Oh, so books are not being borrowed for centuries?
Movies DVDs and k7s are not being borrowed by decades?
Music vynils, k7, CDs are not being borrowed by decades?
What makes games be such a class apart?

as i said about console games, such media, when lent or borrowed, allows only one person to enjoy it at a time. that's not the case with many PC games.

Personally, I havent bought 340? (290? loss to EA, 50? loss for Ubisoft) worth of PC games because I dont agree with this DRM. So, for me, its this draconian DRM thats killing PC gaming.
that's your choice as a consumer, and there's nothing wrong with that.

however, i feel obligated to call out and condemn game pirates whenever i see them. i can't stand by and let them just dismantle PC gaming.

believe me, i know it.

i've got several buddies who love dead space. i asked them when they purchased it, and they just replied "i torrented it..."

i'm pissed at them, because they KNOW what the right thing to do is. >

to be honest, no. they just mentioned how incredibly easy it was to get - one fellow said it was offered on a local network at his college, so transfer and installation took under 10 minutes.

:\

I think if DRM was going to kill PC gaming it would have happened already. And I don't think for one second that PC gaming will die anyway. The install base is colossal and doesn't rely on gaming to survive, so it'll always be around, and in turn, always be a viable option for game development - regardless of the percentage of gamers who choose to get their games through piracy.

Legitimate copy-buying PC gamers are just going through a rough patch at the moment, brought on mostly by ignorant publishers with an insistance on using ineffective and annoying methods of combatting piracy.

There are better ways of going about it, and I believe in time they will...

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=262157&page=1

EA customer service helpful? You are NOT serious, are you?

Hey EA! Guess what? I did purchase Dead Space legitimately. The problem is it would not run?on any of my computers which all exceed recommended system requirements. All I get is a black screen and an error message. Also, there has been Zero support from EA to remedy this problem. I know good and well EA is aware of the problems myself and others are having with this game, apparently they just don?t care. So thanks to horrible DRM and no lousy customer support I am forced to get a pirated version just to play the GD game. EA had better get it together in a real hurry if they want to keep people buying their games. I for one am done with EA and I know I?m not the only one who feels this way. Forget Dead Space, Fallout 3 is a win/win-It?s a great game AND it works as it should!

Thanks for informing me that Dead Space has SecuROM! Now I won't buy it. I've had enough problems with Mass Effect, thank you very much. I think I'll torrent it now that I know.

SecuROM sure works, don't it? Not only does it screw with customers, it also doesn't prevent piracy at all.

Bravo, keep destroying PC gaming...

Yes, bravo, 4899980-0, keep destroying PC gaming... unless that message was aimed at someone else.

You few guys accepting the DRM policy are missing the crucial points.
I too see no need to install a game more than 5 times. But why the hell is such a restriction nexessary ? As previous posters said it's completely useless and ineffective and only causes problems for legimate customers.
It never prevents piracy. Also these protection mechanisms can severly affect the OS and can force the user to format the hard drive. Not funny at all and not a good sales argument.
For me, DRM wasn't a problem till now. Now I'm waiting for a new PC and time will tell...
As long as DRM doesn't affect me directly I'm going to buy games that come with this #?*!
But if I rush into problems due to DRM I'll stop buyin any game that comes with it.
It's also very important to me to be sure I can play a game several years later (maybe on a new PC) and I'm totally unsure that the company who uses DRM can guarantee me that.
EA, throw DRM over board and never bother us again with such stupid protection mechanisms and online activations. Ass long key codes are enough.

Not sure why, but I only just noticed this thread which I find quite amusing. DRM, piracy, online activations, Securom ad infinitum. The gaming industry has long surpassed the profit margins of the film industry and is a multi billion dollar business. There are a number of mammoth conglomerates that essentially control the market, EA being one of them, Ubi being another. As with all large corporations, they seek to maximise their profit whilst protecting their intellectual capital, thereby potentially extending their profits. So far so good, nothing new here, welcome to the world of the capitalist.

Enter software piracy. Corporations whine about "lost profit". Instead of jumping on the oh so convenient band wagon and condemning the evil software pirates for the alleged loss in profits of the "poor" corporation that has it's intellectual capital reverse engineered, let's approach the issue from a completely different angle, possibly from a tangent.

