DRM Shuts Down Gears of War PC - Updated

[hal]

If you've fired up Gears of War (PC) over the last few days you've been greeted with an error message that says

path\directory\wargame-g4wlive.exe: You cannot run the game with modified executable code. Pleast reinstall the game.

A drop-dead date for legitimate owners? It turns out that the Windows digital certificate for the game's DRM expired on January 28, 2009. Epic Games' Joe Graf made a statement on the official forum that

We have been notified of the issue and are working with Microsoft to get it resolved. Sorry for any problems related to this. I'll post more once we have a resolution.

In the meantime, if you want to play you can always roll back your system clock.

Update Mark Rein responds to IGN:

The online cheat detection features in Gears of War for Windows are based on digital signatures. Well, we made an embarrassing mistake: we signed the executable with a certificate that expired in a way that broke the game.

We're working with Microsoft to re-sign the binaries properly, and hope to have this fixed very soon. We know how much this situation sucks, and we apologize for the inconvenience.

In the mean time a work-around for this is to set your computer's date back to a date before today.

 

[evilmrfrank]

 

[Angel_Mapper]

Oops.

 

[KaiserWarrior]

“I think it is bull****. Because what we did was take a great game, Gears of War 1 for Xbox 360, made it run at higher resolutions and added three new hours of really good gameplay and it got lower reviews. I think that’s bull****, and I don’t understand it. I can’t figure out what it is.”
-- Mike Capps, 2008



OOPS LOL.

 

[shoptroll]

Should've used Steam...

 

[a1ex]

No, they should've kept ****ing DRM out of the Game...

 

[IronMonkey]

A certificate is valid only for the time period specified within it. Every certificate contains Valid From and Valid To dates, which set the boundaries of the validity period. Once a certificate’s validity period has passed, the subject of the now-expired certificate must request a new certificate.

(my emphasis)

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

You normally define the certificate life cycle to require periodic renewal of issued certificates. Issued certificates expire at the end of their lifetime and can be renewed in a cycle until revoked or expired, or until an issuing CA is unavailable.

You should define certificate life cycles that meet your business goals and security requirements. The life cycles you choose depend on various considerations, such as the following: ...

• Security provided for issued certificates and their private keys. For example, private keys stored on smart cards can be considered more secure than private keys stored as files on local hard disks because smart cards cannot be coerced to export the private key.
• Risk of attack....
• How much trust you have for users of certificates. In general, lower trust requires shorter life cycles and shorter key lifetimes....
• The amount of administrative effort you’re willing to devote to certificate renewal and CA renewal...

Give careful consideration to how long you want CAs and issued certificates and keys to be trusted. The longer the certificates and private keys are valid, the greater the risk and potential for a security compromise.

You should define certificate life cycles that realistically balance your business goals with your security requirements. Unrealistically short life cycles can result in excessive administrative efforts required to maintain the life cycles. Unrealistically long life cycles increase the risk of security compromises.

(my emphasis)

If you look at each of those factors in turn (I have omitted a couple from the article) then, with one exception, deployment in a game environment would suggest that the certificate validity be very short if your objective is to defeat copyright infringement.

• Security - poor
• Risk of attack -high
• Trust in users - low
• Tolerance for administrative effort - low

It might be acceptable to use a long certificate validity if the objective is to defeat (say) worm/virus attack as it could be assumed that the worm/virus would not have the computational resources available to crack the certificate at the point of infection. It would also present a modest road block to some cheats that modify the executable.

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.

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.

 

[zynthetic]

Strange coincidence.
GoW was sitting on my hdd for a few months and I needed to free up some hdd. Decided to play through it once more before removing it. Seems like I made it through in the nick of time.

 

[StreetPreacher]

The whole thing is just dumb. Once again, paying customers are left out in the cold, while people who pirate their games are allowed to go on playing and life is grand. A legit user's best option right now is to go out and find a torrent.

It leaves me wondering... what has GFW ever done RIGHT? Anything? No wonder it's head was recently axed (IIRC) - the whole thing is a trainwreck.

 

[Sirius]

Wow...what a surprise

DRM:Screwing the legitimate user since its creation.

 

[StreetPreacher]

...it got lower reviews. I think that’s bull****, and I don’t understand it. I can’t figure out what it is.

Easy. It's called "Having lower expectations for console shooters." Witness the nearly universal praise for the Halo series, which is at best mediocre by PC standards.

 

[Alhanalem]

Congrats to epic/microsoft for coming up with DRM that ended up punishing every single paying customer without punishing any pirates at all.

 

[NitrousUser]

lol GG

 

[foddermcfly]

Yikes, I just got this game...lol...great timing!

 

[vybz]

wow so fail

 

[Angel_Mapper]

That sound you just heard was the sonic boom from all of the simultaneous facepalms at Epic Games.

 

[foddermcfly]

That sound you just heard was the sonic boom from all of the simultaneous facepalms at Epic Games.

Lotta wrist-breaking....

 

[Crotale]

This is the kind of lunacy that makes me almost WANT to pirate games.

 

[-n7-]

More massively Epic fail

 

[Masakari]

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.