First off, everyone and their mother (although mothers fall under everyone, I suppose) it talking about the DRM for Spore. That DRM is evil, unethical, and it is my hope that Spore is a horrible failure as punishment for treating honest customers like criminals.
But even worse, in my opinion, is the DRM on Crysis Warhead. Because while Spore is a casual game, and casual users do not change their setp all that often (EA estimates that 1% of their customers will have their property illgealy taken from them by Spore’s DRM), the target market for is Crysis is a much more tech savy, upgrade heavy group.
So I would like to take the oppurunity to refute some of the points EA and Crytek have made here:
“Warhead uses online authentication and allows up to five activations. This gives you the opportunity to install the game as many times as you want on five different machines.”
The first problem is online activation. Games that do not need internet access for core functionality should NEVER require an internet connection. And worse, they do not allow you to activate on 5 machines. They allow you to activate on 5 operating systems. So if you dual boot XP and Vista, you have used up two. That means that if you own 2 gaming computers (like me) and a laptop, and you dual boot, your past your activation limit. Thats a small number of customers, but if a single 1 of those customers has been hindered by this, EA and Crytek have done something unethical.
“This DRM solution is safe. EA and Crytek would never allow anything that included spyware, viruses or malware to be installed on anyone’s computers.”
Securom = Spyware. From wikipedia : “The use of SecuROM is controversial because certain aspects of the protection are similar to functions of malware, and users are not always informed when SecuROM is included with a product.”
“Re-authentication is required only if you make significant changes to your PC’s hardware, reformat your hard drive, or in some cases, upgrade your Operating System. Multiple installations of the game on the same computer that has not gone through significant changes will not count against the number of computers the game can be installed on.”
Like I said above, this does not apply to one computer, it applies to changes to that computer. Compare this to a retail version of Vista, which can be used on one mahcine at a time as many times as you want.
Also not covered is you deactivate a machine. Im guessing you can’t. Which means that you waste an activation eveyr time you reinstall your OS, or make unspecified changes to the hardware. I know that if Crysis had this system in place, I would already have hit the limit.
[...] nopayhere: [...]
Good post, I like your writing style! I’ve added http://randomcomputerstuff.com/ to my feed reader, and will be reading your posts from now on. Just a quick question - did you design your header image yourself, or have it done professionally? If you had it done by a professional, who was it?
It was self designed, but based of the default in word press.