I was actually thinking of buying it. Not now.
If the software industry wants its customers to stop acting like Robin Hood, they should quit being the Sherriff of Nottingham.
You’d lend it to a friend? I guess a periodic check would ensure that it’s not on two computers at once. Maybe that’s their reasoning. Of course, it’s going to hurt them (a lot) more than it’s going to help them (hardly at all).
What does this mean?
Maybe I was too brief and unclear. I mentioned moneyless youngsters because they consist bulk of owners of illegal copies. And usual reasoning beyond introduction of convoluted DRM schemes is “we are loosing meeeeelons of dollars - there are 100.000 illegal copies of our product.”. But if there was no illegal copies available, they wouldn’t sold 100.000 copies - because most of them are in the hands of those moneyless youngsters. On the other hand in the meantime potential paying customers are deterred from purchasing legal copies because illegal ones are more user friendly - lacking DRM checks, copy protection software and - pet peeve of mine - “keep CD in drive during playing” feature. All that fighting with piracy is not ineffective. It’s seriously counterproductive.
Hey, I was looking forward to Spore as much as the next guy, but if this is real, than I’m right with you. When you find a working copy, let me know, please.
Well, if Der Trihs isn’t going to buy it then I’m going to go out and buy 5 copies because…
Oh…wait. I agree with him. I won’t be buying this either though I originally intended to give it a try. Damn…too bad really.
It’s a short hand for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate, the classic space type game like MOO. It also applies to games like the CIV games.
-XT
Just a heads up, folks, we can’t disseminate info on where to find pirated/cracked versions on the boards. Nor should you request people to notify you of such things. Ethics of piracy is fine to discuss, but not the practicals of trying to find out where/how to obtain pirated work.
Ideologically, though, I absolutely agree - this is a terrible business decision and as someone who was biting my nails for Spore for years and would have lined up to buy it at launch, I now won’t buy it.
I wasn’t particularly interested in Spore, but Mass Effect was definitely up for consideration. Not anymore. I hope there’s enough backlash from this to teach them a lesson.
I get what you’re saying. The bulk of the owners of illegal copies are people who would not or could not buy the game anyway. I don’t belive that is completely true.
I don’t think it will be a “mishmash”. I think taken as a whole, the game just won’t have enough depth. It seems like the bulk of the development went into the editors used to create wacky creatures, building and vehicles. And then you just watch these abominations move around Epcot pavillion cities until you get bored and blast it with a laser from your UFO.
Not trying to be ignorant here, but I really don’t understand everyone’s anger over this. Many software products these days require some sort of activation, once only, at install time.
So this game does a check every 10 days… so what?
I can understand that there are some valid concerns: what if the check is buggy? What if it doesn’t work right and prevents me from playing the game? What if it takes over my connection for 30 minutes, doing God knows what? OK, those are valid concerns. But let’s just stipulate for a minute that the 10-day check works, is fast, and is non-intrusive, and in fact you may not even be aware it happens at all, its that good. What is the concern then?
Is it a concern that the game company is spying on you in some way? I guess I could get behind that a bit – we don’t really know what that check code does. It may upload all your e-mails to Bill Gates or something, for all we know. I’m not sure I find this a good enough argument to abandon ship; there are certainly people out there on slash-dot or elsewhere that will examine what’s going on, and you’d probably hear about any skull-duggery.
So what’s the beef, precisely?
It’s the principle that the publisher is treating customers like they’re convicts on parole. “Okay…you bought the game and gave me your money, but you still need to check in every 10 days so we know you haven’t committed a crime.”
I bought the game. There is no reason the company should continue to look over my shoulder.
Also, these are single player games which do not have online connectivity as a crucial part of the gameplay. While, yes, nearly every computer is hooked to the internet these days, there are some that aren’t. What if I want to install the game on my laptop which doesn’t have net access? I should be able to, right? No, this will prevent that. I see no reason that they should put me on a leash for buying their game.
Yes, you can say that it’s done to stop the pirates. But by doing so they inconvenience the legitimate players at best and make the game unusable at worst. They’re sabotaging their own product.
And all that’s setting aside the fact that SecureROM sucks. They did this crap with Bioshock, and their much vaunted verification servers were riddled with problems on launch day, as well as bugs in the authorization code itself.
Hypothetical (which I suspect will become more common the longer the game has been out).
You’ve bought the game, but gotten a little tired of it and no longer play much anymore, instead opting for an MMO like WoW or just plain web-surfing. Your net goes down, so what do you do? Fire up Spore, since it’s not an online game. But wait! You haven’t played it in a month, and it can’t authenticate because your net is down. Now what?
