This is getting ridiculous. It is indeed simpler to bittorent those games, rather than dealing with all the "protection". They aren't protecting games from pirates, they are protecting them from their customers.

Last time I bought a SecuRom game (World in Conflict), I had to download the bloody thing on my computer through LAN, because SecuROM screwed up my DVD drivers in such a way that would make SecuRom DVDs invisible for the system. (I'm not kidding.)

Also, what the hell is with constant re-activation? Everyone knows that those guys will bring the activation servers down in three-four years, especially if they stop making money from sales. Essentially, you would be buying a game that would disappear from your computer at some point of time.

Hah, if only it was luck. Stardock just happens to be good at knowing their audience (both in desktop customization and strategy gaming), thus delivering a product their potential customers are willing to pay for.

-HM

Sounds like the one that Company of Heroes Opposing Fronts used.
Well I don't like Copy Protections, because they do not really help, just a little bit. Yes, I know you don't agree, but it is true, it helps a little bit. You would also be surprised how many people turn up in forums with problems due to these kind of copy protections and illegal version (they say of cause that they have legal one). These guys go even so far to ask for cracks on the official forum, [censored].


Back to the CP mentioned above:
I think it is a good idea, even if I don't like the forced internet connection and validation even 5 to 10 days. I know many of you don't agree, but the companies have to do it they are losing a lot of money to piracy, so they have to think about new and even more radical ways of getting it. We live in a word with companies and common stockholders(?) who count every cent and who want to see profit.

So, lets see.
Do I think a CP is good? - No, I really hate them.
Do I think they are necessary? - Hell, yes. I know people who think that 10 € (Euro) for a Game, DVD or an Music Album is a way to much. Why do they think so? - Downloading is still free and free is good, even some other people have to pay. They simply don't care as long as they can save money for more important things, such as cigarettes. I have an even better argument for a CP. A game without a CP isn't selling better even worse. Company of Heroes, i.e. had no CP and the Downloads for the patches were seven to eight times higher than the number of sold games. Keep in mind, I'm only talking about the German version and the downloads from the German THQ site.

In short: There will always be a new and annoying CP, it is just necessary. There is always someone who will crack it and there is always someone who will download it, simply because he doesn't want to buy it.

My first reaction when I heard the news was somewhere in the neighborhood of "if they are going to treat me like an enemy, I will be an enemy. I'm playing the game but I ain't paying for it." I had planned to wait until a pirated version of each comes out and get a superior product for free. I don't even have a real interest in playing Mass Effect, I just wanted to make my own private statement that the the CP scheme they are using is wrong and abusive to their customer base and completely counterproductive. Whether I will still feel that way later, who can say? Right now, however, this news has made me more inclined to get their game through less than legal channels when before I was ready and willing to shell out my money to buy Spore just because it feels good to take a shot at them even if they never know it.

On another note, for those saying customer friendly CP schemes do not sell games, you are wrong. Very wrong. Stardock has made somewhere in the neighborhood of $280 (well, before factoring out the retail mark up) off of me alone ultimately because their copy protection scheme led me to buy two copies of Collector's Edition of GCII way back in the day, which, I loved so much I bought all related games since (including SoaSE). On the flipside, I want to play Portal, I would love to play it because everyone agrees it is fun and funny, and an all around great game. However, the last Steam game I got ruined my computer. I simply do not have the financial resources at my disposal to risk having to rebuild my entire machine because some clueless bureaucrat on the board of directors decided to include a defective, draconian bit of software in their games that amounts to the hardware equivalent of Russian Roulette.

Copy protection that treats customers as a necessary and valuable part of the market do sell games and will only sell more as the general public becomes increasingly aware of the problem. Copy protection that treats customers as optional, disposable, and mostly pirates anyway will continue to push people to companies like SD or out of PC gaming entirely as when I fire up a Wii I don't have to put up with EA's crap. Honestly, I don't see why StarDock hates copy protection so much, behind game quality it has probably earned you more customers than anything else.

Well, CPs give you the feeling of being a pirate, specially when you aren't one. The next point is that CPs are a good reason to piss of your customers and this is just a unwritten goal of many companies. ...
Pirates don't have problems with CPs, they are cracked or hacked away. Okay, this may cause problems sometimes, but not always.


