Game News Mass Effect (and Spore) copy protection PHUN

[nik2008ofs]

Same here, I was ready to buy Bioshock, but when I learned of the copy protection scheme, I didn't even bother to pirate it... will probably torrent ME and then seed for six months or so, just to show them what I think of their DRM...

 

[FireWolf]

Unfortunately all you're showing is that they're right to go for increasingly more intrusive DRM. You might disagree with their DRM and pirate because of it, but how're they to know? How is the games designing/publishing world to take it. You've still stolen their product.

Getting developers to stop using DRM that cause considerable problems for their legitimate userbase is really difficult. If you buy the game, you're supporting the continuation of DRM (because sales are up ergo it must be the DRM preventing piracy) if you don't buy the game, they can tag the lost sale as due to piracy, or because the game wasn't decent.

The only solution is a system of DRM that isn't intrusive. I never really had a problem with CD keys or online cd key authentication so long as it was once, so long as nothing on my computer was compromised. CD/dvd authentication where the disc has to be in the drive is frustrating (especially when a nocd patch decreases load times significantly) but the way things continue to escalate in the hoops the buyer has to jump through demonstrate that there's no real answer. The PC is targeted as a Pirate platform because of the lack of control that the publishers or manufacturers have over the internet. If there was a way to share games over Live or other services, I can guarantee there would be a massive rise in console pirating simply because the means of distribution would be so much easier.

As it is, console pirates are probably worse than PC pirates. PC titles that get shared over the internet no one profits from, a console pirate distributing bootlegged discs for half the price of the original is getting benefit for minimal costs. I'm not justifying PC piracy by this rationale but to ignore piracy on consoles because it's less prolific is a mistake. Go to the cause of piracy and find a solution for that.

Numerous people in several forums I've visited say that they pirate the game because of the DRM, now some might just be justifying their activity, but some people are genuinely against DRM practices but still want to play the game. The former are never going to pay for the game anyway, regardless of how much you spend on DRM, the latter are lost sales because of trying to stop the first group. How is that good sense? How do people demonstrate, in a way that businesses can quantify, that they support the game, want more games like it, but don't want the DRM and the hassle it brings with it?

I believe it was galactic civilisations or something that used digital distrubtion and no DRM, the developers decided not to treat their customers as criminals from the outset, demanding they prove their legal behavior every 10 days like a drug offender, and I don't believe sales suffered as a result. The game was still pirated, but assuming everyone would rather perpetrate criminal behavior than show financial support for the games they enjoy, only being kept in check by DRM, is a disturbing business mechanic.

 

[Walkin' Dude]

I may have posted this before, but my first forays into piracy were because of copy protection. When I purchased KOTOR, it would not play because of a conflict with SecuROM. The tech support people sent me a DRM-free .exe so that I could play.

Later, I purchased another game with the same problem. Instead of fooling with tech support, I decided to seek out a DRM-free file on my own. From there, I learned how to download the full games themselves. I figured if I was going to have to go through the hassle of getting finding a crack to play a game that I paid for, I might as well go through the hassle of finding an entire game and save my money. It is very likely that, had I never encountered the first issue with KOTOR, I would have taken a much longer time to start pirating games.

Granted, I still purchase games from companies that I strongly desire to support. I am waiting to play The Witcher until I can afford it (and have the time to play it). I have purchased GalCiv2 and all expansions (even though I have not had much time to play it). However, if I am on the fence about a game, I am much more likely to demo the full game.

 

[FireWolf]

... From there, I learned how to download the full games themselves. I figured if I was going to have to go through the hassle of getting finding a crack to play a game that I paid for, I might as well go through the hassle of finding an entire game and save my money...

This isn't sound logic to me. I can advocate going to support and requesting assistance, and even to the extent that they provide you with a no DRM application, even sending you the game without the DRM even on the install disc, but you can't really justify the effort it takes to find a crack for a game as equating to the cost of the title at retail prices. That's like saying it's a hassle to save up for a car that might have an engine fault so instead you go out and steal one. While you're not physically taking anything from the developer, you are making use of a service and not paying for it.

If you went out and bought the game and downloaded a DRM free cracked version off the internet, that I can understand and support (even if it doesn't encourage change) but not paying for something you used and enjoyed is unfair on the developers.

 

[Walkin' Dude]

Well, in the case of software and DRM, it is more like having the car designed so that it might not start because I have a particular garage door. A possible manufacturing defect is one thing, but DRM is intentionally added to the product, and it does nothing to add value to the product. It is consumer unfriendly.

