DRM Shuts Down Gears of War PC - Updated

[Grobut]

And some people still wonder why i do not want DRM on my games..

 

[DannyMeister]

I hope i dont get banned for saying this, but this is why i support piracy (please continue reading):

+ i work in the games industry as an artist
+ i buy all my games (in fact i have both GoW 360 and GoW PC)

My point is i support piracy because it needs to exist. Corporations are evil, and piracy is one of the few things they fear, so it serves as a check. And before some moralist tries to answer that piracy causes DRM and issues like this, it doesnt, and without piracy its very likely that the corporations would be even more draconian in their measures. Both piracy and DRM are bad things, but unfortunately the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Like everyone has said, DRM only hurts us people that actually buy the stuff.

I'd like to see some explanation of the cause and effect relationship you think exists between no piracy and harsher measures. I hate DRM, but this seems silly. Corporations are evil? You have fallen hook, line, and sinker for what makes great movies and political careers.

 

[Grobut]

I'd like to see some explanation of the cause and effect relationship you think exists between no piracy and harsher measures. I hate DRM, but this seems silly.

Then you need only ask yourself "what does DRM actually do?", they say its intended purpose is to stop piracy, but the actions do not match their words, it does bugger all to stop pirates and we all know it, name any DRM enabled game, and you can go find a working torrent for same.

It is a prooven failure at doing what its supposed to do, and a spectacular one at that, and consumers don't like it and call for boycuts, so why do they still insist on using it? when it seems to only hurt their sales and does bugger all against piracy?

Well, that's the multi billion dollar question, 'innit?

Perhabs we should wonder if its really about piracy at all, maybe its about something much more fundamental, like controlling the market?

Corporations are evil? You have fallen hook, line, and sinker for what makes great movies and political careers.

Whilst "evil" is a silly word, it is true that all Corporations are inherently greedy, the whole point of a buisness, afterall, is to make money, nobody runs a buisness out of love and goodwill twords their fellow man, they do it to make a buck.

It is folly to think that a buisness is your freind, it's not, all they want from you is the contents of your wallet, and if they can find a way to charge you extra for something, or cut corners but still charge you the same, all the better! if they can get away with it they will, you can be damned sure of it.

 

[Zur]

DRM = Dumb Retarded Monkeys

 

[BooGiTyBoY]

I remember playing old forgotten realms roleplaying games on my commodore 64.

At certain points in the game you had a random "code" generated that had to be looked up on a spinning code wheel. If you didnt buy the game, you didnt have the wheel, and you couldnt progress at all.

It's sad that a little cardboard wheel with a pushpin was 10x more effective than all the expensive research they've put into failed DRMs.

I also dont know who to blame here... GFW for their crappy certificate system, or Epic for not renewing their certificate in time.

 

[Apathy.]

I remember in the first Prince of Persia for Dos game that I had. I think it was after you beat the first stage, it would put you in a level full of instant death potions and 1 potion that would allow you to continue through the rest of the game. Each potion had an Alphabet letter by it. It actually gave you instructions to look in the manual for a specific letter in a specific word. Example:
Page 5.
Third paragraph.
Second word.
forth letter.

Once you found the letter, you go find the potion with that letter above it. It gave you I think it was three tries. If you just took random guesses, it would kill you and put you back at the main menu. If you went through the instruction manual and did what it said, you would go happily through the rest of the game.

 

[Lruce Bee]

To be honest, I see DRM on a game and I give it a wide berth - just too much hassle.
It's that simple really.

Lruce

 

[Sahkolihaa]

Digital certificates expire for games? Bloody hell.

 

[DannyMeister]

Grobut, you said nothing there that I disagree with. DRM really only hurts legit customers.

I still see no reason that a decrease in piracy would cause a company to draw even tighter reins. Would that be because their success at controlling the market gets them all macho headed? I don't really buy that. I'm too much of a skeptic to think that companies are more concerned with being benevolent than making a buck, but also too much of a skeptic to easily fall for conspiracy theories.