1. EA needs to publish it's yearly sales statistics for all platforms - the info is probably out there (Ubi has a corporate site where they publish this information and they make ONE billion dollars per year !!)
2. Once we have the yearly sales and profit figures, we then need the corporation claiming that it losing profits, to provide an objective estimate of the number of units that they consider they have lost due to piracy. Now this is the hard part.....nobody has a concrete figure of how many copies of a pirated game are in circulation, but corporations just love to exaggerate in this respect - after all, since the estimated number can never be proven, why not jack it up excessively and claim that 10 million copies of your software have been pirated ?
3. At this point, all we know is that corporation X made around $1 billion in the previous year from games across all platforms. We will most likely be told that the real sales value "could" have potentially been $1.5 billion. At then end of the day however, the underlying fact is that ABSOLUTELY everyone in the company is making a killing in terms of profits.....they have to, since the greedy shareholders crank up the new target profit margins each quarter !
4. John Carmack is definitely admirable and his games are exemplary and have continually raised the bar for developers to follow. He got rich from his games.....he owns at least half a dozen Ferrari's.
5. So what's the message ? This entire claim that piracy is "killing" sales for mega-corporations is totally subjective, since there is no way of registering the exact number of pirated copies of any given game, other than torrent site download stats, which are not indicative, since we have no way of knowing whether those that downloaded the games would have actually purchased them in the first place.
6. The US Government is spending billions of dollars on capturing the so-called "pirates" and offenders. In other words, I do not believe for one moment that the commotion around software piracy is created by the gaming industry, but rather induced by the Government encouraging everyone to join the crusade against the evil-doers of society, namely the evil software pirates !
7. Instead of investing billions of dollars trying to catch an elite group of extremely intelligent and competent software specialists, perhaps the Government should invest that cash in clamping down on drug gangs, dealers, pimps, child pornography and the likes. This world has gotten its priorities totally backwards.

First off, I'd just like to say that I prefer online activations over disc-in-tray checks. I cannot stand swapping discs all the time, and this new DRM scheme means I don't have to crack all my legitimately-purchased games just to stay sane. So I'll give you a small thank-you for that.

That being said, what has DRM really accomplished for you EA? If you think it "protects your work from piracy", think again; I can easily find a DRM-stripped torrent of any EA game, no matter how modern your game's DRM is. It doesn't take the crackers long to remove SecuROM, or any DRM for that matter.

No, DRM is not protecting you; all it's giving you is bad press. You've got annoyed customers having difficulties from useless DRM, and many potential customers who will avoid buying until the DRM is lightened up. Basically, you're paying for SecuROM to reduce your sales.

EA is putting out a lot of good titles; you have the potential to be everyone's favorite publisher. But because you insist on punishing your paying customers with DRM, you're coming across as the villainous corporate giant who just doesn't listen. Take a page from Stardock and drop DRM!!

>
> DRM: The reasons we need it
>
> Software piracy is a really big deal for the
> developers of PC games. We work for years making
> games we hope people will truly enjoy. As you can
> imagine, it is very hard to see one?s work pirated
> after all you?ve invested into making it.

> The bottom line in that our DRM policy is essential
> to the economic structure we use to fund our games
> and as well as to the rights of people who create
> them. Without the ability to protect our work from
> piracy, developers across the entire game industry
> will eventually stop investing time and money in PC
> titles.

essential to the economic structure?! you mean by killing it? has anyone at the company looked at the profit loss since Securom was implemented? Spore lost thousands of pre-orders and overall sales because of DRM, and more titles lose out because of DRM. the first question people ask these days before they will even buy is "whats the DRM like?" and if anyone even mentions the name "securom", or something about "activations" people won't buy. those people in turn are very likely to become your best friends in the "warez" underground.
people won't even buy your console games anymore, and those don't even have the drm.
i don't know what blind idiot can't see the money loss involved with this, but if a DRM free game like Prince of Persia can sell just fine, as well as indie DRM free games like Sins of the Solar empire, then i ask whats the point?
and when did this DRM even work? when has it ever prevented "zero day piracy"?
from where i'm standing the company is apparently paying third party development of draconian DRM thats not working, and loving it in the rear as they do so.

in all actuality its a da**ed dirty lie that PC gaming is dieing, so stop spreading rumors.
the only thing dieing is the EA conglomerate. i hope Disney buys you and shuts you down hardcore selling off each of your individual licenses to lesser companies.
i'll be reading the layoff reports with glee personally.




> No disc required
>
> One of the best things about this new method of copy
> protection is that you will not need the DVD in your
> computer in order to play the game. Install the game
> on your machine and then put the disc away for back
> up ? you won?t need it again unless you want to
> install it on another machine. If you are like us,
> misplacing losing discs, this is a great feature.

ha ha HA, try again. nice attempt to rationalize though.


> Computer activations
>
> Dead Space will be playable (activated) on up to five
> authorized machines simultaneously. What is an
> authorization? The first time you run the game on a
> new computer, we will authorize that machine and up
> to a total of five machines. This is very similar to
> what other commercial software applications, like
> iTunes do.

this is BS and frankly i can use ITunes downloaded content on any computer i wish now.
so either they removed it, or i somehow worked around it without knowing, as i've swapped it between my comp, my laptop, and work comps easy without needing itunes at all on any but one of the them.

