Reply With QuoteAwesome. This should be entertaining. Considering Derek is pretty anti-DRM himself, he has his job cut out for him on this one.
Edit: I expect this probably comes from EA. I bet people at Bioware are about ready to explode over it.
According to NEOGAF here:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=291802
I didn't waste my money on PC Bioshock either, so no loss. This is why PC gaming is pretty much dead to me.According to Derek French, Mass Effect, scheduled to arrive on the PC this 28th, will employ the same SecuROM online activation system that was initially put into Bioshock, allowing the buyer to activate his copy of Mass Effect for 3 times before politely asking to him / her to go to hell, that is, contact the customer service “helpline” to get it reactivated. And while the game itself wouldn’t require the DVD to be physically present in the drive, it goes one step further and phones home every 10 days and re-authenticates just to make sure legit customers are not the worst form of criminal scum publishers swear we are.
The authentication, which will be initialized every time you run MassEffect.exe, will send the CD Key and a unique machine identifier to the activation servers, which will be cross-referenced with the data that was sent when the game was initially activated. Well, actually, it runs screaming to Mama every 5 days, but if it can’t connect, it will still allow you to save the galaxy and sleep around with Asari consorts for another 5 days, presumably reminding you to re-activate often with the dogged persistence of a James Bond doomsday death clock
Make it too much of a pain in the ass to be a paying customer! Keep up the good work, assholes!
Awesome. This should be entertaining. Considering Derek is pretty anti-DRM himself, he has his job cut out for him on this one.
Edit: I expect this probably comes from EA. I bet people at Bioware are about ready to explode over it.
Any DRM for a non-subscription product that is based on refreshing a certificate sucks ass. Is this DRM authentication server going to be around 10 years from now when you're feeling nostalgic? Fuck no.
A product that is purchased outright should not have a DRM system that can render it useless.
Whatever. The Bioshock thing was overblown to begin with.
I guess I'm just lucky that I've never had any issues with any of the supposedly evil copy protection schemes.
but you know the cracked exe that pirate group release will.Originally Posted by Lunch of Kong
We're not using modems anymore so verifying something over the Internet is easy and fast. Photoshop verifies itself in 3 seconds, Bioshock 4 seconds. I don't really mind it. It's the pirates and warez kids that piss me off who are killing PC gaming. Developers are moving to consoles because it's not as easy to copy a blu-ray disc and then get a mod chip for your PS3 as it is to play the newest games 2 days before release on your pirated Vista.
Limiting installs is a bit annoying but I never had to uninstall any game more than once or twice. Why would you anyway? Buy another HDD if you don't have the space. HDDs being so cheap nowadays anyway doesn't really make that a valid reason either. What developers SHOULD do (and I think they did for Bioshock? I never checked) is bring out a patch 3-6 months after the release of a game making it possible to install it as many times as you want. If you really need to install something more than 3 times within those 3-6 months then just call them to activate it for you. It's not a big deal.
Blame pirates, not the developers.
Another quality post from a new poster.
I will always have a soft spot in my heart for "You are doing it wrong" and "It's never happened to me" lines of defense.
I'm looking forward to the fresh perspectives and new ideas this thread will no doubt yield.
Console gaming FTW.
kind of strange, that as a customer I should be bending over backwards for a failed DRM that we know it doesn't work.
Bioshock was out on torrent cracked before the game was even release in stores...
Sad but true. I'm about 98% converted now.......
For every person who claims "It's never happened to me, so it's a non-issue" there are plenty of people who have to reformat their hard drives due to a virus, get a new computer, uninstall a game to free up space, fall out of love with a game only to give it a shot a patch or two later, and many other scenarios that warrant an uninstall and subsequent reinstall.
I'll blame pirates for a lot of stuff, but making PC gaming unwieldy is not one of them. Maybe everyone can't do the Stardock thing, I don't know. But I DO know that I don't need to be run through a ringer every time I want to play a game I bought.
A good point in the original thread:
That's right, pay sixty bucks and then they can take the product back from you! Who in the Real World would try this shit? Unbelievable.My problem with this "piracy prevention" is that you can only activate the copy 3 times. I tend to delete my games right after I play them to free space on my hard disk and will often revisit the games by reinstalling them. The problem is that after 3 installs I've lost ownership of this product.
Microsoft? They did that shit with XP. What's that? You want to activate this OS? Well, you've done that X times already on various machines. I'm afraid you'll have to call and ask us if you're allowed to.
Fuck. You.
Its going to allow me to install it and play it without the disk in the drive. Assuming the game just works, I don't have a problem.
Valve still seems the only one to have a vaguely workable system, based entirely on 'we won't send you the last bit of the game until we're ready. Also, it's encrypted.' Admittedly, they did have a problem with that whole 'leak' thing, but...
