Fucking SecuRom

The BBQ Pit
1

This is mild, I’m angry, but I’ll get over it. Still, I hope the companies that use SecuRom see a big dip in their sales in the future.

Fucking SecuRom. Any company that uses it on their games should go the fuck out of business. If it affects other people’s systems like it does my laptop the just might when people stop buying their products. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were easier to dislodge. But man, I’ve spent the afternoon trying to delete this monster from my HD and I apparently have not succeeded.

SecuRom installed itself when I added Neverwinter Nights II Storm of Zehir. But it won’t let me use the disk afterward. I managed to convince AAFES to let me return the disk, and I just purchased the expansion from a download. But when I uninstalled the version from the disk SecuRom didn’t uninstall. Not only that it won’t let me install other games using my DVD RW drive or my external drive because its Rewritable. I’ve tried using tips from various sites on getting rid of it, but it doesn’t seem to help. I think I’ll probably have to reformat the laptop which frankly pisses me off. When my other PC’s arrive I surely won’t be installing any games that have SecuRom om them. Its not worth the aggravation.

What the hell is wrong with these people? Is piracy so bad that they have to use this software that hobbles people’s computers? I’ve never pirated a game or any software, and I don’t intend to do it in the future. But I can see why people use No Cd cracks now.

2

There’s two sides to this, and there is no right answer. This is the stuff epic flamewars are made of, and indeed there are plenty going on regarding this very issue all over the net.

Piracy has indeed gotten quite out of control. With torrents and torrent clients becoming extremely easy to use, and the fact that most people consider pirating digital material to be a crime worth committing regardless of the risk (kinda like speeding) or not even a crime at all. Enforcement is ridiculously low comparatively speaking as well. So obviously the software companies want to try to do something, anything, to try and circumvent it.

On the other hand, you have the innocent end user. The one that legitimately purchased the software, and is now stuck with protection software that often makes the legitimate software harder to use, and sometimes indeed conflicts with people’s computers (though not as many as I would be inclined to believe). They often end up paying the price, with installation limitations, having to go through verification each time they run it, etc. Pirates have no such problems, thus the problem is that not only did the pirate get the software free, they also got a superior version of the software in doing it.

There are arguments to counteract each viewpoint (well, the pirates weren’t going to buy it anyway/well, plenty of people buy the software legitimately so stop punishing them, blah blah blah). But both sides have a COMPLETELY legitimate point of view regardless of which side you take, and thus copy protection is not likely to ever go away until we move to some form of highly secure online authentication system, the best example of which is Steam. But then you’ll of course have all new people taking issue with that, so this will pretty much go on forever. The only alternative is that laws need to be rewritten and enforced MUCH more harshly and consistently, in many more countries, for it to ever die down.

I’ll agree that Securom is probably not the best choice, given that it has a 0% success rate so far, every game and piece of software to use it has been cracked eventually. There are many forms of Securom though, and if, like in Fallout 3’s case they want to use it solely to authenticate the disc, then that’s fine with me. It’s the installation restrictions and so forth where I start to get rather pissed, regardless of whether i’m going to use it or not.

3

Heck, I can’t even uninstall Oblivion without the disk. Which my 4-year-old trashed. 5gb of my hard drive, lost forever, thanks to SecuRom.

4

Well, I can only speak for myself, but the cure seems worse than the disease. I can’t install another game that I paid for legitimately because SecuRom won’t let me. Its not the drive. As I said I tried to use my external and practically NEW dvd drive and was thwarted by SecuRom. So because of this software I can’t install something unrelated to the software that included SecuRom that I paid for.

From POV I don’t have a problem feeling like FUCK YOU to the companies that use SecuRom. It failed, it fucked up my laptop and its purposely made difficult to uninstall. I don’t give shit about what version they used. Their right to protect their products ends at the point it interferes with the use of MY computer. There may not be an easy fix to piracy but since I did not pirate anything its not my problem. Their problem is finding a way to protect their product without fucking up legit buyers.

Seriously, I like games. I like to try them out, I like to play them to relax and I enjoy figuring out how to play new ones. But I don’t steal them. Why should I be punished because some folks do?

5

This is the kind of thing that makes me think that the virtual machine’s day has come. DRM-ware mass up your system? Use the VM manager to roll back to before you installed it, or just delete the machine and start over. Of course, you’ll need a more powerful host system, but even my laptop does a creditable job of hosting VMs, and the later VM specs are starting to handle 3D well.

