Mass Effect and Spore to use new Securom copy protection
 

Securom is already a horrible copy protection, if it doesn't like your cd-rom or dvd-rom drives, well, you're out of luck, so sorry. Now they're changing it so that it checks with the servers every 10 days to authenticate your cd-key and install. If you can't authenticate, then you can't play at all. So you basically need an internet connection to play a single player game, for Mass Effect at least. Word is that Spore uses the same copy protection but it at least has a multiplayer component.

Honestly, it's this kind of thing that turns people to piracy (not that I'm advocating piracy). I don't want to have to worry about installing a new hard drive or video card and irritating the copy protection or not being able to play because my internet is being loopy. EA really should take a page from Stardock, they still had plenty of sales and keep their customers' gratitudes for not making them jump through hoops just to play a game.

What's really ridiculous about this is that the odds are there will be a crack out for it within a week of release.

Never underestimate the ingenuity of people who don't want to pay for software, I always say.

I purchase my games and I'm always online. This won't effect me at all.

It's a shame that the game publishers are killing PC gaming like this.

I really like PC gaming. :(

No blame for the pirates?

I don't think they would spend the money and effort for something like this without reason.

If its anything like starforce though I will still hate it.

Just about every legit game I own, I will download the NO CD cracks, or the hacked EXE's just for the pure fact that all copy protection is removed.

Amazing when a games executable goes from 16 meg to 3.

That much less shit in my ram.

And less chances of a foul root kit, or other "protection" snooping around my hardware.

It is just all a complete waste of money, those who wish to steal the game will no matter what you think.

War on PC game piracy is a joke just like RIAA's little game.

Personally I hope not, I really hate console gaming.

The saddest little fact is that there is a even larger crowd for Console Piracy these days. Its not too difficult to buy two 360's and have one cracked and the other not.

Or if you're willing to risk it just keep updated with the latest mod chips and cracked games.

But its just easier to make the evil PC gamers look like the only real issue.

I'm mostly ranting and taking away from this thread, so I'll stop.

Its the ease of use, most users are not savvy enough to use an xbox crack.

this wont phase pirates one bit. it's just another business for coders to jump in to because they're working on the corporate dime.

They really could care less if the end result is pirated or not, as long as it looks good enough for them to keep getting a paycheck.

So if it doesn't help, why do publishers pay for this?

Well, the copy protection pisses off some customers but it also prevents your average pirate from getting it, since something like this new system will probably take a while to crack. If pirates foiled is greater than customers pissed off, then they make more money than with no copy protection at all, especially since the pissed off customers already bought the software. Of course that doesn't take into account the people that pirated it but had no intention of buying it in the first place since there's no way to accurately gauge how many there are.

I think you get the same sort of thing happening with music, people don't want to spend the money to buy CDs, especially when it's easier and more convenient to download illegally. Software is somewhat less convenient but also more expensive.

Not really. What turns people to piracy is them knowing they can get a game for free, so they choose to get it for free instead of paying $50 for it. 10 years ago DRM was no such thing in software and people were already pirating games so they wouldn't have to buy them.

People who simply don't want to pay for something they can get free are the result of this. It's a shame that the people who actually want to buy the games are punished for it but I don't see an alternative.

Yes, finally this was brought up. As someone who works in an industry based on copyright law, I cannot condemn a company that does whatever it can to stop people from literally taking their products for free. Most people who have a hard time frowning at pirates either don't understand or don't appreciate the importance of copyright laws and intellectual property rights. Go into a "big corporation deserves it" rant if you like, but you cannot seriously criticize them for doing this without taking a hard look at piracy practices and the lax laws surrounding them.

Leak a gimped version before release, refreshing it every now and then with a slightly different gimping. Then have it erase the HD of everyone who downloads it.

