Thank you Matrix, for no DRM

[billyjj]

All the protection in the world and people are still ripping them off... they have drivers that can emulate DRM and software pirates waste many hours of their life cracking games to offline only mode. Cracked games don't work with the new patches, so for wargamers it makes sense to buy the game or you will be playing 1.0 with bugs while everyone else is playing 1.8 with new balance and fixed issues. Also for the most part Mutliplayer never works for a cracked game, so if they can make a fun enough multiplayer game people will buy it even if they originally "stole" it, so they can play with their friends online. DRM is just not needed

[Widell]

I think that will always be the situation. If you are old enough to remember the games of the past that had codes printed on the manual or similar (I even had one for the Amiga in which you had to "look up word 12 from the top of page 20") those are also DRM, and they were also cracked (and yes, the cracks worked better than the DRM'ed game on many occasions!). It's the same with many things in society, and as most of the visitors here stick to the legal distribution channels we feel that we are being punished by "draconian" DRM's while the less legal gamers play along happily without that penalty. However, I don't think we'll be able to prevent people from acquiring illegal copies of things and, aka, different versions of DRM will be put in place. Some will be better (aka Matrix), some will be worse, and some will be outright useless or stupid. Unfortunately, the only niche (spelling?) that will be without DRM will be the Open Source/Freeware apps, and you won't see WITP, HoI or whatever you addiction may be coming from there (Not to say there aren't any good Open Source games out there because there are!)

But, as I said before, I realize this is one of those endless discussions to which there are no final answers, so as Erik so cleverly put it, let's keep it on a civilized level and live with our different views on what a DRM is and what it isn't [;)]

[Obsolete]

If you are old enough to remember the games of the past that had codes printed on the manual or similar

Sierra was doing that right up to the end with their IN-HOUSE developed games.  You could always count on getting some kind of non-digital MANUAL from them, despite everyone else went the cheapo-route and simply gave you an empty box with just a CD in it.

[SireChaos]

ORIGINAL: Obsolete

If you are old enough to remember the games of the past that had codes printed on the manual or similar

Sierra was doing that right up to the end with their IN-HOUSE developed games.  You could always count on getting some kind of non-digital MANUAL from them, despite everyone else went the cheapo-route and simply gave you an empty box with just a CD in it.

Does anyone else remember the code wheels and other fun copy protection systems that came with Monkey Island or Indiana Jones?

[junk2drive]

Yes and keyboard overlays too.

[billyjj]

I never had a problem with the "go to page 3 paragraph 2 4th word"... I think that was a reasonable copy protection at the time. However people did create text files of all the possible answers that you could print. I see the concern but its just like the music companies they think that every song that gets downloaded = a lost sale. You have people that just download everything just to try it out, and they otherwise would have no intention of buying it. The only time that it sucks is when a company actually makes a good game, and people say "well... now I don't have to buy it". So software companies are in a tough situation, and it is hard to look at torrent sites and see your hard work being ripped off by the 100,000's of pirates and they can't help thinking. There goes about a million dollars worth of sales, and for the most part they are probably right, they do lose sales. They lose a lot more sales now than the days when you had to check manuals for words.


I was having a similar discussion only about DVDs on a movie forum and it seems people had no problem bypassing region protection which is illegal, but they were against dubbing or copying DVDs.

[Widell]

The solution that was tried (and failed completely IMHO) on music was completely useless, and until the music business understood they needed a different business model (aka Spotify, lastFM, Pandora and others) they kept protecting their (boxed) sales ahead of downloads/streaming by coming up with more or less ridiculous/useless protection ideas. The gaming industry is going through their version of the same journey.

I also think (and I may be wrong as it is an opinion and not facts!) that there is fundamental differences between the music industry and the gaming industry when it comes to lost sales due to piracy, or whatever we choose to call it. Music, I guess many people listen to a few songs they can get from the Internet backyards, and then get legal copies (This is when Spotify and the others challenge that behavior as you don't have to visit the back alleys any more to get the flavor of your idols new album!) whereas I doubt that many that get an illegal copy of a game buy their legal copy later (May be different in the case of multi player not being possible with a pirated version).

A question regarding DVD's - Is bypassing regional protection illegal? What if I buy (legally, no hot fix or firmware change!) a region free DVD player? I'm asking out curiosity as I have no idea on what the story is here, so would be interesting to know...

[GoodGuy]

ORIGINAL: Widell

A question regarding DVD's - Is bypassing regional protection illegal? What if I buy (legally, no hot fix or firmware change!) a region free DVD player? I'm asking out curiosity as I have no idea on what the story is here, so would be interesting to know...