> If you already have the game running on five
> machines, but would like to add the game to a sixth
> computer, you have options. EA customer support is
> on hand for cases in which gamers need to authorize
> more computers.


BULL**** i had an issue with crysis where my activations were "used up" and it REFUSED to let me reactivate, and customer support was useless, it took FOUR MONTHS of arguing the game was NOT going to unlock the thing to convince them to actually, heres a kicker, LOOK INTO IT. they found out there was an issue on their end preventing the keys from unlocking and had to make me create a NEW eadownloader account to give me a free copy that at this point i'm not even interested in.

> Why five machines?
>
> By examining previous EA PC game data, we have found
> that 75 percent of our consumers install and play any
> particular game on only one machine and less than 1
> percent ever try to play on more than three different
> machines. Based on that, we figured that giving
> gamers five machines to play the game on would be
> more than satisfactory.
>
> If you make major changes to the machine (switching
> out multiple pieces of hardware, reinstalling your
> OS, etc.) or if you have a run of bad luck, some
> hardware failures, a botched OS install, your
> notebook was stolen ? you get the idea ? and all five
> of your authorizations have been used up, give us a
> call. We?ll work with you and get you the additional
> authorizations that are appropriate.

again, lies. another example is i NEVER got a response to my request for an additional Mass Effect key release, just a long period of silence and a closed ticket.
for those of us who maintain and update regularly this is a fine reason not to buy from EA or any other developer using Securom.

> DRM in the future
>
> We all like to know that if we invest in a game
> today, we will be able to play it years into the
> future. If you?re worried about your ability to play
> the game down the line, we will have a solution for
> that too. Once the game has lived its natural life
> and the risk for piracy had died down, we plan to
> patch our copy protection out of Dead Space.
>
> The bottom line is that we will never make it
> impossible for you to play a game that you paid for,
> even is that is years from now.

anyone else smell that? i think its more bull****
EA has a nasty habit along any other money mongering company out there and will more than likely fail on this promise.
so far the only company i've seen actively take a stance and DO this is ID software, whom not only releases a final patch and deactivates the DRM, but also releases many of their FULL source codes for use by modders.
i can't think of one time where EA's done more than say "sorry we don't support that title anymore"


> The big picture
>
> We really cannot stress this enough -- we are not
> trying to make this experience a negative one for
> you. We are looking to implement a solution that
> gives gamers a good experience, while also protecting
> our hard work.
>
> We know that some of you may disagree with this
> approach, and again, we understand where you?re
> coming from and really do respect your position. The
> development team is extremely proud of Dead Space and
> we want all of you to have the chance to experience
> it for yourself.
>
> Thank you very much for taking the time to read this
> today and we hope you enjoy Dead Space!
>
>
> Regards,
>
> The Dead Space Team

now the big question.
what fat PR f*** typed that up for ya?
i have high doubts the actual team feels that way, and i know how companies love to strangle anyone with a lawsuit who would DARE speak up and demand rights, let alone speak the truth for a change.

its bullox like this thats killing the economy and making people afraid, and unwilling, to buy.
this is worse for it than Bush ever could be.

supposedly no.
but its been said before and they've still added limits.

the only one confirmed to still hold its limitations though is oddly enough the controversial conversation starter itself.
Spore.
word on other games so far is still no limits/securom.

I just signed up on this forum to add to the voices of frustrated customers of your products.

I considered buying Dead Space until I found out at what level your DRM really does screw me, the legal customer, over. PC Gamer magazine has begun to flag games for having draconian DRM which is going to seriously hurt a substantial chunk of your customer base in the PC market.

I dealt with Bioshock when it first came out. I was extremely pissed off that I had bought a game and was unable to play it because I was unable to authorize the game in the first place. I was on a college campus that blocked specific ports from communicating with the outside world. It turned out their authorization used these ports. Customer support had no solution and after a few tech support rounds I gave up on them. Then I started finding out that I could only install so many times (and I'm a user who constantly swaps out hardware and usually uses an operating system for only a maximum of six months until I reformat and start again.).

If I didn't know so much about computers, I wouldn't have been able to play that game until they removed their authorization requirement. I ended up having to dig around the netsh commands in Vista to redirect outgoing ports.

The bottom line was after that ordeal, I vowed to check my games for such practices. I will not buy any game that includes over-the-top DRM. I have also suggested to all my friends not to buy the game due to this reason. Many of them chose to pirate it because of my warning. ...and I always get in their faces about pirating games. Not this time.

How long will it be until you tie console games to their machine?

I can't wait to see your company fold.

DRM's days are numbered I think. Ubisoft have started released PC games devoid of it. The new Prince of Persia game doesn't even need a serial code entering during install, and doesn't need the disc in the drive to play either.