"Guise! Why does everone hate EA?!?!"

Wasn't it the DRM featured in the game back then? I don't see EA spending time to remove it for a "free" release.

SecuRom DRM, while 'unpopular' is very strangely over-vilified compared to the persistent and even more insidious DRM of Steam, Ubisoft, etc.

If Sony had the same level of zombie-control that Valve and Apple does, you would soon be reading posts defending SecuRom with all the shills in unison. Instead, you get the indefensible position of on-line DRM is somehow better for you than off-line DRM.

Thinking people know differently.

Optional Nickname! wrote on Jul 29, 2014, 10:08:
SecuRom DRM, while 'unpopular' is very strangely over-vilified compared to the persistent and even more insidious DRM of Steam, Ubisoft, etc.

If Sony had the same level of zombie-control that Valve and Apple does, you would soon be reading posts defending SecuRom with all the shills in unison. Instead, you get the indefensible position of on-line DRM is somehow better for you than off-line DRM.

Thinking people know differently.

True, but unfortunately it is difficult to find boxed games in a retail store, anymore. And most of the games in a retail box still require on-line accounts. So you are stuck with Online-DRM.

I only use Steam and GoG... and Uplay for one time activation then put it in offline mode forever. That said... sooner or later I'm going to download cracks for all my games and uninstall steam / uplay... I just have to get around to building a crap machine to buy and download the games... then crak them and transfer them to my gaming rig.

Optional Nickname! wrote on Jul 29, 2014, 10:08:
SecuRom DRM, while 'unpopular' is very strangely over-vilified compared to the persistent and even more insidious DRM of Steam, Ubisoft, etc.

If Sony had the same level of zombie-control that Valve and Apple does, you would soon be reading posts defending SecuRom with all the shills in unison. Instead, you get the indefensible position of on-line DRM is somehow better for you than off-line DRM.

Thinking people know differently.

I've never had an issue with Steams DRM outside of the HL2 release. Offline mode always kicks in automatically if I happen to lose my connection and outside of multiplayer Steamworks titles which rely on internet related functionality I have no issues. People like Steam because the DRM is relatively benign.

I can't say the same thing for SecuROM over the years.

I've been around for a very long time, so maybe you weren't PC gaming in the 90s. I always despised shit like securerom, safedisc, starforce, etc. Back in the days, that shit made a distinctive hit on performance, was impossible to get rid of, and forced on the media because there was no downloading alternative unless you pirated.

However Steam, I'm glad as hell for it. Single player games can be played without connections (which I don't bother with, keeping steam up allows me to see what friends are up to, join their games, chat etc), and online games it's a no-brainer positive. In an online world, I just don't care one bit if my games are verified, housed, and easily restored via... online!

I'm just not a fan of every company trying to cash in on the service like steam has, all with their own versions like Origin, uplay etc and never buy through those services if I can help it.

Those dirty, sneaky little bastages! JUST FOR THAT!

*Takes my wrath out upon the helpless citizens of my doomed, hell-on-earth, suburb of Slimtopia by walling all inhabitants inside a single structure with no toilet or beds AND...a refrigerator FULL of high fiber food!*

*Wringing my hands together mad scientist style and yelling at my monitor* "Bwahahah! BATHE IN YOUR OWN FILTH AND DISCOMFORT UNTIL YOU HAVE PAID FOR YOUR SINS MY PRECIOUS SIM'S!!!*

It's not that people don't like the Steam DRM. It's that people like buying games for a dollar. I'll put up with a lot when the games are so cheap.

Sigh, really nothing too horrible hear. If you installed this you already or had to install Origin which is worse. Really nothing all that bad here.

I sat here for 10 minutes trying to find something to bitch about. Sadly, I can not think of anything related to this topic or thread to bitch about, nor did I have anything better to do with that 10 minutes. I will therefore bitch about not being able to bitch about anything. Well, I would except that now I have something else to go do. Just pretend I found something useless to bitch about and imagine what that would have looked like. Or reread this post. Either way.

I hate SecuROM and Tages because both locked me out of games I had purchased - the former was with Crysis 2, the latter with STALKER: Clear Sky. Neither added to the experience. Steam is different because it provides tangible benefits that far outweigh the limitations.

That said, I would still like to see Steam move away from DRM. I can understand it for game launches to prevent content being leaked early but not past release.

SecuROM concerns are basically idiotic, and exaggerated to an amazing degree.

SecuROM is copy protection and the implementation can be done in multiple ways - a choice left for the game publisher. The most basic method is CD/DVD based copy protection. The other often used method is based on online activation. During the installation of these games, the installer contacts securom server with the serial key you type in from the box. The key is hashed with some of the hardware IDs, to make it unique for your PC. The game is activated and a file is written to your local hard-disk, so when the next time, game is launched, the local file is referenced.