Now as for Epic and Gears PC, I hope some lessons are learned. Surely game devs and publishers alike won't want to encourage stealing by continuing to ship products that cause problems for people who bought the game. I'm not sure what the full answer to the problem of pirating is, but I'd go down the road of removing restrictions and making software that is so polished and so appreciated that people are willing to pay for it. There's not a good chance of that happening any time soon though... we'll probably just see attempts to make DRM more and more complex in an attempt to improve something that is fatally flawed in the first place.

 

[Larkin]

All people are greedy. Whoever that's making the argument and portraying it in such a way that corporations are the only ones greedy are in denial.
----

I find this actually pretty funny. A few days ago they made everyone happy with the announcement of the titan pack then steam integration of retail ut3 and for a moment it looked like they figured out a way off the fail train, but no, no, it was a false alarm.

 

[Grobut]

Grobut, you said nothing there that I disagree with. DRM really only hurts legit customers.

I still see no reason that a decrease in piracy would cause a company to draw even tighter reins. Would that be because their success at controlling the market gets them all macho headed? I don't really buy that. I'm too much of a skeptic to think that companies are more concerned with being benevolent than making a buck, but also too much of a skeptic to easily fall for conspiracy theories.

You are not looking at it from the right angle, its all about money in the end.

Ever read the EULA that comes with the games you play? well, its no secret that the software industry does not want us to buy software, they want to lease it to us instead, because there's more money in for them that way, plus if it is leased and not owned, they maintain more rights and control over it.
But how do you make people follow thouse stupid rules in the EULA?

Enter DRM, now here is an "anti piracy system" that obviously does not work, it does not stop pirates but still costs a ton of money for Publishers and Dev's to put it on the disc.. and they gladly do this knowing full well it doesen't work, why!?

So what else can DRM used for? well, how about enforcing the EULA? that it can do! just suspend the CD-key/Account of the offending user and there you go, his leasing policy has just been revoked.
And it IS used in this way, you have probably heard of known cheaters getting their Steam accounts flushed and the like, or people getting their SecuRom gamekeys deactivated for complaining on EA's forums, this is the sort of control it gives the publishers, it lets them enforce whatever rules they want, because you had to agree to that when you installed the software.

Thats what its all about, enforcing EULA's, and now they can, and they don't even have to drag you to court like in the old days, they just press a button and your software dies.


Fighting piracy is just a long term goal, they know they can't do that right now, BUT, its in the works, many of the big players in the industry are pushing to get DRM physically placed on all our hardware, a little chip that will tattle on the cattle, or outright prevent us from doing things they dont want us to do with their software, and they can make up any BS rules and payment plans they want and we'll have to abide if we want any software.. what a brave new world that'll be, eh?

 

[JaFO]

(my emphasis)

The interesting question is - what is the certificate validity on games where there hasn't been an accident?

Easy to check : go to the executables and dll's of your favourite game and check the certificate ...
Standard certificate is 2-3 years although a company can probably request any duration.


Just checked UT3 :
UT3.Exe : valid 7 - 1 - 2006 to 29 - 1 - 2009 (ie : it is classed as 'invalid' at this time!)
All assemblies and executables have the same invalid certificate ... *whoops* we can consider us real lucky that Microsoft is not enforcing these things ...

So this 'problem' isn't limited to GoW (PC). It affects *ALL* software released & signed by Epic.
It's merely GoW(PC) which has its restrictions enforced.

I'm curious as to what the objective of signing the executable was - I had read that this was related to GfW Live and not the more general signing to get kernel mode access that MS have been using.

Two words : XP & Vista ...
Both operating systems require signed installers, drivers, executables and assemblies. The only real difference is that newer Windows-versions will start enforcing these things with less and less options to circumvent for users.

