Not just that, but the support time for a game from major publishers is getting shorter and shorter it seems. This drives me crazy. A publisher creates a game, supports it for a few months, and then completely stops everything, including bug fixes.

I'm sorry, but I'm sick and tired of games that last less than a year before the publisher goes away. That is simply way too short.



Historically, this is how PC games have worked as well. As long as you have the original disk, you can go to a new PC and play it.

This is also how SDC and Steam work: As long as you're logging into the same account, you can play you games on any PC. In addition, Valve has finally got their act together, and the offline mode finally works, so you can play all of your games without connecting to the internet.



How about getting rid of that disk, which is prone to getting lost and scratched? In my opinion SDC (Stardock Central), Impulse, and Steam are the future of PC gaming. No disks to worry about at all. Just click and play.

I really think EA is holding onto a model that didn't work, is way too draconian, and frankly is going to be outdated. The future will have a much greater emphasis on providing benefits to those who are legitimate.

It's no wonder that EA is doing so poorly on PCs - it's not that the PC is not a good gaming environment anymore, it's that they're making the same mistakes over and over again.

Stardock gets it. Valve is slowly but surely getting it. EA, on the other hand, is not getting it at all. They're being too stubborn. They're not thinking outside the box. There's a better way, and they're refusing to give up their old way of doing things.

First, the point is pretty mute now because my friend refuses to ever touch that game again. But, when he got his new computer (including new hard drive), "everything" including windows xp and GCII was reinstalled. Using the exact same passwords to get on the forums and to write to stardock got us error messages saying "you have no accounts here". BUT, when we tried to make new accounts, we got never ending messages saying "That name is already in use", "That passowrd is already in use", or worst of all "another player is already using that email address". And every time, my friend is going "How in the heck do they know what's inside my computer, and that it's new!?!?!". He is really freaked now that people my age and youger take companies "peeking" into our computers so casually. . . . . .

Gormoth, I don't believe anyone has said it's illegal for EA to shoot themselves in the foot with this idiotic system. It's just stupid.

It's an unmitigated fact that drm hasn't done a damn thing to stop piracy. It never has, and it never will. You cannot write something that can't be neutralized. Just making it hard is costing the industry a fortune, and has only suceeded in killing entire companies. They made it hard in Titan's Quest by disguising security checks as bugs. It worked, no one caught it. The security made it through the cracking process, and interested customers looking before they bought, decided not to. The best success story I've seen was Richochet. The guy was tracking the stats while making changes, looking to see what he was actually accomplishing. He saw some really nice sales increases when he disabled pirated keys. No effect on the consumer. He also discovered that despite the number of pirated versions being played, about one in a thousand actually gave a shit enough to buy the game instead of just not playing it. It's not an enigma, they know it doesn't work, they know how few of the pirates will actually buy the game. They know that even if they could create a completely hack proof game, they'd still lose more customers to annoyance than they gained by it.

There was another system that almost worked. One of the higher end versions of Starforce installed exceedingly dangerous drivers where no program should be installing anything. It degraded the performance of machines by as much as 30%, and not just when the protected item was running. It also disabled other software, purchased, legal software with legitimate uses. That by the way is a crime in the US. The intentional vandalism of ones property, by disabling hardware and software on someones computer without their permission, is that the right of the corporation? The longest running secure game, unless the record has been beaten, and I haven't heard of anything close, is Rainbow Six: Lockdown. It went months. It sold like shit. It used the previously mentioned illegal malware. Following the Starforce fiasco, Ubisoft lost customers in droves, forum riots broke out over multiple games, this little spat with EA over Mass Effect is nothing. Even if you don't mind the contempt they have for you as a paying customer, the violation of your rights to be informed of what you're being forced to use, or the destruction it will cause to your system, the most secure anti-piracy system to date didn't do a damn thing to help them sell pc games.

Mandatory online activations with a 3 pc limit wont help EA sell pc games either. They have the right to do any damn thing they please as long as they are up front about it, what they don't have are brains.

Well Purple, I can understand your frustration, but I'd bite the bullet and see if you can get it going again. You've got nothing to lose.

Well, I'll mention it to my friend; who knows, maybe he has another operation comming up

Well, I just came back from spending a weekend with him, and showed him this forum thread too. I won't say everything he said, and I'll condence all I can, but basically, he said it did not matter to him where you guys store what, or how you "store" info or why. The bottom line is it's copy protection, just like any other copy protection, and the game stoped working when he got his new computer (BECAUSE of your copy protection, regaurdless of what you call it). He told me is I got him the new GCII (Twilight is it?), and if I installed/registered it for him at his place, THEN he would try the game again, otherwise, he said he had not intention of trying to convice people he was not a pirate (hey, he's almost 60, people in his generation never had to deal with stuff like this).

Anyway, if I get him GCII Twilight, by chance, in the future, I'll do my best he gets all re-registered (God help you if he has to reload windows again though.............)

My problem is they're keeping the 3 installation limit. At first I thought it'd be a real annoyance but not major, and then I thought 'well what if I have a bug+need to reinstall?', or 'what if you can do modding on the game, I do something wrong, and need to reinstall?'. That'd be my 3 installations gone straight away. Since some of my older games have been installed far more than 3 times (and I'm the only one using them) I think it's outrageous I should be restricted in the number of times I can reinstall it. It's absurd that EA is looking to punish it's legal+loyal customers by giving them an inferior product than the one they can pirate, and they're effectively saying 'well we don't care about you, go and pirate our game instead'.

It's nothing short of crazy on EA's part, and I'm really disappointed the system is going to affect Mass Effect and Spore, two games I've been really looking forward to on the PC (even more so with mass effect since it's a bioware game, and in the past they've been great). The only consolation is I can at least consider getting them now, since the 10 day activation has been removed. That one really was absurd - if the game had shipped with it, I wouldn't have been surprised if it ended up selling maybe as little as half of what it should have without all the DRM. That's what so hard to understand about all this DRM - these companies are paying to have something on their product that encourages people to turn to piracy!

Publishers like that will either learn or go bankrupt, either outcome will satisfy me.

Oh yeah, for all the uproar about Bioware/EA's effort in copying protection, my friend who is a member at Demonoid.com is telling me people there are hard at work in working a crack to the Mass Effect copy protection challenge. Apparently the first crack had issues, and now they are all putting their brains together to figure out how to beat it. Well...so much for EA's draconian effort, serves them right. Should have use Stardock's model.

I consider myself lucky, since i've only had minor trouble with copy protection, problem being that my DVD-drive has hard time reading them. For example, i had to install Command & Conquer 3 from my laptop through lan. . A firmware update fixed that up later.

I just upgraded my computers video card, so it should be able to play Bioshock, problem is, i've heard many horror stories about the it's copy protection, and i'm not sure if it's worth the risk..

I guess EA have started taking their "EA games - challenge everything" motto a bit too far

@SanChonino: Yeah, I remember back in the day when I take my cool new PC game over to a friend's house so we could play it together (we always met at his house, he had a larger TV). About half the games I bought he wound up buying as a result. Of course, installing it on a computer I didn't even own was the worst kind of moral turpitude, and proper social interaction only takes place through company owned servers with a monthly usage fee anyway, so that kind of deviancy was wisely stamped out by video game developers.