Back to the CPs:
- I bought Half-Life II some years ago after it hit the budget prize. I never finished the game, due to these really annoying "you have to be online to play it think" (offline mode didn't worked, don't ask me why). I could have lived with that but these steam was so resource-devouring and slowed my internet-speed that I was really pissed off after one week and killed it, together with HL2. The good part was that I just needed a reason to reinstall my WinXP and I got one.
- There was only one CP before steam that pissed me off even more and that was StarForce. I had so many problems cause by it that I had to remove it. After that everything worked fine. It was very hard to believe that a CP could cause such problems. I had heard about cracked games that caused that kind of problems, but mine was bought and I had even removed "evil" software (like nero) so I could play it.


Again back to the CPs:
- Yes, they are necessary, but please why can't they be friendly? Is it really needed that they sometimes piss of paying customers?
- What about these old school CPs from old games, like asking for a special word from the handbook in the middle of the game or something like that?

I still think that these activation and validation is a nice idea, just not good enough, specially for those without internet connection.

20-40% of Australia dont have permement internet access.
so out of around 30 million people they have cut anyone who can buy it down by 6-12 million.

One has to wonder just HOW many people actually would pirate this game.

Then we need to wonder how many people will pirate this game just because they hate the copyprotection.?

Bioware was a game company I supported and always made sure I brought(even when I was tempted due to late Australain releases too download)

If this protection is indeed ture then Bioware is now on my blacklist.

I refuse to buy anygame with such protection after my experiances with Bioshock.



Infact I have to say I find the whole copyprotection measures across the board including movies counter productive.


DVDS you have to watch unskipable up to 5 min anti piracy clip before you can watch your movie.
Every time..... Talk about pissing off your customers.

Games have copyprotection so invasive you ahve to jump through hoops to make sure you can actually play your brought product.


If you had a car that you had to wait 5 mintues before you could drive it you would go bonkers
if you had a car that had to hook up to the internet every 10 days or it would refuse to start
you would go bonkers.

Ontop of this Govements would step in quick smart because such measures are downright dangerous and they waste time.

Western Society is developing a trend that ends up with shorter and shorter lesiure time for each generation.

On the otherside companies are developing longer and longer ways copyprotection can waste the time of a paying customer.

So the question the companeis have to ask themselves is.

Is this protection so annoying that someone willing to pay for my product would infact get a pirated version instead just so they wouldnt have to deal with it?

When the answer gets to yes.. then they need to reevaluate.

Personaly.. I think its already got to yes.

There are no CD checks. BioWare stated you won't need the disc in the drive to play.

They also stated there are no plans to release a patch that removes the authentication.

can you give a link to that? cant seem to find it on the bioware forum, if that was the place they said it

btw, take a look at the bioware FAQ post count, it got a total of 532, thats 500 more posts then yesterday

You could probably insert the disc again instead of that whole 10 day thing. I can't wait for Spore (creature editor on June 17 w00t)

Not entirely accurate. Years ago when the whole Napster thing was in the news about music file sharing, there was a study done that showed music sales went UP since the whole Napster thing. Interviews showed that people were making more purchase of full albums after being able to sample a few songs on Napster.

Me personally, brand me the devil for this, downloaded Sins first. Why? B/c I hate run of the mill RTS games and I'm going to check it out before I pay out money for it. They no protection scheme is great. Mainly, b/c I didn't have to download a crack for it, and secondly, b/c I hate copy protection.

CP basically boils down to a waiting before someone cracks it. There no use in saying we should change the way things are and we should magically start reporting people. That would require all human beings are at their core honorable. Care to laugh with me?

Back to run of the mill RTS games. There only real way to get the feel for a game is to well... play it. Personally, because I like their serial schema so much and the game rules (it's not small scale by any comparison and I LOOOVE epic RTS) that yes I'm going to buy it because I want updates and I want the expansion. Which, the expansion might be a separate download but hey... even that will probably have bugs that will have updates.

So call me evil if you want, I don't care. Why don't people turn other's in: because, they don't care either. How does downloading a game effect me personally? It doesn't. I've found people who go on tirades about evil pirates are mostly because they have a wooden sword shoved up their ass for one reason or another.

Point blank, if it's connected to the web, it's going to be cracked/copied/pirated. That's a statement of fact knowing the nature of people is reflected on the net. The only thing you can do is mitigation, not interruption, of the process. And, I think Stardock with Sins is a great start on how to properly and judiciously mitigate piracy.

