Spore, Mass Effect PC games to require an Internet check every ten days

I’m with RickJay. I think Will Wright bought off more than he could chew and Spore is going to be a colossal commercial flop. I’ll probably get it but I wonder if it will keep my attention more than 10 days anyway.

I wasn’t really planning to buy either of these anyways (well, maybe Spore) but whoever decided this was a good idea needs to fork themselves with a rusty utensil. Sideways. I can only imagine how pissed people would be if they couldn’t play because their net happened to be down, or the server crashed. It’s bad enough with MMOs, but those can’t play without a net connection and a working server anyways.

Given the reaction I’m seeing on the various forums I’ve visited, I have my doubts. The reaction of most is either that they won’t get it, or they’ll pirate it guilt-free.

These people don’t seem to grasp that making your customer base hate you is not good business practice.

I think it’s even worse than that: Telling your customer base that you regard them as nothing more than potential thieves to be policed is guaranteed to piss off a large number of them.

Wasn’t Sins of a Solar Empire really commercially successful? No copy protection at all for the single player game.

You always hear about new protection schemes, but they’re always cracked within days. Has any release in history been uncrackable? Have any even lasted 2 weeks?

Sometimes controlling the multiplayer is very successful. There are a lot of games with multiplayer authentication that end up working well.

Remember that huge “for the love of god, stop pirating software” debate that was on here when this forum first spun off? This is EXACTLY why I’m going to download the pirated version rather than buy it. Because at least I KNOW the pirated version is going to include a crack which will auto-activate so I don’t have to deal with this crap. It’s one thing if it’s your OS or it’s a $500+ piece of software. But a friggin $50 GAME?

As I see it, two of the most important ways of suppressing piracy are to make a product as good or better than the pirates - which means no heavy handed copy protection that screws up the game or your computer; and, make piracy socially unacceptable. Which means you don’t do things that make people so mad that they’ll go out of their way to steal from you.

The video I watched several months ago of one of the developers (might’ve been Wright, I don’t remember) taking us through the game suggests it’s been well thought-through. The game already looked basically completed then, and they’ve still been working on it. I don’t think it’ll be a world-shattering experience, but I think it’ll be at least as good as Bioshock was. Certainly worth $50, I think, but for SecureROM.

I’ve been anticipating this game for years, since I first heard about it. But why would I pay $50 bucks for a game that I won’t be able to play seeing as how I’ll be moving around so much.

A MMORG makes sense to need an internet connection, a single player game does not. That’s why I get single player games, so I don’t have to worry about whether I have a connection or not.

Yeah, this is stupid beyond reason.

I thought that was a given.

And this is exactly why I stick to console gaming as much as I can. I believe I can get Mass Effect for the 360 (if I had one) and there’s no such internet requirement check-in.

Is there any word on how obnoxious this is going to be? I mean, aside from having the game shut down after 10 days if you don’t check in. Will there just be a little button you click on and it says “Okay! You’re good to go now!” Or is there going to be a huge deal involved with checking in that will take up precious game-playing time?

I haven’t heard. But frankly, I wouldn’t trust people who do things like this not to include spyware or worse in their “copy protection” system.

I feel bad, but I’ll probably buy Spore, never use the disk, and download an image complete with a crack. I’m not going to let SecureROM anywhere near my computer. And what if I want to play on my laptop? I go weeks sometimes without an internet connection on that. Better to crack it and avoid the whole mess.

I give it a week, two on the outside, until this is cracked and someone comes out with a workaround.

And whose to say that in a couple years EA won’t decide to shut down the validation servers to save money or something? Sure it would be nice to think they would release a patch eliminating the validation requirement but the way they are treating paying customers I personally can’t trust them to.

Yep, which will leave this form of copy protection in pretty much exactly the same boat as all the others: honest people who know nothing about “cracks” and “warez” and other methods of circumvention will get screwed, while the tech-savvy customers and the actual pirates will happily get around the protection.

Just about every single DRM or other form of anti-pirating device included in games, software and other products over the past few years has inconvenienced honest consumers far more than it has hurt the pirates.

Nah. I think no more than 24, maybe 48 hours.

Somebody on this board said that marketing is theology. I guess that is the case. They think in dogmas like “piracy cost us millions” without realizing that those illegal millions of copies of their product wouldn’t be purchased by mostly money-less pre-teens if they were available only legally. Money making part of gaming customers are those late teens and twenty - thirty somethings, that doesn’t care too much about 50$ for good game. But they do care about hassle and privacy involved in those anti-piracy measures. And they see total inefficiency of these measures. Heck, in the past I cracked legally owned games just to run them straight from .iso on HD to avoid shuffling CDs.

Well - I was highly anticipating it. Now I’m just another lost sale.

I’m sure it was someone who doesn’t know anything about marketing.

From a business standpoint, those moneyless pre-teens are irrelevant. They do not contribute to the profits that allow companies like Maxis or EA or Blizzard to develop new and exciting games. Companies are interested in people purchasing their product, not making sure everyone who wants a copy gets one.

Really the argument for all this bootleg threads always boils down to “I want it but I don’t want or have to pay for it”.

Software companies are certainly within their rights to try and protect their software from hackers and pirates, but from a marketing standpoint, it is foolish to apply copy protection that is inconvienient and obtrusive to legitimate users.

Personally, I don’t think I care that much as my computer is always connected to a high speed internet but I just don’t see the point of it. If you have a copy that appears valid, what would change over the course of ten days?

I saw the same video, and was unimpressed. Granted, a lot of what they think will make the game cool is different from the sort of things we’ve seen in games before, and Wright didn’t have the time to get into it, but each subgame looked like the equivalent of a shareware game.

Look at it this way; the final part of the game is a 4X space game. Those games are really, really, REALLY hard to make right. The very best is probably Master of Orion II, which was made 12 years ago. Even the really good ones, like Sins of a Solar Empire or Galactic Civilizations, have significant flaws, and a lot are either very flawed (e.g. Ascendancy) or absolute disasters (Star Wars: Rebellion, Master of Orion III.) And these are heavily developed games by reputable game companies.

So, realistically, how good do you think the 4X part of “Spore” is going to be? If it’s not at least as good as GalCiv, it’ll bore you to death once you get to that part of the game. Similarly, the “Civilization” part of the game will look like a terrible bore as opposed to playing “Civilization.”

Taken as a whole it might be a diverting little game, assuming it works conceptually, but I remain concerned that it’ll end up being a mishmash.