heh, wasn't it just *last* week I was saying in another thread that very soon every frigging PC game will be using a "phone home" form of copy protection.
This is hardly surprising. This, coupled with Byte Shield (now adopted by Paradox/Gamers Gate and a bunch of other companies) is the beginning of the new push at curbing the piracy of our games.
All you sissies crying foul, I feel your pain. However, even HD movies *and* console games *have* copy protection; but nobody whines about those, do they? You mofos are only complaining because - as pirates - its just going to make things a bit harder. Wankers.
There is nothing wrong with non-intrusive copy protection.
This isn't non-intrusive copy protection. The copy protection consoles and movies is completely transparent to the user. You stick a game in a console, it works, period. Anything that doesn't work is labeled a buggy POS and tends to die a horrible death. With movies the only thing you ever have to think about is regions and usually only if you are buying foreign films.
Gamers are complaining because the PC industry has failed so hard at copy protection it isn't funny. With a console I only have to think "is my disc in the console?" if I want to play a game. PC copy protection has been incredibly intrusive and anything but transparent. Bioshock's phone home scheme cause many people to be unable to play the game when they purchased it, because the authentication servers crashed. A scheme like this means the user has to think about the copy protection. Is their computer plugged into the internet, can it phone home through the firewall, if not how do they configure the firewall? For more tech savvy people this isn't much, but there is a huge swath of gamers who aren't tech savvy. PC copy protection has historically been a pain in the ass, refusing to run if you have a virtual drive, refusing to run if you have certain parts of the nero suite installed, refusing to run on certain CD drives, trying to covertly install things on people's computers that in the end causing trouble.
I don't really pirate games, but I can't think of a single pirate who has purchased a game because of a copy protection system. I can on the other hand think of numerous times where I decided not to purchase a game because their copy protection system caused more problems than the game was worth.