Anyway, I am not saying that it was justification for piracy. I am just saying that is how I learned to find cracks, and after learning to find cracks, it was easy to take the next step to moving on to full software. If not for having to find cracks for a legitimate purchase, I might not have made the effort to learn to find the cracks at all. If I did, it would have happened much later, because it was something I had no interest in doing at the time.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I can speak from personal experience that the recent trends in copy protection have actually curbed my buying of games. When I do buy games, I buy them from places like Direct2Drive or through Stardock's commercial game distribution software. If they're available on those sites, I may buy a game from them. But I get a little sick of the intrusive copy protection schemes. Hell, I started gaming in the 1980s when they had those cardboard spinwheel copy protection schemes, and those didn't bother me nearly as much as what they're doing today with DRM.

 

[tunguska]

If you went out and bought the game and downloaded a DRM free cracked version off the internet, that I can understand and support (even if it doesn't encourage change) but not paying for something you used and enjoyed is unfair on the developers.

While in some cases the devs actually support increasingly intrusive DRM, I agree that if you like the game, even if only the cracked version, the developers do deserve something. I would be happy to do as you are advocating here (buy the game, leave it in the shrinkwrap, and just download the cracked binary) except for the fact that I don't want to be voting with my dollars for even more intrusive DRM next time. I realize that increasing the leech count at TPB for instance might also end up as a vote for more intrusive DRM, but it looks like there is no sticky count of total downloads at TPB, just of current leechers and seeders. And I could also download from a more obscure tracker site or with emule or something. Or wait until after the first month of release when maybe they aren't monitoring the numbers so closely anymore. That sort of thing. As you have pointed out there really is no way to vote against more DRM, but I at least don't want my purchase to count as a vote for more.

In the cases where the devs obviously support the DRM I would say that they don't deserve the full asking price of the game. Maybe 20% of the asking price should be deducted and contributed to the cracking team that is first to crack it instead. The devs could make this easy by placing some kind of "donate" button somewhere. They may not legally be able to explain what the real intention is (to be compensated by DRM protesters) since it would probably be a violation of their contract with the publisher, but I don't see the problem with just a "donate" button. Although who knows? Maybe donations are specifically forbidden in the contract.

 

[Jeff Graw]

Sweet, what an easy rationalization to pirate both games!

 

[franc kaos]

As I understand it, any crack is going to remove the 'phone home' every 10 days stuff, so what is the point? unless someone floods EAs servers with license keys, anyone who buys the game is always going to have a valid license - unless they loan it to a friend, or install it onto a second laptop, or buy it second hand, most of which you could with the 360 version.

I was looking at Spore with interest, and with its online component of downloading others civs to populate your game, I would have thought, again, the every 10 day 'phone home' reactivation is pointless, as it can check your license whenever you download more content.

Tho' with it being EA, that server'll probably be closed down one year later - Spore2 with slightly better graphics will be out.

I Hope and pray that EA fucking implodes.

Tony F Paulazzo.

 

[miles foreman]

I don't understand these developers who bitch about piracy. Sever your ties with whatever shitty publisher you're using and sell your games to Stardock or Valve. They'll distribute them for you digitally. Either method will net you more money and better customer relations then the 1980's style of publishing you're using right now. Work for yourself, not the man!

The publishers can fuck right off to console-ville.

 

[Section8]

Sacred wasn't a popular game

According to Ascaron - "Published exclusively for PC in 2004, SACRED sold more than 1.8 million copies, making it one of the most successful action RPGs worldwide."

You can bet a good portion of those were bargain bin sales (I know mine was) but 1.8 million for any PC game doesn't sound like "unpopular" to me. It's more than Oblivion or Mass Effect sold on the 360.

 

[Azael]

I'm with the camp that things like these only serve to aggravate and punish actual legitimate owners of the game. Requiring on-line verification for a single player game is fucking retarded in the first place and there are just too many things that can mess up, leaving with you with a game that you cant' play, for this scheme to be justified. Intrusive DRM are one of the main reasons for me to get warez. I honestly don't see why I should have to install crap like SecuROM or Star-Force just to play a game. Copy protection back in the old days (find the symbol on the bottom of page 52 in the manual) might have been a hassle, but at least they didn't screw with your computer.

 

[Spec]

I withdraw my nasty condemnation of The Walkin' Dude's piracy temporarily. Go ahead and torrent this one.