6

Disk verification systems can all go shove their DVD collections up their asses. I strongly suspect the StarForce disk verification system of fucking with the IDE driver on my last PC causing my HD to go in to PIO mode on a semi-regular basis. If there was a program to block the install of these low-level bit mangling, cycle-stealing useless strings of shit I’d installthat in a second.

I actually went so far as to write a letter to EA telling them that I loved BF 1942, but when I want to play it I want to play it, not hunt down where I put the box so I can put it in the cd drive. (They were the only people I’ve ever written to who didn’t write back).

If any game publishers want to know why I only buy games off of Steam these days, tell them it’s 'cause they can’t stop themselves from fucking with my OS while I install their otherwise exciting games. Then kick them in the dink for me.

7

Start a class action suit.

8

Start a class action suit. They are installing pernicious malware on people’s computers.

9

Class-action suits worked for people who were hit by the Sony rootkit scandal:

10

Have you tried Add/remove programs in the Control Panel?
And, even if the game doesn’t have an entry there, you could simply delete the game folder. It wouldn’t remove all traces of the game from your computer, but it would recover most of the hard drive space.

11

Yep, that’s how I first learned of SecuRom.

And it’s a good game, I don’t want to a broken install to kill this laptop when I buy it again, dammit!

12

It’s an amusing state of affairs when pirates release content that is of a higher quality than the original, i.e. it comes without all the bullshit protection mechanisms that infect your computer and make you jump through hoops to play your own game.

After all these years we’ve been used to watching propaganda at the movie theatre, about how pirate DVDs are bad quality and don’t give you the ‘authentic movie-going experience’. In the games medium, however, the complete opposite is true.

Hilarious and yet quite sad.

13

Yup, very true. I actually regret spending money to legally purchase the DRM-ridden ‘Spore’ instead of getting the pirated cleaned-up version. You can guess how this might effect how I choose to obtain GTA IV when it comes out for the PC in a few days.

14

It was back when people were still running windows 98 but I had a program called uninstaller something or other that I wish I had now. It would allow you to uninstall hidden files and delete registry keys from them at the same time.

Dislodging SecuRom has proven to be frustrating. My dvd drives are practically useless and the truly silly part is that SecuRom won’t even allow me to use the disk of the game that installed SecuRom in thew first place. Who in the fuck thought this kind of copy protection was a good thing? I sincerely hope those fuckers go out of business. I don’t agree with piracy but after this I’d be tempted to pay retail price to the pirates for a copy of something that is essentially better than what the manufacturer sells.

A friend of mine called me last night to ask if I was going to play Warhammer. He wanted to meet me online and play tohgether. When I told him I had the game but couldn’t install it he almost dropped his phone laughing in a disgusted “thats fucked up” way.

15

This type of draconian copy protection is not only useless against pirates, but is unnaceptable!

Under what sort of delusion is the company operating to actually believe that it is perfectly ok to leave such software running in user’s PC’s AFTER the game in question has been uninstalled?

16

This is the problem I have with it. It seems a bit ridiculous to me as it’s completely ineffectual. Pirates are releasing games that are actually cleaned up, so it’s not stopping them. It’s only pissing off the customers. I don’t Collaborator’s take at all because it’s completely ineffectual at stopping piracy. They need to figure out a new way to do this because it is simply not working. It’s going to drive sales down if anything. Super-restrictive DRM is bad news and I think it drives people towards piracy.

17

Abso-bloody-lutely; this is why PC gaming is on the bones of its arse. I cannot for the life of me figure out why publishers would stick DRM on their software. Take the example of Spore. Being a lawful type, I declined to purchase it because I don’t want DRM up the yazoo, but I don’t want to pirate it either. So that’s one sale lost. Imagine how many people out there want the game but don’t care about pirating; not only have they lost a sale but actively encouraged the problem of piracy. Totally mental.

The sooner this draconian fad dies, the better.

18

I used to have that one. I use the RevoUninstaller now. It’s freeware and it does exactly the same job.

19

I don’t see how downloading another copy and using your old CD key would be all that wrong, from a moral standpoint. The laws probably aren’t quite that progressive, though.

20

Galactic Civ II if I understand correctly, does not have DRM on it. Neither does Sins of a Solar Empire I believe. Neither game requires the disk once installed either. But you can’t get patches and updates unless you have a legally purchased disk with a code. That makes sense. If Stardock can do that why can’t the others.