I wouldn't think that it's illegal, since it's not a real copy-protection. Imho, the regional code had been introduced for various reasons, but one of the main thoughts was to give the distributors (in different countries) a technical protection in addition to their lawful (exlusive) right to serve a particular region/market. That means that it was in the Studios' and the distributors' interest to avoid (legal) imports, in order to protect their pricing and release policies.

Example: A friend knew some stewardesses (*grin*) who used to de deployed on the Germany - Hongkong route, like a decade ago. DVDs used to be cheaper over there, plus the release dates (of the original/english versions) were way ahead of the (dubbed) German releases.
So my mate got his DVDs cheaper and he had a kind of exclusive deal there, as he was the first who got to see them (at a time where filesharing was widely unknown or useless (due to lack of broadband [A]DSL in Germany).
On a sidenote, he had to deal with those funny Chinese subtitles with quite some of those DVDs, so he used to get the German versions later on, if he really liked a movie (plus his English sucked anyway, hehe).

I used to work part time for a japanese company (daughter of SONY) during my studies, and some techs gave out master codes to some employees (you had to press several buttons in a certain order), which would disable the region protection on the DVD-players they had bought during internal staff sales. Without disabling the protection, you will be limited to say ASIAN region DVDs (in case you legally obtain "Hongkong"-CDs) after a while, because once you've activated a region you're limited to watch DVDs from that particular region (it used to be that way, at least).

Even with (internal/external) DVD-Rom drives, you have to opt for a particular region after a while (this happens automatically, I guess, after you've played something between 5-10 DVDs from a part. region).

With a DVD-Rip-program one would be able to freely choose and switch the region code, plus one can remove the code completely while a given DVD is transfered to the harddisk, but the transfer may already violate copyright laws in quite some countries, even though the region scheme is not a dedicated copy-protection scheme.

Whatsoever, even with all the different copyright laws in other countries, I don't think it's illegal to obtain/use a free region player, I just think that you won't find any. [:D]

[Obsolete]

Does anyone else remember the code wheels and other fun copy protection systems that came with Monkey Island or Indiana Jones?

One thing that used to bother me were the FAKE bad-bit errors they used to put on the floppies to prevent DISKCOPY from running.  Sierra used this in their very early SpaceQuest, IIRC, and it was also used a lot in the Commodore 64s, though very easy to get around for those who knew the trick.

[GoodGuy]

ORIGINAL: Obsolete

One thing that used to bother me were the FAKE bad-bit errors they used to put on the floppies to prevent DISKCOPY from running.  Sierra used this in their very early SpaceQuest, IIRC, and it was also used a lot in the Commodore 64s, though very easy to get around for those who knew the trick.

On the AMIGA, longtracks were a common thing to establish some level of copy-protection. There were also rumours about disks written in "machine-code" that had to be read backwards by the floppy-drive (lol), but it turned out they had found a way to make the drive spin at different speeds on certain sectors, making it impossible to get a working copy without a hardware dongle, which was then produced and sold legally by the company who created "X-copy" - for quite a while, by the way. [:D]
But even with the dongle, such games could not be copied to HD.

[Obsolete]

Well I really found these FAKE bad bit errors pretty terrible for copy protection.  Anyone who was a pirate knew how to get around it, but the innocent person couldn't make a backup.  Furthermore, people used to panic when they found these bad sectors on their floppies, and would immediately return these back to the store, or they would try to run DISC-DOCTOR to CLEAN these bad sectors, not realizing there was nothing truely wrong with them in the first place.  Thus it was a disaster waiting to happen.  By trying to repair the FAKE damage, often the chance of REAL damage would occur.

A very bad scheme, and no surprise this terrible system has been abandoned around a decade ago now.  But leave it up to Ubi to find one even worse for the next generation of PC gamers....

[Greybriar]

Chamber of the Sci-Mutant Priestess had a copy protection scheme that involved marking a sector of the hard disk as bad. You also had to use its uninstall process to recover a file in the installed game or you couldn't install the game from the floppies anymore.

[Obsolete]

Edited: This is a family friendly forum, if you want to post a cartoon please make sure it stays within our boundaries for language.

[joeblack1862]

Hi All,

I thought I had better post this update on my issues with Steam over the previous weekend. It all looked like it had been resolved (I even closed the question on Steam).