Or worse, people who travel a lot, and want a game that doesn’t need a net connection to work because they can’t rely on having one regularly. Spore and Mass Effect no longer meet their needs, because they require periodic check-ins.
Basically, there’s no reason an online authentication should be a regular requirement for an offline game. It doesn’t hurt the pirates (because they’ve circumvented the check-in) and it encourages people to used cracked versions because they don’t want to deal with the DRM.
Well, even assuming all the things you mentioned, you missed something else that plenty of people have already noted—a system like this requires that the servers for the game be maintained and operational in perpetuity. Is the company going to do that?
What if i buy the game, play it for a while, put it aside, and then decide in a few years to take a trip down memory lane and play it again? Will those servers still be there, ready to authorize my use the game i played for? Will the company decide that keeping those servers operational is no longer financially viable because people are no longer buying that particular game? Or will the company even make an active decision to kill the servers in order to force people off the old game and on to whatever their next new game is?
I can still play my 10-year-old Tomb Raider games on my old PS1. Will we be able to say the same about these games?
The company making these games has made very clear that it doesn’t trust its customers; why should its customers trust the company?
And, on preview, what Jayn_Newell and Bosstone said.
I was interested in both games. Now I have at least half an mind to pirate both games, jsut to screw with the company. Treat me like a customer and not a thief. No other industry does crap like this. Even retail, at most, likes to see your receipt on the way out and that’s a quick formality more than a real security check.
It’s simple: make games that lots of people like and people will come out to buy them. GalCiv I and II and Sins of a Solar Empire sold or still sell like hotcakes. And they make vastly more profit on thsoe than all these uber fancy things like Crysis which no one can run properly or which comes with oodles of copy protection.
Hardly; have you actually read this thread, or others like it ? People are saying they don’t like being treated like criminals; that they don’t like not really owning something they’ve bought; that they don’t trust the company to not do something like shut down those validation servers; and these obnoxious copy protection schemes tend to damage the game’s functionality. And that’s just with what we know; frankly, I don’t trust people who think like this, who regard their customers as criminals, to not include spyware or worse with their product.
Frankly, they and their defenders need to keep something in mind : I’m their customer, potentially. They need to convince me to give them money, not go out of their way to piss me off. I can and will walk away if they don’t present me with a product I like, the way I like it. I’ll go read a book, or play a less paranoia-hobbled game, instead of giving money to people that I don’t like.
Exactly. I may be salivating like mad over Spore, but it’s a luxury, as is all gaming.
Which, frankly, is probably why they feel they can get away with it. “Don’t like it? Just don’t buy it.” Eventually nobody’s going to like it enough to buy their products.
And they’ll probably blame pirating, rather than admit that they drove their own customers off. And steadfastly ignore questions about how games with less restrictive protections sell at a profit.
I think the problem is that there now exist companies, like SecuROM, that serve no other purpose than to provide anti-piracy “solutions”. They’re the de facto experts on piracy (just ask 'em!), and they’re doing their level best to stay in business. The best way to stay in business, if you are an anti-piracy company, is to inflate the threat of piracy. When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
The anti-piracy company is happy, because they’re getting paid for providing security for another game. The game company is happy, because their game is pirate-proof (at least, according to the security company). The pirates are happy, because they get the challenge of cracking a new game before their friends do.
The only ones hurt by all of this are the people who legitimately bought the game.
I don’t think I have a computer that could run Spore even if I wanted to, but I’m awaiting with anticipation the announcement that someone has cracked this stuff with something absurdly simple like rolling back the system clock.
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like an online check every time you start the game is a much harder to crack authentication scheme than an online check every 10 days. While you can still break the “online check” part, the obvious weakest link is to just screw with whatever it is that calculates whether it’s been 10 days.
For folks who’re curious about SecuROM: There have also been quite a few complaints about SecuROM hosing one’s computer permanently if you install a game that has SecuROM included. For most people, it doesn’t harm them that they’ve noticed.
But for the unlucky few, there are quite a few reports that it prevents you from burning ANYTHING to CD/DVD. Ever again. It’s frequent enough that The Sims 2 boards have FAQs on how to remove the game, lock stock and barrel, from your machine, and provide information on which expansions have SecuROM. 
No doubt that’s an important factor. But I also think that a lot of what’s going on is a matter of the gamemakers using piracy as an excuse. If a game sells bad, it’s due to piracy. Not the DRM driving people off; not bad game design; not a lack of originality; not because it can be played well only on very high end machines; not even bad marketing. It was all the pirate’s fault.