That's true, I didn't mean to imply that most pirates are doing it out of some sort of moral outrage. What I meant was that there are some people who would have paid for the game but won't because of DRM issues. A lot of pirates don't want to spend the money and many of them wouldn't buy the game even if piracy weren't an option. These companies make the mistake of assuming that every pirated game means a lost sale when in reality, a lot of pirates wouldn't buy the game no matter what. I think it would benefit the companies in the long run, they don't have to spend money on draconian copy protection measures that don't even work and customers don't have to worry copying their game to their laptop or upgrading hardware or any other of the myriad issues with DRM.

actually, it does. If servers can't authenticate you, you can't play. The moment they decide they don't want to upkeep those servers... you can't play anymore.

A good example of this scenario is actually happening.

Yeah but with things like wikipedia theres no need for technical know how, you can get everything you need to know online. You can buy chips that can crack the systems and most cracks that don't require something physical are avaliable through detailed walkthroughs.

That's simply untrue. The concept of DRM in the form of copy protection has existed for over 20 years.

The problem arises when the control methods become unacceptably controlling or restrictive.

So you're worried about them forcing a system upon us to prevent piracy and then not only abandoning that system but still requiring authentication? Doesn't that strike you as somewhat unheard of in the gaming world? MSN Music, sure, but that was a rather massive failure due to MS making virtually every mistake possible for online music. Unless something amazingly unexpected happens, ME and Spore are not likely to be failures.

Granted it's not going to be a problem for five years at least, but you can bet that MS (or whoever it is that's responsible for this) will pull the plug on the authentication server the very day it becomes unprofitable. If you don't think it'll be needed that far down the road, I will respectfully point out that there are still people out there devising new ways to defeat those copy protection methods on 20 year old games mentioned above.

Still, these may end up being the next Starcraft and Diablo 2, which still, after as much as 10 years, still have magnificent online investment because of such consistent use. It seems a bit early to be predicting their untimely deaths.

I'm sure if they "pull the plug" on their authentication servers, they would probably release a patch that would get rid of the copy protection altogether. There have been many games in which the developer released the game with copy protection, and then patched it out in a later patch.

I think it's kind of dumb that you have to authenticate every ten days rather than just authenticating once, but I have a constant internet connection that rarely goes down, so it won't really be a problem for me. I don't really see how this encourages piracy, since most people who want to play the game will probably buy it just to avoid the hassle of being bugged for authentication every ten days.

No, with a crack, it won't even ask once.

will it doesn't matter what the content is, music, game, book, movie. this is the CRUX of why DRM is problematic. If you buy a music, game, book, movie, you own a physical representation of it WITH NO LIMITATION to how or where you use it, it exists for all intrinsic purposes, forever.

While MMMOs have come and gone, ala Earth & Beyond, Gods & Heros, they have an intrinsic online requirement to the game.

I purchase games via Steam a download client created by Valve the makers of Half-Life and there challenges to the fact that it authenticates each and everytime I want to play a game. I was playing an older game the other day Call of Duty: United Offensive and I expect to only play that for a certain time. Yet Call of Duty 4, I bought traditionally box from a store and have it sitting on my desk. To play it I must have the CD in the drive. I could have downloaded it via Steam and they would authenticate me online.

If Steam goes away, I don't get to play it anymore.

While it may not be the case, there are business decisions that game companies make in order to stay profitable. It doesn't matter to them if you still like to play the game or not, they upkeep for them is a cost and they may not necessarily be making a monthly subscription profit from you, only the initial outlay for the game.

I have a copy of Bioshock which upon installing connects to authenticate and download a patch. For whatever reason, I cannot authenticate, and thus I cannot download the patch. This now required me to contact support and go back and forth with them until we resolved it.

Had I bought the Xbox360 version, I drop in the disc and start playing. Instead I had to spend several hours troubleshooting instead of playing. I don't know about how much free time you have, but mine is finite and very precious to me.