It's like installing a game with permanent offline mode.

There's no driver level (ring 0) stuff going on in the background. There's nothing that runs in the background, whether the game is running or not. It's a simple check on running the executable. Subsequent re-installs will not cause more activations, because of the local files stored from the first activation.

When a tool says "wiping out traces of SecuROM", all it's doing is deleting these saved activation files. These are not executable, dlls or any other driver file. Some just get spooked because the file names are very long (and contain non-standard characters) to keep the file management somewhat of a hassle.

How the activation limits are managed is also up to the publisher. They even allow simultaneous activations, where you can install the same on two different PCs, and then play at the same time. It's going against the EULA (for one license use), but it's a customer friendly feature even when not misused. You can lend the games to others, have them installed on multiple PCs without worrying about online or offline modes, and patch them independently. Publishers could set the activation limits to some number or even make more licenses available every few weeks.

Between HumbleBundle (the non-DRM sales, not the Steam keys) and GoG, I pretty much only buy DRM-free titles these days. But if I had to use DRM, to this day I think the least bothersome method was what EA had with their use of SecuROM in Crysis, Burnout Paradise or Mirror's Edge. The games allowed multiple simultaneous installs, and only one install time activation. The 'revoke license' option was right there in Windows start-up menu for the game. And EA had also released external tools that you could run to revoke licenses for games (essentially looking at those locally stored files and revoking these) It was much much more flexible than DRM methods used in Steam, or Battlenet for instance.

Optional Nickname! wrote on Jul 29, 2014, 10:08:
SecuRom DRM, while 'unpopular' is very strangely over-vilified compared to the persistent and even more insidious DRM of Steam, Ubisoft, etc.

If Sony had the same level of zombie-control that Valve and Apple does, you would soon be reading posts defending SecuRom with all the shills in unison. Instead, you get the indefensible position of on-line DRM is somehow better for you than off-line DRM.

Thinking people know differently.

Well for one thing, SteamDRM doesn't prevent a game from loading just because you have an emulated drive... SecuROM does.
Also - SteamDRM as far as I know has never had install limits, pretty much all the third party ones that are 'over-vilified' do.

So basically if it's invisible to the user (ie SteamDRM), you don't hear people complaining about it generally. If it interferes with the legitimate installation and playing of a game, you do hear people complain about it.

Ceribaen wrote on Jul 29, 2014, 15:17:
Well for one thing, SteamDRM doesn't prevent a game from loading just because you have an emulated drive... SecuROM does.
Also - SteamDRM as far as I know has never had install limits, pretty much all the third party ones that are 'over-vilified' do.

But then SecuROM unlike Steam, never stopped me from playing a Game A on a PC, just because another Game B using SecuROM is currently active on another PC. It didn't ask me to create an account and link a game to it, like Steam. And unlike Steam, I could revoke game licenses (if given option by the publisher), and then sell the game with its activation limits intact.

And by the way, I never ran into a problem with having a virtual drive stopping a game from running. I am sure the problem would be there as you mentioned, but it may not have been as prevalent as you would think.

BitWraith wrote on Jul 29, 2014, 11:28:
It's not that people don't like the Steam DRM. It's that people like buying games for a dollar. I'll put up with a lot when the games are so cheap.

I'd not. I gladly pay 10-20 times more on GoG to get a DRM free version than buying those $1-2 games during Steam sales.

The great thing is that GoG is truly catching on, and there are lots of new games appearing there. Then there are also all the Kickstarted games, where some backers like me played a part in insisting that a DRM free version remains an option.

pagb wrote on Jul 29, 2014, 09:36:
Wasn't it the DRM featured in the game back then? I don't see EA spending time to remove it for a "free" release.

Bingo. This is the same DRM it always had and always will have. Even if EA was giving it away free forever - and they're not, they're still charging for it after this promo is up - it still wouldn't be worth their time to do a build and QA cycle for a new version without SecuROM. After all it's a free game.

If you're not going to break the law, DRM doesn't matter at all.
I don't pirate games and therefore I'm happy to deal with DRM-- and though I'm not a fan of EA, I can totally understand why they would protect their intellectual property.

Thenetcase wrote on Jul 29, 2014, 18:19:
If you're not going to break the law, DRM doesn't matter at all.

Well you definitely don't speak for everyone.

I understand that.
But stealing games from publishers / developers is just as wrong in the sight of the law as walking into K-Mart and stealing something off the shelf, or breaking into a home and robbing the owners.
It's basically the digital form of the same thing.

Thenetcase wrote on Jul 29, 2014, 18:39:
I understand that.
But stealing games from publishers / developers is just as wrong in the sight of the law as walking into K-Mart and stealing something off the shelf, or breaking into a home and robbing the owners.
It's basically the digital form of the same thing.

Who was talking about theft?