I think part of the problem with these game companies (and recording/movie/etc companies too) is that they have gotten a free ride on bad products for far too long. By that, I mean that consumers cannot return opened games/music/movies when they find them to be unsatisfactory or even faulty. I know the problems with allowing people to return such things (rental chains would go out of business for one), but I think the absolutist position of disallowing consumers to return these things is where this rampant overstepping copy protection comes from. Fine, you find a game boring, you shouldn't necessarily be able to return it; but if it crashes or is unplayable for some other reason then that is a "manufacturing" defect, and if it fries hardware then that should warrant a lawsuit.

I've been chomping at the bit for Spore for probably longer than it has been under development, and I thought Mass Effect looked interesting ever since I saw the console commercials. Hearing this news, I have to say, puts these games in the same category as Bioshock for me, the "wish I could validate purchasing" category.

And at least with most recording and movie companies, if the media or data on it is flawed, they have recalls and product replacements. Can you imagine game companies sending out discs with patched content???

It was MadBoris who posted it but he must have removed it out as you can tell it no longer is there. I responded to it and he removed it. This guy is also a BioWare/EA employee IMO. Trying to control the damage by making everyone look stupid and crazy for wanting a better CP.

It's on page 17 of that massive thread in the Mass Effect forum. It wasn't a BioWare rep that said it either, and it wasn't actually worded as 'lucky'. Here's the relevant quote:

That was edited or removed as it had read they were lucky not fantastic timing it was changed and no edit sig so that has to be a forum admin.

true... i'm hoping they do this... if no internet connection then let a CD check or something... much more efficient... but as they say they are monitoring the keys so cd check is probably out of the question(probably)...

That's not how it works. Even if forum admins edit posts on the BioWare forums, it shows that the post has been edited and by whom. The post was not edited.

I admit, I also thought he'd said they were lucky, but I think it's because the way he worded it (fantastic timing), there's no doubt that's exactly what he meant. Unfortunately people like him are slippery and you can't paraphrase them (or misremember their wording) or they'll jump all over it like he did.

Uhoh, I love spore what am i gonna do!   

I hate these moronic piracy debates and the aggressive profit-protection measures that inevitably spawn them. For all you pirates out there (and I do not claim that never in my life have I pirated or stolen anything) piracy is in fact illegal and is at best morally questionable. Yes, piracy can lead to game sales in some cases because a pirated copy provides a much better idea of a what a game is like than the pathetic excuses for demos that I've seen lately. Anyone who claims pirates don't buy the games they pirate has never met any of my friends. At the same time, there are also plenty who pirate and don't buy. Some of them would never have bought to begin with, but I suspect that doesn't cover everyone. Here's where we get to the part that drives me insane. One side argues thus:

1. DRM schemes hurt the legitimate customer by requiring him/her to go through extra steps in order to use the product he/she paid for. In some cases DRM can result in unnecessarily and unusually poor performance or the total inability to play a game that one paid for, whereas pirates do not suffer these ill effects because the DRM is removed or circumvented.
2. DRM is inevitably defeated by pirates, just as any defensive measure (chainmail, the Maginot Line, whatever) is inevitably defeated by someone who dedicates their time and energy to finding a way to do so. DRM cannot, therefore, cause piracy to cease.
3. DRM is therefore a bad idea because it decreases the experienced quality of the product for some paying customers while failing to achieve its main purpose of limiting or preventing the use of the produce by non-paying customers.

The other side comes back with
1. Piracy is theft in that pirates are making use of someone else's invention without providing due credit or payment to the owners thereof.
2. Owners of IP have the right to protect their IP from those who would use it without permission. If you buy the product you agree to the EULA, so you've got no room to complain about the protection measures you agreed to.
3. The problems caused by DRM are experienced by a minority anyway, so that's not a valid reason to remove them.

Now that we've laid out the background, everyone fails to see how these two viewpoints do not contradict each other in any way and are in fact almost entirely compatible with each other. Instead, people accuse each other of piracy, try to give examples of cases in which piracy has not hurt a game (and get accused of piracy) or try to claim that the corporate greed driving DRM justifies piracy. (two wrongs make a right! yay!) Have I missed anything?
Personally, I'd like to see companies (like Stardock) drop less money on DRM and more on ensuring the release of quality products that are worth paying for and then supporting those products with patches and updates. Pirates are a problem, yes, but Stardock had it right on when they (I forget who made the post) pointed out that the product should be designed primarily to function for the customer, and not to ferret out pirates. Unfortunately, I don't think human beings in general trust each other enough for this to become the norm. I have to echoe the complaint of an earlier poster that, 20 years from now when Spore and ME are old games that we want to play because no new games catch our interest, we may not be able to play anymore because of the every-10-day nonsense. I'm sure by then our EULA will have run out and we won't legally be entitled to play anyway, but that's little consolation.

