I think I originally found this article on the Dope, but it bears a re-post in case anyone hasn’t read it. It’s by the president of Stardock, the company that made Galactic Civilizations 2 and Sins of a Solar Empire, talking about how unnecessary copy protection has been for his company. Here’s a good quote from the article:
What about buying it on Ebay and using the inevitable crack to get around the ‘security feature’? You still get to play the game, without contributing to the sales, without pirating. Win win?
I used to pirate games a lot in my early teens, then one day (after I finally got a steady job) I cleaned out my room and threw all my illegal pirated games into a skip. I will never download (or buy) illegally again, I’ve just about restored my collection of games now…
When will those fuckers learn, for all their good intents it just doesn’t bloody work. Has there been any game that hasn’t been cracked within a couple of days? Most are cracked within hours.
For spore I have a feeling the check in is when it also checks the server for new content. If they do this the crack will need to be quite creative.
Also, I heard Bioshock took (relatively) longer to crack. I mean I still think it was only a week or so, if that, but they got sales from all the reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally impatient people.
But how many sales did they lose due to that screwed up security system they used ? I didn’t buy one myself - in no small part because of that same system - but from what I’ve heard there were all sorts of problems with people being unable to use the game. Not to mention that it installs files that you can’t get rid of. I have no intention of letting it on my computer.
OK, you’ve got me there. That’s a pretty good reason.
You are aware that there are cameras all over that store? And there are salespeople that ask if you need help, not because you need help but to deter shoplifting? There’s even locks on the front door of the Mervyns! And that Ford dealer down the street locks up all its cars at night! Heck, you probably lock your front door – aren’t you now treating your neighbors as thieves? Shame on you! [/sarcasm] C’mon, bandit, that’s pretty weak.
You may have a point, but this example seems unlikely to me – I can’t imagine someone that travels with a laptop (I’m assuming they’re not lugging around a desktop), and they never go online. Really? Why would you even travel with a laptop, if not to check mail and such? I’ll give you your inconvenience angle, but this is a little contrived.
I recall that - somehow, in some impossible way - gaming survived, grew and thrived in the early days when people copied discs like hotcakes. Amazing, isn’t it?
There were copy protection schemes pretty early in the game, they were just different and more creative. Things like requiring specific words from game manuals to start a game (I remember when I got my first computer when I was 12 or 13, my uncle gave me a giant folder of photocopied manuals so I could play the games on the floppies he copied for me) - or my favorite, pinwheel things where you had to align two discs to get a certain result.
Those copy protections were actually more onerous on the user than the current ones for the most part.
This is very true. Back in the day, you’d get a game on a floppy (a media very likely to degrade), and the copy protection would prevent you from making a copy even as a backup for yourself. Several products (Locksmith, Nibbles Away) evolved to rid games disks of copy protection, and they weren’t cheap.
Then there’s dongles, still widely used for music software. Talk about intrusive.
And let’s not forget the black text on red paper (SimCity for instance) to enter the code from. If you were lucky they were numbers but sometimes they were graphics. And, of course, those were all cracked too, but I still have most of the forms for those games (and the games still running in DOSBox two decades later.) MOO had “identify the spaceship from the manual”, Zany Golf had a disk, lots of the LucasArts adventure games had a code you had to put in partway through the game to be able to finish it, I think Wing Commander had something, and so on. I’m sure we could make a big long list just from memory.
I take my laptop almost every time I go on a trip that involves air travel, and I use it primarily for watching movies, listening to music (when my iPod battery dies) and occasionally playing games - hardly ever for internet-related stuff. You can’t easily get connected to the 'net if you’re in flight, obviously, and not every place you are going to go has wi-fi (or, at least, unencrypted free-access wi-fi). I do know that a lot of hotels and other places charge for internet access. I guess I’m weird in that I can go more than a couple of hours or so without checking my e-mail, but if I really wanted to play, say, Spore in such a place, I’d probably be pissed at having to PAY to check into some server so that I can play a single-player game that I ALREADY paid money for.
Does, say, Ford send over someone every ten days to make sure you haven’t loaned your car to someone ? And if they don’t show up, will your car suddenly stop working ? And does their anti-theft tech have a reputation for damaging or wrecking the car, or the garage that you keep it in ?
I bought some shelves from Target a few weeks back. They don’t require me to check in every ten days; and if Target goes bankrupt, my shelves won’t spontaneously reduce themselves to sawdust. These people ARE treating customers in ways that would be regarded as ridiculous in other industries.