A lot of interesting takes here, but I DO firmly place the blame on the publishers. I'll try to dig around for some numbers, but two of the top selling games over the past few years have NOT used copy protection. Imagine that. I won't buy a game that uses it (I haven't bought many PC games lately, obviously). I planned to buy Spore, but now I will not (buy it at least). Yes, I think piracy is wrong, in many ways. However, publishers chasing away legit customers due to DRM that is borken (which nearly all of it is in some way, shape or form) is just ridiculous. The people who already planned to pirate either game still will. The people that planned to BUY it still will. The only outcome is that some people will buy it retail and then NOT be able to play, thus making another agitated customer. Show me a case of any gamer who pirates their games ever being prevented from doing so for more than 1-2 weeks after the release date... such a case does not exist. So, who are we helping? Well, honestly, nobody. Not the publisher, not the developer and certainly not the legit end user. Who are we HURTING? Well, SOME legit end users, and thusly the publisher and developer to some degree, albeit likely a small one.

I worked for a company that developed and provided DRM for clients using the internet to distribute video media (streaming and downloaded). Luckily this was NOT my primary department. I detest DRM. I have yet to see a case where DRM has proven to protect very much, especially in the video game industry. I have, however, seen MANY cases of DRM hurting legit customers. Wow, seems like a great scheme. The Sony DRM Rootkit? Sony Records Audio CD DRM that has proven three times over the course of its life to not work in Book Standard CD players? Bioshock's initial DRM that caused people to become furious and an immediate patch was made to change it?

An old post of mine about DRM. The points remain relatively the same. Sorry for the rambling, but this topic gets me in a tizzy. Most new copy protection schemes are broken BEFORE they are even released in new software. I would bet money (if I had any) that Spore will be cracked days to weeks before it hits retail shelves. Yeah, that's really sticking it to the pirates, right? I would also wager at strong odds that within a few weeks of release you see numerous reports of problems with the copy prot scheme. Yup, that's looking out for the real customers, too.

I don't know how anyone can argue FOR DRM these days. It's proven it's worthlessness from all angles over the past 5-10 years. Obviously a few of these companies still have really good marketing folks. *sigh*

xeph, I don't disagree with you with respect to DRM, however I can see a place wherein it fits in the stream and that is in production. DRM the alpha, beta, and gold. DRM the preproduction artwork, text, models to protect your "investment." That's where it needs the protection more than it needs it on the released version.

When you release it, strip off the DRM, and regression test the game then release.

This allows controlling it getting leaked and released into the wild before it's time.

Akin to visual time code burned into a workprint copy of a movie, most players won't want to experience the hassle, but those that wish to have it "before" the announced date are the same people who are the crackers. So your only maybe alientating them.

Cyn, I think that'd be great. The problem is that C-levels and investors seem to be convinced that their bottom line is in great jeopardy with no DRM on the shipped product. Studies have been done to prove how worthwhile and useful DRM is. Most of these studies have been conducted by/for the DRM scheme developers. Funny, eh?

My opinion stands at:
If someone can code it, someone can crack it.

thats how electronics work for me.

Which two?

If I had to guess, Half Life 2 and World of Warcraft.

WoW had authentication codes on their CDs then authenticate to a server.

HL2 has to authenticate to Steam servers.

Yeah, all Valve products have DRM through Steam.

I'm not against Steam entirely. As a content delivery system it's pretty damned convenient. As a front-end for my games it's the same deal. It's nice that my games will auto-update as long as Steam is open. It's also great that I never have to worry about losing or damaging the CDs for the game, or upgrading my computer. I can simply log into my Steam account and so long as I've got sufficient bandwidth I can re-download that sucker anywhere I want. The DRM aspect is pretty non-intrusive. It does worry me that all Steam-enabled games become unusable if I can't connect to the Steam servers, but I'd like to think the Valve folks will be forward looking enough that if they ever take the Steam servers down they'll offer some sort of patch or work-around.

