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[Bal]

It gets worse for poor Flagship. They released in Korea recently to, supposedly, huge sales. Turns out those were primarily sales to internet cafes, who are required to buy a copy for each separate computer they have. However, no one actually wants to play it. So much so that many cafes are demanding refunds (due th the significant investment on their part), and it's turning into another huge clusterfuck for the company. At this rate they won't live long enough to publish Mythos.

As for SecuROM, pretty much anyone here who is any kind of PC gamer at all probably has a bit of SecuROM on their computers. Even the Steam version of BioShock has it, for some asinine reason. In BioShock's case, they neutered it into the ground because of all the bugs and complaints, to the point that all it does is sit there and notice when you install or uninstall. Still a security risk, but it doesn't fuck anything else up. Assassin's Creed recently had a crashing problem because of it attempting to contact a server every few seconds, and if it failed to do so for any reason, including packet loss, the game would lock up. The fix? Play offline.

Again, shit like this just makes people disinclined to pay good money only to get shit on for their trouble.

[patito]

Hm. Seems that Oblivion also used SecuROM.

So it seems it does play nice with Visual Studio after all, and I just must never have tried to use Process Explorer before playing it. It'd explain the difficulties I've had in uninstalling these old Windows 3.1 games, too.

Well, fuck. Guess I don't have anything to lose after all.

Though these are all older versions of SecuROM. Things might have changed.

Hmm. Principles... or Spore. Principles... or Spore. This is gonna be a tough one.

Oblivion doesn't have secureRom, Neverwinter Nights 2 did however have it, that's what my research tells me. If Oblivion actually had secureRom then that just means it's very easy to beat and pirate, not that I would know from experience 

Also, even the Bioshock demo had secureRom, good thing I've destroyed and reinstalled my system since then.

[A²]

I talked to a friend about the Hellgate debacle as I called it.

His response: "Well that's what they get for leaving Blizzard"

 

[Norondor]

I actually work in the same building as Flagship Studios.* I'm not sure if they're the Mythos guys or the Hellgate guys but they do tend to look pretty broken.


* well, ostensibly.

[Bongo Bill]

Oblivion doesn't have secureRom

Well, shoot. Now I'm back to the old crisis.

[Brentai]

I talked to a friend about the Hellgate debacle as I called it.

His response: "Well that's what they get for leaving Blizzard"

Well... yeah.

I mean they all fucked off from a publisher that takes absolute care of each and every single release from start to finish and went to one that craps out like 10 little shitnuggets a week.  And then they're shocked to find out that their game just became one of those shitnuggets.

Not that I'm entirely complaining.  It was nice to see Diablo 3 happen sometime this decade.

[Kazz]

EA says: "We will give you all the money, publicity, and resources that you will ever need to make whatever game you want."

Developer says: "Sounds great!"

10 months later...

Developer says: "We need more time!"

EA says: "Who said anything about time?"

[Brentai]

EA steps back a little bit

Still not rescinding their decision as far as not installing the fucking thing on your system in the first place, but at least a little progress has been made.

[Brentai]

Also yeah that stupid limited-installation thing is still in effect.  I'm going to wipe everything and set up new partitions today, and I'll be very interested to see if I'll still be able to play the games I paid for afterwards.

[Bongo Bill]

I appreciate that the response was timely and indicative of a willingness to compromise. Obviously getting them to remove it altogether was too much to ask for, but what they have done is proof that they listen and that they respond to what they hear. It's pretty surprising.

I think this means we won. Not completely, not decisively, and (though I hope otherwise) maybe not even in a way that others will learn from, but we got them to do something close to what we wanted.

Why, if I knew conclusively just what side effects I could expect from SecuROM (which, in this heady Age of Information, you'd really think would be easier to find out), there's a fair chance I might be prepared to call myself satisfied. For the time being.

[Bal]

Tycho made the point, and I am sympathetic to it, that a publicly held company making games for the PC these days can't do nothing in regards to privacy. You can't explain to stock holders that doing nothing is the better choice, because they don't care. I think there are definitively better options out there than SecuROM, Steam for instance, but there are also definitively worse ones, such as Starforce. Both Mass Effect and Spore have been dialed back to more or less the same level that is in BioShock, so from my perspective the damage is already done.

[Thad]

I appreciate that the response was timely and indicative of a willingness to compromise. Obviously getting them to remove it altogether was too much to ask for, but what they have done is proof that they listen and that they respond to what they hear. It's pretty surprising.