Which should be standard fricking proceedure anyway. Drive checks are utterly worthless.Its going to allow me to install it and play it without the disk in the drive.
I've gone back to Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Vampire, etc a couple times over the years. It would be really irritating if my copy of Baldur's Gate 2 wouldn't install anymore because of antiquated DRM. I imagine Mass Effect will have the same lasting appeal years down the road. It's a shame that legit owners won't be able to play it 10 years from now.
Seems people are passionate about this subject. :)
I'm not defending a broken system, I'm saying a little verification won't hurt if it works. You don't need to "bend over" for anything, digital rights management systems make sense but when you can't play your new audio CD in your old panasonic CD player due to crappy copy protection (as was the case some years ago) it's not going the right way. Remember when Soldiers: Heroes Of WWII came out and nobody could crack it for weeks due to the starforce protection it had? That was interesting to say the least. Don't know if there were any stories of legit copies not working on people's computers.
edit: In no way did I say "it didn't happen to me so it's not an issue". I'm saying their choice of the number "3" came from somewhere and I'm betting it's called research. If the system works, very few of us players are going to have to format our HDD 3 times during the first 3-6 months from release (as I suggested).
I've done that a dozen times with XP and Vista and I spent max of 10 minutes ever on a call to microsoft. Never a big deal.
Starforce = fail.
There are a lot of people who refuse to buy game with Starforce on it.
Who said it's a non-issue? I, for example, said it was "overblown." As in yes it's an issue but some people overreacted. There was all kinds of talk about how bad the Bioware DRM was in principle but how many people have actually had a problem? There are few, if any, who've actually run up against the install limit. And it certainly doesn't seem to have had an effect on sales.
Eh, the schemes aren't all that evil. It's the behavior of the employees that always bothered me. StarFarce, for instance, calling everyone a pirate if they had any issues with their product or practices (not to mention the infamous link-to-a-pirated-version-of-GalCiv2 bit; That bit was genious). SecuROM at least never pretended to be anything but a really annoying DRM. I still remember when it quietly flipped my CD-ROM drive's PIO mode way back in the day because it somehow couldn't properly verify the disc without massively slowing it down. It would have been nice if they'd let me know that I had to switch the mode back in order for anything to run okay. (To be fair, that was several years/versions ago)
So the products are annoying, obnoxious, fairly useless from what I've heard, and the employees sacrfice goats on an altar, but they aren't evil.
It's good to know that an EA acquisition won't change a game company. Yeah.
Well, a 'little verification' tends to start with drive checks and utterly pointless serial keys for single player games, which have been a pain in the arse since people realised that CDs really could be copied. Christ, I hate typing serial keys... 99% of anti-piracy is just an exercise in expensive futility, which really cheers up the companies that sell the software, but doesn't do a whole hell of a lot for my mood.I'm not defending a broken system, I'm saying a little verification won't hurt if it works.
I'm sure number of copies Crysis sold via the number of copies were pirated had something to do with it.
No sale.According to Derek French, Mass Effect, scheduled to arrive on the PC this 28th, will employ the same SecuROM online activation system that was initially put into Bioshock, allowing the buyer to activate his copy of Mass Effect for 3 times before politely asking to him / her to go to hell, that is, contact the customer service “helpline” to get it reactivated.
I'd been toying with the idea of getting the PC version, seeing as how I haven't finished the 360 version yet, but after seeing this... forget it. I'll just finish the version I have.
It might have helped if the full title hadn't been Crysis: Your PC Can't Run It. Anyway, didn't EA claim it sold phenomenally better than the overwhelming majority of PC titles in the end?
Yeah true, and requiring a CD to play any game. But nevertheless, I wouldn't care if my Bioshock checked online every 10 seconds to verify it's a legit version if it simply worked and didn't cause install problems or whatnot. It's not going to slow down any of your porn downloads :)
you would if it kick you out the game whenever your internet connect drops.
Hey all-
Does the DRM policy also apply to digital downloads?? If not, I just may go that route.
I play on a laptop that is almost never plugged into the internet (and I do not have a wireless setup at home), so the reverification sounds like it'll be a pain in the ass (not difficult to do, but it seems VERY needless since I will have paid my fifty bucks).
I also prefer NOT to have to carry discs around to play the games I want to play. This is also making me look towards digital downloads as an alternative (it also means one less new pc game box in the house, so my wife won't be the wiser). Gal Civ II Twilight of the Arnor is my first digital download purchase. I just STILL don't have a clear handle on this DRM policy that these companies create when I see Stardock doing well without it. And just to be clear, it "appears" it is needed for certain games, but I'm just not sure which ones.
Jorune
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