The key part is this:

When you walk into your favourite game store and buy a copy of the latest game, you're not really buying the CDs (or DVDs, as the case may be). The physical media provide the content delivery, but what your hard earned cash is really getting you is a license. EULAs are more or less restrictive depending on the company and the product, but there has not been one to date that has stated that you may only use the product for x amount of years, and rightly so. There'd be an outcry at that sort of restriction. What these online DRM models do is effectively the same thing. These companies are deciding that you get to use their game only so long as it's profitable for them. And that, frankly, is not what I pay for.

Steam does have a workaround, there is an offline model that you have to activate. This is so that people who have dialup etc. can still be customers of Steam. I like the convenience of them too, this was one of the first things I did after buying HL2. The new games I made sure that I could do it without connecting to Steam.

As far as the games are concerned, I do understand the EULA and have many issues with it. I am referring to when I buy a CD/DVD for a Playstation2, Xbox, NES, SNES, DS, Gameboy (console games) I can play it at your house, my house, any one who has the requesite hardware.

The real issue is piracy. 5 years from now would be an excellent time to champion a concern about the servers shutting down.

I don't like the MPAA and RIAA because of their illegal and unethical practices in tracking down supposed pirates. Here's the thing: if you're actually guilty of piracy and you're caught, you should be punished. Let's not pretend that piracy is this amazing act of civil disobedience; it's theft. Back when I was using Napster, had I been caught, I should have been prosecuted and punished. Unless the game industry is taking a play from the MPAA and RIAA and using illegal and unethical practices, though, I can't fault them for attempting to make theft of their product more difficult.

Well I don't know about top-selling games for the year, but Sins of a Solar Empire had pretty good sales, topping the charts for a few months and it has practically no DRM. It doesn't even ask your cd-key when you install, you use your cd-key to register your copy online to get patches and new content. Great game too, I'm glad it succeeded to help the developer and also to show that DRM isn't necessary to make money.

Edit: Will, the problem is that it doesn't deter pirates at all. Every game with DRM has been cracked, many times before the official release date. Most people won't have issues with DRM but a few will and pirates will have no problems whatsoever. I don't know how easy or not it is to crack ME's or Spore's DRM but at least it's easy to tell when it has been cracked. Some games have DRM that doesn't just prevent you from playing, it degrades your playing experience like killing your entire party before the last boss or making your character control strangely and be unable to reload. With those, the crackers release a crack that just removes the cd-check or something and release it while later on pirates encounter these problems. So in those cases it may take weeks or months for crackers to completely bypass the DRM but I bet ME and Spore will be cracked within days of release.

You do need the CD key to patch and Stardock is a niche gamer company. I doubt their budget runs into the 10's and 100's of millions like some do. Still my younger brother downloaded it off bit torrent and played it.

This isn't as simple as pirating video or audio, though. You won't be able to get around this with a simple download of a p2p or mininova. I've seen Blizzard take on hackers on Bnet and win time and time again. I think you're assuming a lot in thinking that pirates will crack it and suddenly all pirates will have access.
There's no evidence to suggest that this DRM will effect playability.

A lot of this seems too premature. So premature, in fact, that it strikes me as pretense.

This argument is still about wanting piracy to be easier.

Piracy has never been hard...

From this link about Galactic Civilizations II.
I like the way they think...


Not entirely true. There are no auth codes for the discs themselves. They've even gone to a downloadable system and you just buy your account code online. MMOs are inherently a bit different though.


Define "niche gamer company" please?! Sins and GalCiv have been top chart sellers for several months each. Just because they are not EA does not mean they are not major players. Do you remember Cavedog? They were shortlived and small budgeted, but Total Annihilation was the number one RTS seller for a good long time, even beating Starcraft for a while (outside of Asia).


What Logan said. Piracy can't really GET much easier. Seriously. It was easy 20 years ago and it's easy today. People who want the game for free WILL get it for free, damned near every time. Regardless of DRM scheme, regardless of publisher, regardless of possible consequences. DRM does NOT protect sales, ever! Show me one study that proves that it does using sound logic and realistic data. I bet you can't! Think the whole thing through logically and you'll see what I mean. *shrug*

I must agree with the idea that DRM != protection for any dollar value of sales.

