AAA DRM and secuROM!

TE_owner · March 22, 2009, 08:56:09 PM

ive got farcry 2 and fallout 3 and heard that it has secuROM and that farcry 2 has limiting DRM!!!!! ive heard it has increased pirating for people who just want to play the flipping game!!!! anti-DRM here i come :ranting2::ranting2::ranting2:

Anonymous · March 22, 2009, 09:22:06 PM

any form of game protection IS DRM - whether it be securom, safedisc or whatever, it is a form of DRM so I wouldn't bother getting quite so het up about it!

TE_owner · March 22, 2009, 09:23:57 PM

Quote from: BlueBall;269601any form of game protection IS DRM - whether it be securom, safedisc or whatever, it is a form of DRM so I wouldn't bother getting quite so het up about it!

sorry BB

Gaara · March 22, 2009, 10:01:32 PM

One must take into account though, that when it comes to drm there are many forms of protection, of which are some just plain nasty.

Securom is a terrible bit of software that I try to avoid getting on my computer because it impares my rights too much. Who are "they" to say how often i can install a game when I bought it.

That's like a car dealer telling me that I can only use the new car I bought twice a week maximum! It just doesn't make any sense.

Logically, manufacturers are allways going to try and protect their products (which ofcourse they have the full right to do, i just don't agree on some of the methods), so it's up to you to decide if you are so bugged by the protection that you will not buy the game or learn to live with it.

Anonymous · March 22, 2009, 10:38:31 PM

Quote from: TE_owner;269603sorry BB

I didn't mean it like that

It wasn't a telling off I was just saying it is all over the pace so no point in letting it get to us

T-Bag · March 22, 2009, 11:12:45 PM

I'm pro-DRM. But only when it's the valve stuff used with steam. It's simple keeps all your games in check.
There are so many out there which are far too agressive interfering with things that are unrelated to the game.

kregoron · March 22, 2009, 11:28:08 PM

DRM/copy protection is fair game, the manufactures just wanna protect their property which they have spent a great deal of time and money making.. and not really something to waste to much energy on

Atleast they dont ship games with starforce anymore

smilodon · March 22, 2009, 11:56:15 PM

DRM never stopped any game being pirated. Everything is out there if you really want you're PC games for free. All DRM does is give a publisher a few weeks grace before the pirate versions appear. That may be enough to get their sales up and some profit in the bank, nothing else

The irony is that DRM often causes far more inconvenience to the legitimate customer than to the pirate. Music is fast being stripped of it's DRM as music publishers have finally realised that it stops nothing and even encourages people to get thier music in pirated form rather than legitimately.

As a gamer what I want is to be able to download a game without having to give the publisher a mass of personal information they have no right to and really only want for marketing, not to have sit for several days waiting for the publishers overloaded authentication servers to allow me to actually play the thing, to not have to shove a DVD in the drive every time I want to play it and to be able to still play it when I add some ram or upgrade my graphics card without having to re-validate the game all over again.

The only real way I can get that is to pirate the game. But I don't want to steal it, I want to buy it. :doh:

DRM got so bad that when I bought Bioshock it simply would not authenticate. The customer support was non existant and the only way I got the game to play was to download a second pirate copy and play that. It's insane that to play a game that I had paid for, I had to steal it :blink:

We live in a sad world.

TeaLeaf · March 23, 2009, 07:45:47 AM

Quote from: Smilodon

QFT.

Totally agree with Smilo here. DRM should not intefer with me and my life or my ability to play a game I own in a convenient fashion. No-CD crack anyone?

TL.

kregoron · March 23, 2009, 08:40:11 AM

Quote from: smilodon;269621DRM never stopped any game being pirated.

I actually got a game where the DRM is so effective that it still hasnt been cracked.. but then again i never got to play the game with expansions either as its impossible to install

T-Bag · March 23, 2009, 08:46:49 AM

Quote from: smilodon;269621As a gamer what I want is to be able to download a game without having to give the publisher a mass of personal information they have no right to and really only want for marketing, not to have sit for several days waiting for the publishers overloaded authentication servers to allow me to actually play the thing, to not have to shove a DVD in the drive every time I want to play it and to be able to still play it when I add some ram or upgrade my graphics card without having to re-validate the game all over again.

My point exactly. Half the time the game comes out pirated before the release date (soon after they go gold). So why make regular users mess around with DVD's and securerom anyway.
Steam seems to be the way of the future. Everything all in one placeworks online or offline, install it as many times as you like. It's still got it's bugs but it's a step in the right direction. Even games which come on disk and are then activated never need the dvd.

Anonymous · March 23, 2009, 09:29:11 AM

Steams only weakness is that you cannot even give the game away after you finish.

Gaara · March 23, 2009, 09:31:56 AM

Quote from: BlueBall;269635Steams only weakness is that you cannot even give the game away after you finish.

It would be a good feature if you could deactivate a game from your profile and send it to someone else as a gift. Don't see it happening anytime soon though.

smilodon · March 23, 2009, 09:48:21 AM

Of course for your Steam game to work Steam needs to work in most cases. So we're reliant on Valve to keep our paid for games functional.

On the other hand I can see how upset a game developer/publisher must get when they see years of work ripped off and given away for free and for the bragging rights of the person who cracked their game. And if no one ever bought a PC game then we'd sadly see developers giving up on the PC platform and just selling games for consoles :blink:

Games that have intrusive DRM end up on bit torrent very fast. Spore had a three install limit DRM feature and overnight became the most pirated game ever, half a million dowloads in a week :blink:

I also wonder how many pirate copies of a game are actually lost sales. There are games I know I want to play. All the Total War games for example are must haves for me. So I go and buy them. Pirating them never crosses my mind. But some games are ones I'm not really interested in. For example post appocalypse games like Stalker and Fallout 3 or Squad shooters like the Tom Clancy series do nothing for me. I'd never consider buying them. So if I spend a few hours messing about with a pirate copy and then confirming I don't like it and deleteing it is that piracy? Yes. Does it hurt the developer? No. I'm sure most piracy is nothing more than extended demoing. The actual loss to the game makers from people who would have bought the game and played it but who went for the pirate version is much less than the total number of downloaded copies seen on Bit torrent.

The way to fight piracy is to offer something extra as an insentive and not punish us for not actually using pirated software. A game that can easily be cracked and stolen isn't much of a temptation if the player looses the ability to have 'achievements', mods, free content and other extras. BioWare co-CEO Ray Muzyka, who was originally a supporter of the DRM mess that was Bioshock now says....

"We're doing a lot of post-release downloadable content on all of our PC titles going forward. We think it's a good thing to encourage players to make them want to buy a PC title. That's ultimately the best, most successful path to prevent piracy is to have players that want your games, want to believe in them and think they're high-quality and realise they're going to get a lot of value out of them as platforms for long time afterwards."

Piracy is a bad thing. But punsihing me for it every time I buy a legitimate game seems perverse. Give me a little thankyou for buying it and I'll become a loyal customer.

/smilodon climbes of his hight horse.

Zootoxin · March 23, 2009, 11:40:53 AM

I agree with the points made here.

I agree with smile about getting a game to see what its like before you actually buy it, I got my hands on Oblivion ages ago it had no crack protection at all.

Within an hour of playing it I was online buying a legit copy because I was blown away.

Whatever the Devs do the games will be cracked and put on the internet, why waste the money on trying to develop more and more complex security features? maybe they should concentrate on not releasing buggy and unfinished products.

Most of the games now have online features which you can not play if you have a pirate version so that seems to work well.