That was his point, that a good game will sell well regardless of whether it is copy write protected.

I'll try to help you out here since you seem to think anyone who disagrees with DRM somehow supports piracy. I think I speak for most if not all anti-drm posters in this thread when I say, none of us support piracy, we just recognize that DRM doesn't stop piracy and does more harm than good to games.

Second post on the second page in that linked thread, by Derek French. He says:

Oh no what's this? The date on my desktop does not seem to change! It's always May 1st How will it cope?

Oh, great, so a year from now I won't be able to play it anymore!

Grrr....

Crippling the game because it checks every 10 days is plain annoying it isn't even a reasonable time period 30 days would be better. I do travel with my laptop and if I take a vacation I don't expect an internet connection. Not being able to play my games because I hadn't updated them or not being able to play because I decided to use my mac side for a couple of weeks rather than my vista side is not appealing.

I understand wanting protect your software, but I also believe that pirates cost a company a lot less than they make it out to be. Very few pirates actually pay for the games. So why worry about pirates and worry more about making a good game. As that sells better than a mediocre game with hellish copy protection.

I dont see anything wrong about copy protection. Its their game and they can do whatever they want and i'll be happy to buy it with or without copy protection. If you dont like it dont buy it!

Oh look, they don't want my money. Bummer for them. Both of those games were interesting, now I'll buy neither of them. They can blame the lack of sales on "piracy" like they always do.

Can I please ask everyone above where in the above-quoted post it says anything about having to check with an authentication server every 10 days?

It doesn't say anything like that. All that is mentioned in that quote is that an initial activation is required, and it re-authenticates within ten days following that to ensure the CD-Key has not been black listed (I imagine this applies mainly to catch-all the initial batch of pirated keys).

It doesn't really sound that onerous, considering it'll let us play without the DVD (I think that's the real winner there).

Derek French says it (italics are mine):



Second page of the link, second post.

Well, if that is the case, I and many of my friends wont be getting Spore (or bioshock for that matter). I think I'm done with EA products. Its time for a company like that to crash and burn. The old way of doing business is dead (Ferocious IP protection at the expense of the customer). Stardock and Steam have the right idea. They get their money, we get our product, all are happy.

EA (Microsoft and Blizzard to an extent as well), milk the customer for all they are worth and make sure the product doesnt work in 5 years as the tech changes. Mediocre games with grand titles. Games with great graphics, but are only fun for a week or so.

Anyway, lets hope these other companies come around to the idea of doing business like stardock does. Or, lets hope stardock grows and keeps pumping out the quality, fun, and best of all DRM free games! Then I can keep throwing my money at them

Thanks!

Bah, no edit.

To sum up, this is the copy protection scheme:

- activation key required to install the game.
- you do not need the disc in the drive to play.
- five days after installation and first activation, when you fire up the game, it will try to 'phone home' to authenticate. If it fails to connect, it will try again on day 6. Then on day seven and so on up to day 10. If it cannot authenticate at day 10, the game will not run until you connect to the internet and allow it to authenticate.
- at any time, once the game has authenticated, the timer resets and you have 10 days again before it must be authenticated once again.
- you have 3 activations allowed. These are used for installing on other computers, or re-installing the game. As well, if you 'significantly change your hardware' (BioWare's wording, and so far this has not been fully explained as to what 'significant' means), you'll have to re-activate. If you use up your activations, you'll have to contact EA support in order to (hopefully) get more activations.

If you read the thread, it was explained. Repeatedly too, you're not the only one that didn't immediately see it...

The specifics.

On install, the software counts down, five days in, it attempts to authenticate, ten days in, if no authentication, poof, no work till authenticated. On authenticating, the timer is reset, giving you ten more days. Assuming constant connectivity it will re-authenticate every five days.

The problems, aside from the obvious one for someone that doesn't have internet at home.

Your isp is down, the server crashes, whatever. Shit happens and you can't authenticate when you go to play the game. It's been ten or more days since you last played the game, not exactly an unusual occurrence that. Authentication is, at this point, mandatory to play. Oops? You get to wait till you can authenticate to play.

You go on vacation/work related travel to a place with no wi-fi hotspots or land lines, assuming you authenticated right before leaving, you can play it for ten days unless you find internet connectivity somewhere to restore it.

Someone gets your cd key through a keygen(not impossible, not unheard of, very unbloody likely, but shit happens) and your authentication fails. You then get to call EA tech support(weep for humanity at this point) to straighten out your problem, it may or may not happen. The joys of having verification and disabling abused keys that may or may not have been abused by their owners.

If it's an encrypted authentication, I'd have been cut off for a couple weeks when my isp started blocking encrypted traffic for me and refused to admit it. I had to spend two full days on the phone with those pricks before I got that one past the tier 2 tech support that was still a bunch of morons reading from manuals in India. I was one step away from being sent to the executive tech support for big wigs before someone in the engineering department realized that they did indeed have a NOC controlled firewall and I wasn't full of shit when I read them their own information and told them it was shown as enabled. Tech support in India blows. Now you might be thinking big deal, play something else, but what? If this became the norm, there wouldn't be anything else. All your other games would be disabled for the same reason.

Playing without the dvd is a real winner, but I think I'd prefer to use the dvd over having it phone home every five days because I'm a thief and at any moment could up and steal the product I already bought!

It's brilliantly stupid. I'd come up with a comparison, but I honestly can't think of anything comparable.

OMG!!! THE EDIT BUTTON WAS THERE!!!

Damn you for posting before I finished typing my book! I'm such a windbag...

on page 2 he says:


Thank god for Stardock is around that knows and understands the people

I've been looking forward to Spore like no game since perhaps Civ IV, but this is just plain totally infuriating.

On my computer and the seven or eight others on our network, nothing "calls home" on its own, ever. Keeping tabs on outbound network traffic is basic security; if something does compromise one of my computers, I don't want to contribute to the problem by allowing it to spread outwards to the rest of the world.

Going back to my first Amiga 1000 twenty-two years ago, I've never once pirated a game, and I'm getting too old to start doing that now. I resent the hell out of any game that would put that much effort into annoying me because it thinks that I am some kind of warez kid, and I absolutely hate the thought that these morons are going to stop me from buying Spore.

excessive copy protection will be the death of PC gaming long before consoles take us out. 8*(