What has now happened is this:

1. The money for the game I never received has been taken from my account (on the 30/03/2010)
2. The game was not on my list of games yesterday night.
3. My account has been disabled this morning.

So Steam have taken my money, not provided the goods and when I questioned it, they have now disabled my account so I can't play any of my games this weekend.

These are just the facts, nothing else. I have re-opened the support ticket and opened another to get my account re-enabled.

[Arctic Blast]

If you don't mind my asking Joe, how did you pay for the game? It's possible your credit card company might have flagged the purchase as a possible problem, causing the whole thing to be utterly borked in the process (it has happened to other people).

At any rate, crappy situation. Here's to hoping it's rectified soon.

[joeblack1862]

ORIGINAL: Arctic Blast

If you don't mind my asking Joe, how did you pay for the game? It's possible your credit card company might have flagged the purchase as a possible problem, causing the whole thing to be utterly borked in the process (it has happened to other people).

At any rate, crappy situation. Here's to hoping it's rectified soon.

Cheers AB,

It was via Paypal and it seemed to have become a right mess. As I have a disabled account and lost the money I escalated the dispute on Paypal, nothing to lose. Paypal will refund the money, so at least I'll get it back.

As for Steam, I have lost any confidence in them at the moment. Being an Easter weekend that will be that as far as hoping for a resolution.

The thing is, until this happened to me, it never really occured just how completely at their mercy you are. I have done nothing wrong, successfully paid my money for a game, didn't receive that game and questioned this, this appears to have resulted in my account being disabled so I now can't play any of my games.

I hope I am only presenting the facts. I don't want to colour this with emotion. Just hope it helps others.

[Arctic Blast]

ORIGINAL: Joe Black

ORIGINAL: Arctic Blast

If you don't mind my asking Joe, how did you pay for the game? It's possible your credit card company might have flagged the purchase as a possible problem, causing the whole thing to be utterly borked in the process (it has happened to other people).

At any rate, crappy situation. Here's to hoping it's rectified soon.

Cheers AB,

It was via Paypal and it seemed to have become a right mess. As I have a disabled account and lost the money I escalated the dispute on Paypal, nothing to lose. Paypal will refund the money, so at least I'll get it back.

As for Steam, I have lost any confidence in them at the moment. Being an Easter weekend that will be that as far as hoping for a resolution.

The thing is, until this happened to me, it never really occured just how completely at their mercy you are. I have done nothing wrong, successfully paid my money for a game, didn't receive that game and questioned this, this appears to have resulted in my account being disabled so I now can't play any of my games.

I hope I am only presenting the facts. I don't want to colour this with emotion. Just hope it helps others.

Man, that's terrible. Hopefully it does get sorted out, one way or another. [:(]

[NefariousKoel]

ORIGINAL: Joe Black



The thing is, until this happened to me, it never really occured just how completely at their mercy you are.

Unfortunately most people continue on unaware or uncaring about the appalling DRM situation. Until they're affected by it.

It's sad you had to go through this but now you know why some of us can be so vicious in our convictions.

[joeblack1862]

ORIGINAL: NefariousKoel

ORIGINAL: Joe Black



The thing is, until this happened to me, it never really occured just how completely at their mercy you are.

Unfortunately most people continue on unaware or uncaring about the appalling DRM situation. Until they're affected by it.

It's sad you had to go through this but now you know why some of us can be so vicious in our convictions.

Absolutely one hundred percent correct.

It is the "it won't happen to me, only other people (or pirates if you listen to the Steam fanboys)". What has struck me is how blinkered some of them are.

I put it to them that I had tried to buy a game on Steam via Paypal and this trouble had happened. I did exactly the same on both GG and GOG the same day and no problems. The reply was that Paypal was at fault.... err... yeah, that's what the evidence points to......

I will not buy any more games on Steam. In fact, I am waiting to get my account back so I can unistall all the Steam games (does anyone know how to unistall steam games without an enabled account?). After that, I will tell them to remove the account. Then I will remove Steam. That is how convinced I am that this is not for me, I will happily lose the games and treat it as a lesson learned.

Oh, and they still haven't answered the support ticket that I raised on morning of the 3rd.

EDIT:
Just to be clear, I am not telling others what to do, that is personal choice, I am merely relating my own experience, which is still ongoing. Erik, if you feel I have crossed a line at any point, let me know.

[JudgeDredd]

Well, I could say "...steam fanboys" and "...how blinkered some of them are" kind of cross the line, but then I'd be showing myself as a sensitive arsehole, wouldn't I...and sensitive I am NOT! [;)]