 

[Norfleet]

Numerous people in several forums I've visited say that they pirate the game because of the DRM, now some might just be justifying their activity, but some people are genuinely against DRM practices but still want to play the game.

In a forum I run, many people who previously had never even heard of torrents and pirating have become pirates as a result EA's previous DRM moves, and those weren't nearly as drastic as this. And I know these people are most assuredly not the kind of people who need to find "justifications". No, these people genuinely knew absolutely nothing about how to pirate things, because they learned how from a how-to guide posted by another user as a result of all this. So I can actually see the visible evidence of how this system is actually creating more pirates at the expense of sales, because their customer-base is becoming offended at this. As far as I see, there's basically three types of people: Those who will always pirate the game no matter what, those who will always buy the game no matter what (or simply not play it at all), and those who could potentially succumb to the Dark Side. No pirate will ever be persuaded to turn back to the light by DRM, so all this has done is annoy customers into becoming either non-users or pirates.

 

[thesheeep]

No matter what people may think, piracy IS hurting devs, publishers, retailers, etc.
There is no way to argue around this. Unfortunately, as many already said, this resulted in completely ridiculous copy protections, just like the one EA will be using.

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Just to get this right, you need Internet to play those games? wtf?
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I'm all in for new innovative copy protections, some that are secure (at least for 3-4 weeks, any protection will be cracked sooner or later) but not annoying. I'm also very sure that there are already researches and studies being made about this, so IMHO it will only be a matter of time until someone "invents" a completely new approach here.

 

[Norfleet]

No matter what people may think, piracy IS hurting devs, publishers, retailers, etc.
There is no way to argue around this.

I actually disagree with this assertion. It is popularly asserted that piracy hurts, but that is not borne out by observed historical evidence in other media, so why does it somehow apply here? People can read books for free in public libraries. Does this somehow hurt the sales of the books? This is simply not a claim that matches observed historical evidence. Look at the success of Microsoft Windoze. Do you really believe that the success of Microsoft Windoze can be explained by its sales popularity? No. Windoze is as ubiquitous and dominating as it is today not in SPITE of piracy, but BECAUSE of it. The idea that piracy hurts developers and publishers is simply not supported by actual evidence. People are quick to cite the numbers of pirated downloads and claim each of these represents a lost sale, but we all know this is utter bollocks.

Consider the following: You make a game and sell 150,000 copies of it. Would you rather that this game has a community of 150,000 users, or would you rather the game have a community of a million users? Which do you think makes your game more successful? I dunno about you, but I would rather take the million-man userbase and accept the piracy than try to stomp it out and cripple my installbase in the process. A million users is still a million users, even if 850,000 of them are pirates. That's still a million people talking about your game.

In any event, the historical evidence strongly suggests that free copies of ANYTHING ultimately helps sales rather than hurting it. No company has ever failed because of piracy, as much as they would like to blame it. Piracy does not kill companies. Shitty management practices kill companies. Also, calling it "piracy" in the first place is the dumbest move ever. Any child can tell you two things: One, that sharing is a good thing, and two, that pirates are awesome.

 

[Azrael the cat]

I may have posted this before, but my first forays into piracy were because of copy protection. When I purchased KOTOR, it would not play because of a conflict with SecuROM. The tech support people sent me a DRM-free .exe so that I could play.

Later, I purchased another game with the same problem. Instead of fooling with tech support, I decided to seek out a DRM-free file on my own. From there, I learned how to download the full games themselves. I figured if I was going to have to go through the hassle of getting finding a crack to play a game that I paid for, I might as well go through the hassle of finding an entire game and save my money. It is very likely that, had I never encountered the first issue with KOTOR, I would have taken a much longer time to start pirating games.

Granted, I still purchase games from companies that I strongly desire to support. I am waiting to play The Witcher until I can afford it (and have the time to play it). I have purchased GalCiv2 and all expansions (even though I have not had much time to play it). However, if I am on the fence about a game, I am much more likely to demo the full game.

Same here - I bought a game legit (forgotten which one), but found out that in my careless opening of the box and packaging I had destroyed / thrown out the CD key. It was either buy another copy, throw the thing out as a waste, or learn to pirate. I chose the 3rd option. I had heard of pirating before, but never would have realised how easy it was until then.

 

[thesheeep]

People can read books for free in public libraries. Does this somehow hurt the sales of the books?

No, because nobody reads whole books in a public library. Well, almost nobody...
But almost everyone can download games. At home. With only a few clicks and some basic understanding of how *.rars work...
This can in no way be compared...