Spare me – it was stated above that there was some sacred principle, and I find that highly suspect, and in turn ridiculous. The mailman requires you to use a certain range of mailbox types, or you don’t get mail. Apple only lets you use the iPhone AT&T’s network. The cell phone company knows what tower you’re near, and your phone literally phones home to keep operating. These limitations don’t seem onerous to me, and I especially don’t think they imply that customers are thieves as was stated upthread. If you don’t like these limitations, fine! Shop elsewhere, or don’t get mail or cell service. I can see there are legitimate reasons to not like the software-phone-home scheme, and admitted as much above, in the very post you quoted. Why is all the extra drama and silly scenarios about disintegrating furniture and silly puffery about principles even necessary? It detracts from legitimate objections to this scheme and is frankly silly and overblown.
OK, I guess that’s a pretty good objection. I would assert that you’re not typical, but what do I know. But again it doesn’t seem very unlikely that you’d plug in your laptop to the net three times a month, no?
In the first two cases, neither is really a good approximation of what SecuROM is. iPods working on on AT&T, or USPS delivering only to certain types of mailboxes, is fundamentally the same as Spore running only on PCs, which of course is true of most PC games. A cell phone, of course, exists for the express PURPOSE of being connected to a cell network.
In any event, much of the point of this thread is that people WON’T buy Spore and Mass Effect now. I was very much looking forward to Mass Effect, but now there’s no way; Spore I was going to buy if the reviews were good, but again, no way. I simply don’t trust SecuROM; it has a terrible reputation for making computers go wacky.
And I suspect they’ll quietly abandon it after awhile.
No, it shows how silly and obnoxious these copy protection schemes are, since that’s how furniture would have to act if the furniture industry was as control-freakish as these people are. I buy furniture from someone, and it’s mine; they aren’t allowed to wire it with remote controlled explosives and destroy it if they feel like it. These people feel they have a right to do the equivalent with their games, however.
If other industries acted like this, they’d go out of business. I wouldn’t be surprised if the PC gaming industry “protects” itself out of existence as well.
I’d contend its not helpful to manufacture unlikely examples of things that don’t happen and never will. But I guess we’ll have to disagree.
So, leveraging my example of dongles above, how about if the game came with a USB key that you had to insert to play? Would that be better, worse? Would people still feel strongly about “being treated as thieves” ?
I’d feel slightly better, my issues are:
My USB slots tend to be full
I have to not lose it
It pretty much kills digital distribution (Direct2Drive for example, though I like hard copies anyway)
If I ever travel with a laptop, or go to game locally with a friend it’s yet another small thing to get lost in the bottom of the bag I’m bringing, or remember to bring.
It’s still treating us like thieves.
Despite all these grievences, I do like this idea a lot more than the online check in.
I don’t think analogies to physical possessions really are that helpful or apt. The problem with software in particular is that it can be duplicated almost instantly with no loss of information. You can’t buy a sofa and then create copies for your friends. Even a book, which can be photocopied, still takes extra resources and is a general pain to copy. But a game or application can be copied indefinitely, each instance an exact reproduction.
That doesn’t negate the points I, Jayn, and mhendo made, though. You can poo-poo principles if you like, but that’s a major factor in my decision-making when it comes to these things. I ran Windows XP for about 5 years and tolerated the authentication code bullshit…until the time I knocked an IDE cable loose in my PC, plugged it back in, and XP not only demanded I re-enter my authentication code in three days, but my code no longer worked. It had a finite number of uses before it expired. I’m sorry, but that was a legal copy of Windows. Why does Microsoft get to decide I can no longer use it?
I don’t consider my principle about free software to be ‘sacred’. That’s your word, not mine. But I believe it to be legitimately come by and I see no reason to subject myself to more arbitrary, unnecessary leashes.
Bosstone, you can protect software without being total control freaks. I would have accepted an original activation (minus SecuROM) with a choice of online and offline options. But, once it’s activated, it should stay activated, it shouldn’t require any of these periodic checks. It’s asinine.
I work for a software company, and we use activation. It has its flaws, which we’re working on, but the aim is to make it not a huge pain in the ass for people. And, yes, there are easily acquired cracks to get around it. But the point of activation isn’t to totally lock down your product - it’s to discourage casual piracy, particularly people who don’t even realize they’re pirating. An alarming number of people see nothing wrong with installing on 18 different computers or making copies for all their friends, it’s true. But the people who really want to pirate software can, and will, crack your software. Once you’ve started alienating paying customers to prevent people who would never buy your software anyway from using it, you will be rightly criticized by your customers.