Publisher spends a boat-load of cash for the latest copy protection.

Such copy protection is well documented to have issues with certain hardware combinations, and other critical flaws that cause the game to not even run.

Who is hurt by this? The legit end user.

As a end user, if you buy a product that does not work. You should be able to get your money back... well not with PC games. No way, no how anymore.

So you are now left with a 60$ game that will not run on your computer. The publisher will attempt half-assed tech support that in the end usually frustrates the end user even more. Often to the point of giving up.

This leaves the end user in a situation, they paid good money for a product that does not work and will not be able to return it due to anti-piracy policies.

These dirty pirates that the Publishers (Might I add it is VERY COMMON that it is indeed the PUBLISHER not the DEVELOPER who adds Copy Protection.) are trying to deter are sitting back in their basements playing the very game with zero hassle because it was cracked days ago.

What happens now? That same one-time legit end user may never buy a game again from that publisher and will say "Fuck it" and download it and quite possibly many other games they never knew were available to download.

I've been playing games for many years, and have seen so many countless individuals have games be non-functioning because of Copy Protection. PC games have it bad enough with software/hardware compatibilities as it is, they do not need copy protection that is being given more and more low level protections to step in and increase the chance of things going bad.

Has Copy Protection made it any harder for a pirate to attain a game (A game that they never were going to purchase in the first place...) and cause them to say "Well this is too much hassle, I'll just go buy it instead." ? Hell no.

While it use to be far easier to attain such things, its still *VERY* easy to do so to this day.

I've yet to see a good reason as to why these games need copy protection. What we need are stiffer laws that fight against piracy, software based methods do not do shit.


Also as a side note, I would like to say that thanks to piracy, I have bought many ( As in 20+) games that I never would have even bothered with without trying it out first.

Demos are hard to come by anymore, and quite often they are far from the end product.

So copy protection has made some of my games non-functioning and caused me to *NEVER* buy ones with it installed. (Not all, just certain types), and piracy has actually caused me to PURCHASE games that I never would have bought in the first place.

Interesting no?

Destrox,

I'm in the same boat. I've downloaded games, decided I liked them and gone to the store to buy them. I don't really have any desire to pay $40-60 for a shitty game. I DO, however, have a great desire to support developers that make good games.

Ah this is another forum talking about the exact same thing with pretty much a lot of our exact points:

http://neowin.net/news/gamers/08/05/...-days#comments

It is that easy though. Every game gets cracked and it's put on the net. All you have to do is download it and replace the executable with a crack which probably comes with the download. If not, there are sites dedicated solely to cracks. Bnet is different because you have to log in to play because it's multiplayer. Mass Effect and Spore are both single player, although Spore does have some multiplayer components.

It probably won't affect playability like FADE did. From what I heard, FADE did a good job actually of deterring pirates (due to its difficulty in cracking) with relatively few genuine customers getting hit by it.

To me, this just comes down to the attitude of the companies that it's ok to hurt their legitimate customers in their fight against piracy. It doesn't deter pirates and some of the pirates who do get put off by it, would not have bought the game no matter what.

I might get it if they add it to Steam. Steam does DRM right, you download it and it authenticates once then you can play forever if you want, offline or online. If your HD gets fried, it's no problem, you just log back on to your Steam account and it starts downloading your games again. Can't say I'm surprised though that EA would ignore this digital distribution option and spring for some overly involved Securom DRM.

Looks like BioWare changed their mind.

Cool! I'm glad to see bitching on forums really does accomplish something after all.

Then what's the problem? Buy the game, install the crack, and be done with it. I've done that with plenty of games that I legally own but don't want to dig up the disc every time I play. I was under the impression that you couldn't crack it because of the check every 10 days (which they recently backpedaled on).

If it's that easily cracked, I don't see what the big deal is.

(edit: I read the rest of the post after replying and realized that it's already been established that Bioware went back on the 10-day check, so forgive me for stating what's already been stated.)

