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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.'"
See, the catch22 with DRM is, it's fine until it interferes with your gaming - and then it's gone too far.
Most DRM seems "fine" until the day you realize it has crossed the line. :P
And lately it seems just about all DRM is like that.
This is more evidence that DRM hurts the honest consumer.
As we all know, the pirates wait for the DRM-free... "collectors edition" release on The Pirate Bay.
Why do people continue doing it? Did they start when the economy was in a healthy growth period and then think "more DRM, more economic growth for us, it must obviously be causal".
(now there's a good application of "correlation is not causation" for you)
We could call it a "cartridge", and we could call the device it plugs into a "game console".
What a novel idea.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
A proper DRM system...
I stopped reading at this point, my oxymoron detector kicked in pretty quickly.
There was a time I would never have even considered running a pirated version - my main experience with pirated software has been cleaning off Trojans installed by NoCD cracks or the like.
Now... I can see the claims that DRM is (sometimes, at least) truly more of a hassle for honest consumers than for software pirates. That is a truly sad thing.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Perhaps if everyone did this, we'd see DRM take on a more practical appearance like a USB dongle - or even the entire game on a USB dongle - and without time limits or requiring web authentication.
This approach is too customer-friendly for them to consider. The mission of DRM is more than destroying piracy, it means to destroying second-hand game market and cross-boundary water-goods trade as well.
The era of customer-oriented marketing strategy has long gone. Nowaday, all customers are treated as criminals and pirates. Face it man. ARRRR!
It's not DRM. It's cheat prevention. Big difference.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
The hilarious part is that it only froze up on the people that paid to have DRM installed on their machines. The stolen copies are just fine I'm sure.
I think the secret is, if you really really want to give them your money: buy a copy, never open it, and install a stolen version.
I have two copies of Titan's Quest (never opened), a copy of Flatout 2 (never opened), two copies of NWN2 (no), a copy of Jedi Outcast (no), Jedi Academy (no)...
Mostly it isn't even the DRM, simply having to even put the CD in is an unnecessary hardship. Why should I be inconvenienced because I bought it and the people who stole it get the good copy?
I think it's time the stop treating customers like shit and I say so on my registration cards. Fat lot of good it's done.
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
> "Free market theory" is that buying and selling takes places voluntarily between two rational parties, both of whom agree to the terms of the deal. If he thinks he's getting shafted, but keeps buying the games anyway, then it's nobody's fault but his own.
I've highlighted the part of free market theory which has failed to help you out. Knowingly allowing people to screw you out of more money is decidedly NOT "rational" from an economic standpoint. In fact, it is very directly in conflict with the behavior economists expect from a rational person, so much so that it cannot be reconciled with it.
Yes, the situation is all his fault. But it proves that these transactions violate the presumptions (and therefore, will not follow the predictions) of free market theory. Given that it violates the axioms you've put forth, it would be quite unreasonable to expect free market theory to hold.
Who said software should be free? You are lumping unrelated issues together for some reason.
Rather, this piracy issue is not the customers problem, so the customer should not ever have to deal with it or be inconvenienced by it. It is the problem of the content owners. Piracy is the cost of doing business, so accept it and quit screwing with paying customers or pick another industry. In no situation is it acceptable for the content owners to screw with something I paid for after the fact.
If DRM measures ever inconvenience paying customers at all, it is an absolute fail. It doesn't matter if the number of problem cases is small, they have a responsibility to ensure that the people who PAID them aren't affected by their irrational and ridiculous restrictions, and if i AM affected in any way, you owe me a refund.
And to make it even more insulting, the DRM doesn't actually stop piracy of any kind, so it is all for nothing. The end result is that these companies are saying their interests are more important than the customers.
One of the best ways we as consumers can help fight DRM is to buy games from companies like Stardock. All of there resent releases have NO DRM. Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire are their big titles. Don't pirate these games. Stardock is trying to prove a point, that you don't need DRM to sell games. They believe that if you make games that people want to play, provide excellent customer service, and don't encumber them with DRM that they will sell more games, and it seems to be working. These games have no DRM at all (unless you consider typing in your product key to be intrusive DRM). There is no SecuRom, no install limits, not even a CD check. Also, they freely in the EULA give you the right to install the game on multiple computers as long as you own them and are the primary user. Most EULA's state that you are only allowed to install to one machine. Cheers.
