Sounds to me like it’s just Mass Effect that’s going back on their copy protection scheme, although I didn’t read the article through to the end.
Also, this doesn’t seem to address the problem of playing the game again 10 years down the road, which to me is the big issue with this sort of copy protection.
You missed this :
Not quite. It also reauthenticates your copy of the game every time you go online, which I think is non-invasive enough to be acceptable.
The Nerds Win!! The Nerds Win!
I still don’t like them not allowing me to install it on more than 3 different computers without contacting their tech support. There are some games I still play decades later with way more than 3 PC changes in between. Also, what contributes a computer change? Is it a new HDD, MOBO or what?
But apart from that I think they’ve managed to reclaim a customer, for now. At least I will be able to play without a CD in the drive, which is welcome. There will probably be a patch for limited installs a long long time before I more onto my fourth PC.
Yay, us!
Cynical Bastard Mode;
Where they’re at now is exactly what they did with Bioshock, with the authentication and the three installs maximum. People didn’t take too kindly too it then.
Perhaps they brought out a worse story, waited for the hubbub, and then took it back down to the level they’d already planned so people would be happy with it?
I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
I want to encourage good game development, yet I also want to discourage intrusive anti-piracy measures. There is no good answer.
I bought Sam & Max Season One, and paid extra to have the disc sent to me. Unlike the original episode downloads, the disc suddenly requires me to have the DVD in to play the game. It also detects my disc emulation software, which I use because I happen to hate looking around for the disc every time I play the damn game.
I buy the game because I want to own it, not rent it.
I did not go in for the digital distribution of Portal. I wanted to own the disc. But it turns out that owning the disc is irrelevant. I’m just as beholden to the digital distribution system as if I had never bought a physical copy of the game. I created an account and logged in to play the game, but I felt dirty about it, and I’m angry that I have to have this spyware installed just to play a game I paid for and own the disc to. Why did I register? It’s not an online game. I should have waited for a patch, and kept my registration key none of anybody’s goddamned business.
I will not any longer. I’ll buy Mass Effect, but I won’t install it until I can do so without making it anybody else’s goddamn business. It won’t teach anybody a lesson about the folly of intrusive copy protection, but at least they may not run off with the idea that it was really the sci-fi RPG genre that wasn’t bankable.
When will I go online with a single player game? Or are you referring to patches/extra content?
Patches/extra content.
About the 3 activations thing. I wonder if you were to uninstall it, make an equipment change then reinstall the game if that would be a work around? They say installing/uninstalling doesn’t count toward the activations just the number of computers it’s on and upgrades at a certain point would trigger it.
If it’s the same as what they used for Bioshock, you get 3 credits. When you install the game, you use a credit, and when you uninstall you’re refunded a credit. Theoretically, anyway; they had major problems actually making this work when Bioshock was launched.
In these cases, I question what happens when there’s a hard drive failure and you lose the data without having uninstalled first. I suspect a call to EA will get you your credit back, but you really shouldn’t have to jump through hoops because of an accident. It’s why I dumped Windows and switched to Linux.
Just thought I’d post this for anyone who doesn’t read Penny-Arcade.
I’d have thought you’d buy the game, then go download the, ah, mechanism deactivator afterwards?
To respond to the guy who estimated a few weeks for a crack or a workaround; it depends. Sometimes it can be cracked quite easily, if the system is inherently flawed. (I’ve heard of someone who actually faked a validation server for Bioshock, for instance) However, Bioshock and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory were notorious among the cracking community for being tough nuts. Of course, that meant it was a challenge. But I do know as a fact that SC:CT wasn’t availible as a working straight-out-of-the-.rar download until aproximately six months after launch. And I have heard that a lot of people actually broke down and went ahead and bought it.
It’d be interesting to see NPDs sales numbers for the SC titles, and how SC:CT compared.