IIRC one of the things that Vista was supposed to do was to disable all unsigned media by default. And if you start XP or Vista at first you'll notice that this is the behaviour for drivers already (thank <your favourite deity> you can tell the os to 'ignore' such warnings ... )

It starts with 'simple' stuff like Windows warning that the executable is 'not signed', which is something I'm sure any XP or Vista-user has seen when trying to install relatively 'old' software. Such things either are enough to scare users into not installing the software or they make them press 'yes' regardless thereby defeating the entire idea behind signing ...

The concern is that unless the certificates are signed with a stupidly long validity period (>9999 years!) then there is a risk that some games might stop working in a "few" years and yet if they are not signed with short validity then there doesn't seem that much point to signing them at all.

The problem is that a 'stupid long validity period' is not possible (plus it defeats the purpose of signing it).

I've always joked that the only thing this will result in is properly signed and 'trusted' viruses/trojans.

btw : signing software isn't just bad for consumers. It also has significant impact on amateur/open-source developers who can't afford to pay for a certificate and thereby are either forced to sell their software unless they use one of the few 'free' certificate authorities ...

 

[DannyMeister]

Yeah, hardware DRM makes me shiver.

 

[Alopexau]

Whoa whoa hold on, games with licenses that EXPIRE now? I've been meaning to play gears online with a friend, but have been putting off reinstalling it due to HD space running low, does this mean I can't now? If I roll back my clock will that let it run after being installed and clock restored? What the hell is this?

...and yet they wonder why piracy is higher now, maybe if they'd stop treating every legitimate user like a potential criminal, a good number of them might you know, NOT turn to piracy to get working copies of games? Just a thought.

 

[elmuerte]

Code signing is not a form of preventing people to run a program after a certain time, it is used to give the end user the functionality to verify the authenticity of the executable.
(there is an option to set an end date, but this is rarely used). Code signing is not related to the certificate used to sign the code. If the certificate expired it only means that you can not use that certificate to sign new code. So, when a certificate expires the program should still be allowed to run, only when a certificate is explicitly revoked the OS might determine that the program is no longer allowed to run.

Now, where did Epic screw up? Part of the code signing is setting a timestamp when the code was signed (this is an optional feature, which is a dumb decision if you ask me). Epic did not set these timestamps when UT3 and GoW were signed. This isn't a major issue. Except that GfW requires this timestamp to be set, or else it will use the certificate expiration date.

Code signing is not meant for DRM, it's used for tamper protection. Of course tamper protection can be used to enforce DRM (which GfW does).

Don't confuse code signing and it's optional expiration and certificates used for the signing and their expiration.

 

[TheSomian]

as always, only the legitimate players are screwed. All the pirates don't have these problems, sotell me: what is this DRM crap for, if it

• can still be bypassed
• only prevents the legitimate buyers from playing

?

 

[Grobut]

All people are greedy. Whoever that's making the argument and portraying it in such a way that corporations are the only ones greedy are in denial.

I never said that, my post origionally contained more paragraphs explaining how buisness and consumers are natural enemies, IE they want our money, we dont want to part with our money, but this is BUF, a text based medium where, ironically, people don't want to read, and will reply to any post longer than a lolcat picture with "tl;dr", so i decided to cut that part before submitting it.

(que someone replying to this post with "tl;dr" just for lulz, or adding it as a tag for secret lulz)

as always, only the legitimate players are screwed. All the pirates don't have these problems, sotell me: what is this DRM crap for, if it

• can still be bypassed
• only prevents the legitimate buyers from playing

?

I told you, its about enforcing EULA's

 

[haslo]

Just do as I do, and don't play DRM-infested games.

GOG.com has a nice collection, all DRM-free. I kinda got to like Painkiller over the last couple days.

 

[TheSomian]

I'm not against DRM, i'm just against preventing ppl from playing their purchased games,while thepirates can play them.

 

[Sk.7]

I know how to fix this. Release a patch, big suprise... WITH SLI FIX FOR GEARS! GRRR!!