The idea that piracy hurts developers and publishers is simply not supported by actual evidence.

I'm sure there are more than enough studies about that, but you wouldn't believe them anyway, as they are surely financed by publishers and corrupted.

Consider the following: You make a game and sell 150,000 copies of it. Would you rather that this game has a community of 150,000 users, or would you rather the game have a community of a million users? Which do you think makes your game more successful? I dunno about you, but I would rather take the million-man userbase and accept the piracy than try to stomp it out and cripple my installbase in the process. A million users is still a million users, even if 850,000 of them are pirates. That's still a million people talking about your game.

Games are a business, like it or not. And if you see you have 150.000 people buying your game and 1.000.000 people playing it, you will be somehow sad and/or angry about that. Of course, people who claim that those 850.000 are lost copies are retards. Most of the time, if you download a game, you wouldn't buy it anyway. Most of the time!
But in those 850.000, there are surely about 50 - 100.000 lost copies. This is why I said that piracy always hurts devs, publishers, etc.

Of course, there is also the positive aspect about it, the mouth-to-mouth propaganda, spreading the word, bigger community, etc.
A more simply fact is: Is a game doesn't sell well enough, either the publisher, the dev, or both will have serious financial problems. In such a situation, even those "small" 50.000 additional sales could have been a saviour.
One of the reasons why online games are so attractive to publishers and devs is that there doesn't really exist piracy, because you simply need the original CD-Key to really play the game.
What I hope for is that someone will invent something similar to that for Single Player games...

In many cases, just as you said, shitty management practises are hurting more than anything. Not releasing a demo is a great example.

Any child can tell you two things: One, that sharing is a good thing, and two, that pirates are awesome.

True

 

[Lesifoere]

People can read books for free in public libraries. Does this somehow hurt the sales of the books?

No, because nobody reads whole books in a public library. Well, almost nobody...
But almost everyone can download games. At home. With only a few clicks and some basic understanding of how *.rars work...
This can in no way be compared...

So you can't borrow books and bring them home now? Okay then!

You'd make a better point by bringing up the fact that when you pirate a game, you can burn it on a CD/DVD and keep it around as long as you like, where with a library, you have to return books. =p

 

[Noceur]

Just yesterday my brother bought Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 so we could play co-op... the DRM (SecuROM) wouldn't recognize the disc being in the DVD, though, so we eventually had to download a crack for him to play the game.

Now, there's something wrong there. It's like buying a car that you have to fucking break into because the car keys won't open the door. The difference is, if people had to break into their cars, the company who made the cars would fucking fix them. Who the hell makes cars that you can't get into with your own god damned car keys? Has anyone heard of such a thing? It's fucking nonsense.

 

[Micmu]

Who the hell makes cars that you can't get into with your own god damned car keys?

Renault.

 

[Noceur]

Who the hell makes cars that you can't get into with your own god damned car keys?

Renault.

Hah, touché!

 

[MetalCraze]

actually piracy sometimes can even have a positive results.

like before release of stalker I had a strong wish to buy it - it looked like a great game (but there was no demo) + a strong wish to support developers who are my countrymen. 5 days remained before it will hit the stores, but it already was in a local network here. I didn't want to "pirate" it at first, but there was no demo so 2 days later I decided to take a look (omg skyway is a stealing bastard! *winks at JL*). well when I tried the game I was like "wtf is this? it looks like an unfinished alpha-version of what was promised. it was even below the most pessimistic expectations - not only SP but MP as well". so I decided not to buy it (omg here's your lost sale!). but they lost this sale because they've made a shit (and why should I pay for shit)? so yes piracy saved me my money here. look at it as you wish, but if the game turned out to be great - I'd gladly bought it on the day of it's release here - but it was below flaming mediocrity.
attack piracy as you wish - but devs and publishers that lie to you in everything does not deserve to have the money. and yes I won't even pirate Clear Sky - considering that only shitty part of GSC left with the best designers having their own 4A company now.
also the irony - stalker had copy-protection but it was already travelling through torrent networks 5 days before the release.

 

[Starwars]

Looks like they changed the DRM after all the feedback. http://masseffect.bioware.com/forums/vi ... &forum=125

Whether it was Bioware or EA who took the initiative to change the "check every 10 days", good decision. While I still have doubts about the copy protection in general, this was a good move.

 

[Suchy]

One-time online registration, now that's quite reasonable.