If you don't have a data plan on your phone, then this either won't work at all, or you will be charged a hefty fee per kilobyte for your trouble...
A better option is piracy, pirate the games and you don't have DRM problems. Buy them as well if it makes you feel better, then you can play the pirate copies when the legit ones screw you over.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
You can make a backup of ClientRegistry.blob in the Steam folder to restore Offline use of Steam:
Sort of a pain, but once it's working it's not so bad. I agree that nobody should have to do this to play the games that they bought.
My favourite game, rFactor, I play with my pirated version.
And I have bought the legal, paid version just because I wanted to support the company. And I show it proudly to my friends.
But having the disc in the tray constantly just damages the disc and inconveniences me.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
I thought how strange, being as how a couple of them didn't even have a multiplayer mode. I thought, well maybe that's just for some kind of updating scheme or something, but I sure wasn't going to risk $50 to find out. So I ended up buying a USB drive, taking it to a place with high speed public internet, and just torrenting a few cracked games instead.
I can't play my restored Steam backups because I cannot update Steam on my modem connection (it is not smart enough to resume downloads. Steam is shit) and so I have learned that Steam is not my friend. They told me I could make backups and play them without having to get them blessed. They lied. Fuck Valve, fuck Steam, and fuck Half-Life n. Anyone want to buy my fat-jewelcase HL2 disc and code?
Any user who plans to play these games into the future does their self a great disservice if they buy anything which requires a connection at any time, whether it's just for the install or every time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"