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Stardock, Microsoft Unveil Their Own New Anti-Piracy Methods
Island Dog sends news that shortly after Valve showed off their new anti-piracy methods in Steamworks, Microsoft and Stardock were quick to demonstrate their new, similar technologies as well. All three companies are bending over backwards to say that this is not traditional DRM. Stardock (the company behind the Gamer's Bill of Rights) calls their system Game Object Obfuscation (Goo), "a tool that allows developers to encapsulate their game executable into a container that includes the original executable plus Impulse Reactor, Stardock's virtual platform, into a single encrypted file. When a player runs the game for the first time, the Goo'd program lets the user enter in their email address and serial number which associates their game to that person as opposed to a piece of hardware like most activation systems do. Once validated, the game never needs to connect to the Internet again." Microsoft's update to Games for Windows Live has similar protections. "You can sign in and play your game on as many systems as possible, but you have to have a license attached to your account. Of course, this only works for online games."
The only flaw I have with Steam is that they dont allow you to tie activation keys to your account.
They do for some games, such as Unreal Tournament 3.
Others such as Crysis, Fallout 3 they do not however.
See here for a list of games you can do it with: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7480-WUSF-3601
The PS3 has region free gaming. In fact, I just imported an Asia/Chinese game Demon's Souls and it runs perfect on my US PS3.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I've used Stardock's Impulse a little bit and while I can't comment on all games on it, the 3 I have it works quite well. You can tie a license key to an account, however I have installed and played 2 of the 3 offline never connecting to the internet to play or install, simply by entering the license key in the normal installation. Then I can then tie it to Stardock Impulse which will automatically tell me about updates and help me install them. To register it with Impulse I simply entered the license key again with the online component. In fact Impulse recognized that I had the game installed and asked me if I wanted to add it into the system.
Also, I can then log into stardock impulse on any other computer and it will allows me to re-download and install the game on that one as well. Well I've only done it for one so far, Sins of a Solar Empire, so again I can't comment for all games.
In fact, I play offline all the time and only fire up Impulse (I haven't needed to run it to play the games) when I check for updates.
With GOO, you are able to decouple your e-mail from the game and transfer ownership.