(Sorry for the double post)
I’m actually glad for them that they’re doing this. Could I hypothetically feel victimized? Sure. The games industry is bitter and desperate. You won’t have to listen to Gamespot’s HotSpot more than twice to encounter a discussion about the effects and countermeasures of and against piracy. There’s a disproportional ratio of people playing, and people who have bought, a game. Someone estimated a 7:1 ratio of downloaded copies vs. bought ones, and I think that sounds about right.
I just accessed a popular pirate haven’s game download page. There are over two thousand people actively downloading Assassin’s Creed as we speak. That’s one source for a game that has been out on two consoles for half a year, as well as on the PC for a month - in non-peak hours.
I want those people to stop; I want them to halt their downloads and delete the files on their computers, out of an ethical concern for the status of PC gaming. We’re seeing many, many developers who until recently have been faithful to the PC platform, now giving us the cold shoulder. I welcome every attempt they make to restrain piracy of their games. SecuROM, digital activation, whatever. As long as it works for legitimate users, fine. Even if it is a hassle; even if I had to wait two days for my Bioshock activation to come through, that was fine.
Because the callousness of the PC pirate is leaving me cold.
This isn’t targeted at any response in this thread; I’m just getting my gut feeling off my chest.
Aye, there’s the rub.
I agree piracy is bad, and I wish it wasn’t so prevalent. But I don’t think the game companies are going about it the right way. Look at the digital music industry; Sony went the wrong way in their DRM, and they’re a laughingstock now. On the other hand, iTunes has pretty handily destroyed any effect piracy might have. Sure, there’s still people passing around music for free, but there’s vastly more working through iTunes. Yes, that’s an unsupported assertion, but I can tell you that if it came to buying music from Sony versus pirating, I’d pirate. If it came to buying from iTunes versus pirating, I’d buy from iTunes. And I don’t think I’m alone.
Don’t treat the customer like a thief, make it easy for them to access their purchases, and they’ll be far, far more interested in purchasing than pirating. You won’t eliminate piracy entirely; there’s a core group that pirate because they like to pirate, not because they’re upset at the game companies. You’re never going to stop them, so it’s better to marginalize them. Steam has gone a long way toward this goal, I think.
EA has recanted.
Neither Spore nor Mass Effect will require the ten day check-in; you’ll still need SecuROM, but you’ll be able to activate once then only again if you want to patch or download new content.
If I may respond to this part. It’s partly about the continued progression of intrusion, and partly about the fact that it doesn’t actually work. I am willing to put up with some reasonable measure of hassle (keeping the disc in the drive, USB dongle, well-designed occasional activation system) in order to play a game I like. However, if the requirement gets too onerous (and every 10-days, for example, is), I stop being willing. In my experience the trend has been towards more and more invasive demands on legitimate users to prove that they are such, with no end in sight. This is a slippery slope argument, but it is, in my opinion, a valid one. The reason it’s valid is that none of these things actually prevent piracy. If I, as a legitimate purchaser, have to do more and more, but the pirated versions continue to come out, I start to get angry at the people who are making me do all this extra work. I’m willing to put in some effort to help protect the industry, but all this cd-checking authorizing dongled crap doesn’t do that. It just makes extra work for me, and provides a challenging puzzle for the guys who like to find security holes.
When somebody holds up a prize and says “All you have to do is jump through this hoop, and you get this”, you jump through the hoop. But, then, somebody figures out that if they just walk around the hoop, they can get the prize too. So, the next time, the guy makes you jump through a hoop and slide under a bar. And someone else figures out how to get past that. After a while, you get pretty pissed off at the guy who’s holding out the hoops when you can see streams of people just walking up and getting the prize, right?
Yeah, but SecuROM still blows up hardware.
I thought they fixed most/all of the issues with SecuROM now. I mean, it still does the operation at “root” level (I think), well as close as you can get to root on windows, but all it does is hid the process, it isn’t nescessarily bad.
Well, at least MY DvD-drive hasn’t formed into neomeganeudarkvoltron and tried to slaughter an orphanage yet.