DRM – Please procede to the nearest cliff…

If your a gamer you know what those 3 lovely letters mean when put together. Digital Rights Management. Is a lovely thing which is trying (and failing) to stop pirates. It used to be that years ago you could go and buy a game, chuck it in the floopy disk or CD drive and play the game after it installed or maybe not installed, you might have been able to play it off the disk. I remember when they invented CD keys and the like. They did so get on my nerves, especially if they were printed in one certain place. I have a hait of losing game manuals and boxes, so once I lost them, I was buggered and had to find a keygen or similar to buy the game I had already fucking bought. Sure I could be more careful, but I bought the fucking game. If you were to try and convince EA or what not that I had bought the game, they would sincerely tell me to fuck right off.

But as I say, I could stand the cd keys. If it meant i wasn’t able to play multiplayer when I lost the manual, oh well, my fault, deal with it mother fucker. They’ve taken it a bit further. The biggest example of the epic fail was Bioshock’s SecuROM. Oh how that worked out…

Whether you bought the normal version of the Steam version, SecuROM came bundled with it. It’s supposed to stop people without this that and the other playing it. And of course, probably a few days before the release, Bioshock was cracked, the pirates won and they played it without anything happening. What happened to the people who bought the game? Well you were royally screwed.

People were actually given a set umber of ‘activations’ of which to use for ‘their’ version of Bioshock. How were bthese activations used. Well once you say unistalled and reinstalled the game for whatever reason you used up one. New hardware? Yup that uses up one. Having to format your computer, you naughty pirate you, that’s an activation. Want to have it on more than one family computer? NO.

Of course pirates had to put up with any of this. Not one bit at all, they could install and copy the game as much as they like. Oh well, let’s just punish the people who fucking bought the game eh? Much better. What made it worse for the people who bought Bioshock is that they actually had to find out themselves that this was the case, there was nothing written in the manual or anywhere else about the activations. They just did it. Wankers. Thankfully, as of June this year, they took it away, after a hell of a lot of moaning from the 2kgames board members, with threads well over 100 pages based on the issue. Don’t get me started on the sound issues for Bioshock though…

Oh and one more thing on this particular version of SecuROM. Some people started to notice that their Virus scanners were going crazy to some lovely software that SecuROM had installed. Acting a bit like a rootkit. After a few questions asked about what exactly this was and how you could remove it, well quite frankly fuck all was answered. People were left too it after uninstalling Bioshock to work out just how the fuck you get rid of the pissing files that acted like a rootkit. Well done SecuROM you fucking cunts.

The reason I’m really writing this article though is to do with Spore. Now I’m a sad person, and have been looking forward to Spore since it’s announcment, completely forgetting that of course, EA would be publishing it. Greeeat. That means that some lovely piece of SecuROM, very similar to Bioshock’s one will be on it’s way. I’ve had it on pre-order for 6 months and I’m going to be treated like a complete arsehole with this I can imagine.

Now from what I read it adds some new things into the mix. Like, without asking, sending information about your game to check it’s a legit copy. Somehow my legit copy can turn into a non-legit copy overnight. That makes perfect sense. And what exactly do they send? Who knows. But fuck me I’m going to find out, they can fuck off if they think they can silently upload things from my computer to some giant server. That’s what hackers do. Enjoy having me screaming down the phone until they tell me EXACTLY what they are sending from my computer without my explicit permission. My computer, my files motherfuckers.

The saddest part of all of this? Pirates still win, and good on them. They are fighting cunts like EA and continously winning, with little money and resources. Huge amounts of money is spent on DRM software, putting the prices of games up. Admittedly without pirates, there would be no need, but they are there, they will always win, now deal with it. Stardock have practically admitted defeat against Pirates, who they say quite truthfully, will not buy the game if they can’t get it illegally, they just won’t bother. I advice all game companies to follow their gaming bill of rights.

• Gamers shall have the right to return games that don’t work with their computers for a full refund.
• Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state.
• Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game’s release.
• Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game.
• Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will play adequately on that computer.
• Gamers shall have the right to expect that games won’t install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their consent.
• Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time.
• Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers.
• Gamers shall have the right to demand that a single-player game not force them to be connected to the Internet every time they wish to play.
• Gamers shall have the right that games which are installed to the hard drive shall not require a CD/DVD to remain in the drive to play.

~ by dantheman999 on 27 December, 2008.