At least EA's not gonna use Starforce.

No, they've chosen something equally as distasteful.

Just read about this in another thread. No Spore for me, then. When I buy a game, *I* want to be in control when and how and under which conditions I play it. A company that is trying to take that control away from won't get my money, period. I won't pay money for a game that depends on anything out of my hands to work - and it's not in my hands how long EA will keep sending the reactivation signal, or even how often they would reactivate my game because I kept tinkering with my hardware.

I'm just sad that this had to happen to Spore, a game that might have actually been good and innovative. But there are lots of other ways to have some fun.

Sadly, this means that I will not be buying Mass Effect and Spore, both games which I have been anticipating for a long time and looked forward to getting. Same thing happened with Bioshock; after reading about a few people having problems with the DRM and the developer/publisher being unwilling to do much to help, I decided to give it a miss. Maybe I'm in a minority here, but all the same I am another example of DRM costing a company sales as opposed to earning them due to DRM.

There's a few reasons I choose not to buy these games, despite wanting them a lot:

1. After buying Galciv II and experiencing first-hand what it felt like to buy a game from a company that didn't instantly suspect me of being a pirate, I decided I would no longer support companies that use intrusive and impractical DRM schemes that only affect paying customers, not pirates. Like those really annoying and unskippable "Piracy is a crime" ads you get on bought DVD movies, the people who actually steal the product neither actually see or even care about the message on the disk, the downloaded movies start up as soon as you load the file. No hassle. The pirate gets a superior product over the paying customer. Same with games with excessive DRM: The pirates get the most user friendly product, and for free. The paying customers get all the hassle and all the technical problems from DRM issues gone bad.

2. While internet is something most people have, it is not a constant. Around April last year I had some financial issues, and as a result I was unable to pay my internet bill. In that month I did not have internet, and I really experienced just how dependent I was on it for my daily routines and how bad it felt not to have it. Forums browsing, reading news, instant chat with various friends I've met online, my house phone (as I have IP phone), all gone. Not just that, but it was also during a period where I was massively addicted to WoW, and the withdrawals were quite bad.

There is sadly no guarantee for me that this can't happen again, or that I for whatever reason (like moving house) won't be without internet for extended periods of time. As such it is really not in my best interest to support a move towards single player games phoning home several times a month in order to run. Can you imagine a few years down the line if this were to become an industry standard? Even if you very rarely are without internet for extended periods of time, when it happens you'll suddenly be unable to play any game you own, even if it has no other online component than the verification. Why on earth would I want to support that? No, I'm afraid I'll keep supporting companies like Stardock (which we need more of) instead of those that may ultimately make my game collection useless.

Yes, you can crack copy protections through various schemes, if you're willing to visit a ton of dodgy sites in order to track down a working crack. However, if you're forced to use "it can be cracked so it's not that bad" as a rebuttal to someone complaining about DRM, you've pretty much lost the entire justification for having DRM there in the first place. Besides, who is to say that cracks will even be easily accessible in the future if they actually manage to arrest more of the cracker groups out there (like Drinkordie or whatever their name was)?

DRM is part of a failed business model. You can't put intrusive/impractical/user unfriendly copy protection on something, sell it at full price and expect to realistically compete with a free, user friendly equivalent. DRM is punishing legitimate buyers for following the law, and the pirates offer the cheaper and better alternative. This needs to get changed. I just want to slap stupid corporate suits who create a game, put an obnoxious DRM on it and afterwards ask themselves why so many people are still pirating it despite the "awesome" DRM they put on it.

Make being a legitimate customer have some perks instead of a punishment. Create a user friendly infrastructure where you offer bonus content etc for paying customers if they verify they are legitimate customers, accessible when the customer so pleases. Stop with the stupid "you will pay for our DRM and you will like it" policy already

Seriously, why is EA so retarded? Oh wait..it's run by dumb fucks. Thats why.