Apparently, Electronic Arts is planning on releasing two of their biggest PC titles this year, MassEffect and Spore, with the SecuROM DRM Scheme. For those of you who don’t know, the SecuROM DRM was included with BioShock, gave owners of the game living hell. For example, should you have to reinstall the game, you would have to call SecuROM to get a new registration code. There was also a lot of fear that it was installing a RootKit on systems (which would allow it to execute commands under the root, or administrator, user account without requiring any passwords or notifications).
Obviously, the announcement that SecuROM was once again going to be used as the copyright protection in popular pc games sparked an outcry from pc gamers. Originally, EA said that SecuROM would check with its servers every 10 days to re-authenticate the game, but they recently took back that statement, and are now saying that it will only re-authenticate the game when you download additional content off the internet, meaning fewer unwanted internet connections.
Oy, there needs to be a line that DRM should never cross. It’s one thing to want to protect one’s intellectual property, it is another thing entirely to be invasive as to the point to render the product completely undesirable. There’s a very long list of offenders, though I’m happy to see some sanity returning to Ubisoft and EA. Even thought their actions were probably more in response to the potential profit loss than they were customer dissatisfaction.
I had my computer temporarily disabled because of Starforce’s copy protection system when I purchased and installed X3: Reunion. It overwrote my default CD drivers with its own that slowed down CD and DVD playback to an unusable point.
Well, that’s two more games I’ll want nothing to do with then. Sad really, since I liked the idea of Spore and may have been the first game I bought since Oblivion.
As for StarForce, you got off light w_n. My roommate almost needed to re-install XP because an uninstall/reinstall of DiRT removed his CD/DVD drives entirely (even from the device tree!); This was due to it finding GameDrive (now Virtual Drive) running on the system. With DiRT now in the GT library I’m considering handing him a subaccount rather than unsubscribing.
–TSK