Very cool news, I'd still love to see the actual studies and proof that it is cost effective for them to use it.

Will, I don't really understand your "making piracy easier" observation. Let's get a real-world, material version of this. Let's say... murder.

Side A: Pro-DRM:

Sure, an OCCASIONAL innocent person is killed, but it "deters" criminals from violent crime. The vast majority of the populace is not affected at all.

Side B: Anti-DRM:

Even an occasional innocent being killed is not acceptable policy. Besides, capital punishment does NOT eliminate violent crime.


At least that's the comparison I see...

What? :orly:

First of all, software piracy and DRM is a real-world, material version. Either way, your observation doesn't quite work.

Okay, so DRM doesn't really work. Fine. So what next?

The Canadian government has recently tabled a new copyright bill. While it's still rough around the edges, it's a step into the right direction: it puts restrictions on the penalizations to end users. Instead of a maximum of $20,000 per illegal item, it's $500 per infraction.

Another step into the right direction is that they explicitly states that ISPs abide by the notice-and-notice system when illegal content is transferred.

It also imposes stiff penalties to those who upload illegal content (ie. the "real" pirates).

The only big problem is the blanket prohibition on circumvention of protections, which is related to this thread and Securom. For example, even if you are a legal owner of the software, it is illegal for your to break the security if something goes wrong with your attempts to unlock it. Hrm. :grumpy:

Generally, you can have as many copies of your legally owned material as you want on your devices, so long as you own said devices.

Anyway, I think this would help target pirate activity if it could be enforced (which it can't, really), but it's a step in the right direction. This issue has been sitting around with no legal updates for over 10 years.

That's not even close to the only thing wrong with the new legislation, although it's a big part of it.

That's another rant though, I guess.

Will, Almost every new form of copy protection has caused more burden to the buyer than it has to the pirate. CD Checks basically require me to keep a stack of 10 CDs on my computer and another 20-30 CDs readily handy on a shelf within arms reach.

I can't tell you how many games I've trashed because I lost the CD key to them or in the case of Diablo 2 the ink just rubbed off the sticker.. I swear I have at least 4 copies of Diablo 2 but I only have 1 CD key because the ink smears easily.

Half-life 2 required online authorization to play it offline. Not only this, but once you authorized it required you to download the 100+mb patch. Being on crappy dialup at the time meant I spend about 6 hours downloading a patch that fixed 1-2 bugs I probably never would have noticed in the first place. It was absolutely the the worst gaming experience of my life. It very negatively influenced my opinion of the game and the developer. I refuse to have Steam installed on my system.


These are of course slightly older examples because I've almost completely migrated away from PC gaming and more toward consoles. I'm glad to see Mass Effect dumped the every 13 days re-authentication deal and hopefully Spore does too as it'll probably be the only PC game I buy for a very long time.

Baraka,

DRM isn't material; Nor is copyright material. They are legal jargon, words on paper or spoken. Material crime is far more intimate with most people. Violent crime, robbery/theft, embezzlement, etc. Trying to crossover a law based on non-material objects into the material doesn't work. To me, that means the laws don't make sense. Am I not explaining this well? :(

The point is that, a) it's not terribly enforceable as there is limited evidence left behind during most "crimes" regarding DRM.

b) The rules are sticky and not well explained. Actually, with software you usually CANNOT have as many copies as you want on devices you own. Many pieces of software allow ONE install on ONE system (windows is the best example, but there are others). And you can almost never copy the disc, by way of the EULA.

c) It's the marriage of everything, DRM, copy protection and EULA that makes it a nightmare for legit end-users. I'd bet that many end-users, simply out of lack of understanding, violate the EULA more often than not.

At any rate, the defense against Willravel's comment is akin to this... If you COPY your gaming disc, using something that defeats the copy protection, you are in violation of the law (DMCA, I believe... at least). I don't want to hear about "making piracy easier"... I want to hear about "Not being assholes to your end-users".