I think this means we won. Not completely, not decisively, and (though I hope otherwise) maybe not even in a way that others will learn from, but we got them to do something close to what we wanted.

Disagree.  This is a token gesture that creates the illusion of compromise while actually doing little to alleviate the underlying problem.  "Less unacceptable" is still unacceptable.

Tycho made the point, and I am sympathetic to it, that a publicly held company making games for the PC these days can't do nothing in regards to privacy. You can't explain to stock holders that doing nothing is the better choice, because they don't care.

Apple and Amazon have been doing just fine with their DRM-free MP3 downloads.  Adobe doesn't require this kind of invasive bullshit to authenticate its software, and I can guaran-goddamn-tee that there are more people pirating Photoshop than Bioshock.

You want to convince the stockholders that you shouldn't use DRM?  Remind them of what happened to Sony in '05, and tell them that is what happens when you use DRM.

[Bongo Bill]

Less unacceptable may still be unacceptable, but the fact is that we were always dealing with a situation where what we wanted (for EA to use either a sane DRM technology or none at all on games at the end of their release cycle) was impossible. With the slow turnaround time of the games business, it will be a while for Stardock's example to accumulate followers.

The producers tried to push the envelope, and the consumers pushed back, and the producers backed off. The envelope is still there and that sucks, but let's look at this for what it is: an encouraging sign that the cluelessest game publisher of them all can be persuaded by the words of its customers. (Granted, I'm not paranoid enough to suggest that this whole thing was a distraction to keep people from asking whether the revised scheme is worse than what came before.)

It's understandable to be worried about complacency at this point. A concession like this calms the outrage caused any change to happen, while leaving intact the true problem. But we have learned that somebody's listening to us. Just because the war isn't over yet doesn't mean you can't acknowledge that the battle worked out in our favor.

[Norondor]

How in hell can you go from "this isn't an excuse to be complacent about the issue" to "this means EA is scared of us, so we win" in like two sentences PARTICULARLY over them conceding more or less fuck all

[Thad]

(Granted, I'm not paranoid enough to suggest that this whole thing was a distraction to keep people from asking whether the revised scheme is worse than what came before.)

I am.

Well, that's glib.  I'm sure they hoped their decision would fly under the radar and they wouldn't have to compromise.  But the compromise is really not much of one.

It's understandable to be worried about complacency at this point. A concession like this calms the outrage caused any change to happen, while leaving intact the true problem. But we have learned that somebody's listening to us. Just because the war isn't over yet doesn't mean you can't acknowledge that the battle worked out in our favor.

See, I don't think that it did, and you've pretty much covered all the reasons why.  We've set the bar so low at this point that we're willing to call this a victory, when really it's just slightly less of a defeat.

I don't feel that it's appropriate to pat either EA or ourselves on the back for this.  We need to keep the pressure on.

[Brentai]

In summary:

This is an encouraging sign that we can win.

It is not, under any circumstances, to be mistaken for an encouraging sign that we've won.

[Kazz]

Just a quick question; who among us actually wrote to EA about this?  Because the use of "we" above sounds kind of hollow if most of us did little more than bitch about it here.  (I'm talking primarily to Bongo.)

Also, I think EA is just trying to placate the tiny community of people who are paying attention.  Spore is going to sell millions, no matter what kind of copy-protection they use, unless the gaming community starts the most incredible word-of-mouth campaign the world has ever seen.

And even then, I'm still buying it, because it's Spore and they could put an exploding rattlesnake in the box for all I care.

[Bongo Bill]

Well, I sent an email, but it must have been to the wrong address or something, because I didn't get even a canned response. Perhaps it was too close to when they were announcing the new scheme.

[Kazz]

How new is the scheme?  The post from EA sounds more like a clarification than a list of changes.  Granted, I'm not following the situation too closely, but I don't listen to anything Kotaku says anyway.

[Bongo Bill]

It's exactly was it was before, except that instead of phoning home every ten days, it phones home any time the game would be connecting to the Internet anyway, plus once when you install it.

It limits the number of times you can install it (and is apparently very zealous about determining the number of times you have installed it; rumors suggest that changing your hardware counts as a new install), and apparently offers no ability to reclaim an install by uninstalling; after you run out, you need to call them to install it more times. That is part of what the big stink was over Bioshock.