Yes, that's right, lets blame PIRATES for GoW not working. The poor production companies are just protecting themselves by purposefully selling a broken product (if you claim that GoW isn't broken, you forgot to read the title, summary or article) in order to... to what? To make sure that people who don't know how to find a crack (or cracked version) aren't copying the game? A simple CD check could do that. You say it's to keep the honest, honest, but it does not keeping them honest at all, it either teaches them that only cracked games work properly, or you just straight up lose a customer. I personally think the lesson being taught is that honesty is punished, and not worth the effort.
I'm not entirely sure how you can fight against piracy by making sure only pirated copies work as they are supposed to (in the consumer eye). Blaming pirates for game company failures isn't going to win over any supporters. "Your game would work, but we had to cripple it because of pirates" is so weak of an excuse as to be transparently stupid to all but the least mentally capable gamers (and I'm talking REALLY unable to comprehend causality).
Automakers would not put an anti-theft device in a vehicle if said device caused your engine to stop at random times (like when driving) and be unable to be restarted until the auto company did something secret inside the engine compartment. They would not sell it if there were certain driver/automobile combinations that simply did not work (i.e. if the car just plain won't start if the an "incompatible" owner tries to drive it). Furthermore, if they DID install such a foolish device you would hear very few people blaming carjackers for the utter foolishness of the automakers. No one would believe it, and nor should they. It is the very same here.
You lend people books and you can no longer use the book until they give it back. You don't make a copy of the book and give it to them. That's why it's a problem - it's copyright infringement.
I dislike DRM which makes the game difficult to play or messes with my system. As far as I'm concerned anything else is fair game. If I don't notice the DRM is there, it doesn't bother me.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
Why is it the customer's responsibility to enforce the law? If I own a convenience store and I have a problem with shoplifting, it isn't the law-abiding customer's responsibility to become volunteer crime fighters when they're in my store.
And, if my attempt to prevent shoplifting involves giving every customer a full cavity search, making false accusations, and occasionally not giving the customer what they paid for, then I have failed to come up with a realistic and workable business model. I would have no one to blame for that fiasco than myself.
So, yes, Epic should be held responsible for the business decisions they make and for the consequences those decisions have on legitimate customers.
And that's why analogies fail on Slashdot--everyone tears them apart not for the reasons that they are similar, but for the reasons they are different.
The point is that for some reason, we let software companies get away with remotely disabling the products that they sell to us. We'd never put up with that from other industries. It doesn't matter that software can be perfectly copied--that's not a justification for the behavior.
The best way to defeat DRM, the way which has worked in the past, is to break it. Over, and over, and over again. As each scheme is broken, the DRM publishers come up with a new one. Each new one is nastier and more intrusive to the paying customers, causing compatibility problems and total failures. After enough of this, paying customers refuse to buy DRM encumbered products, not for ideological reasons but for practical ones. And then DRM largely goes away. It happened before.
What brought it back? The DMCA, of course. Making the DRM breakers hide from the law made DRM look viable again.
Agreed. Demos which come with half of the content locked don't represent the full enjoyment to be had from the game.
Best demo ever? Shareware Doom. First episode, all the through. How many copies did it sell? 1.1mil. 8th highest sales through '93 to '00. That was when mainstream PC gaming was STARTING.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
My copy works just fine, I wonder why? Oh, right, I got it from Piratebay. Torrented downloads: They just work.
No, after paying customers refuse to buy DRM encumbered products game developers give up on the PC and just make console games.
This is already happening.
Do you have any statistics which back up your implicit assertion that piracy is significant enough that it threatens the business of game companies?
I'm absolutely serious here: every game gets cracked by pirates anyway, so DRM is not effective at stopping piracy. It's not even effective at delaying piracy appreciably, from all reports I've seen. Yet game companies seem to by and large stay in business (and when they do go under, piracy is by and large not cited as the reason). It seems fairly evident, then, that
- DRM does not prevent piracy, its stated purpose;
- Piracy is not significant enough to threaten the livelihood of game publishers;
- DRM does massively inconvenience legal game buyers.
This would suggest to me that the idea that we need to "come up with something better" than DRM in order to "fight" it is fallacious. If DRM is not effective at doing what it's intended to do, but is effective at alienating your product's legitimate customers, there's no good argument for continuing to use it.
A shopkeeper who keeps hitting his customers in the face with a frying pan on the assumption that a non-zero number of them are trying to shoplift is not doing himself any good. "I'll keep doing it until you give me a better way to discourage thieves" is not a rational stance.