As most folks expected, Electronic Arts use of the SecuROM trojan install has sparked up a little class action lawsuit against the publisher. At first, EA thought they could just bump the total installs from three to five to make gamers happy, but they’re out for blood.
With an amazon rating of 1.5 stars and 2900+ ratings, it’s obvious that people are not happy with the security system used by Electronic Arts for this title. Forbes mentions how pirated the game has become since the DRM news went hot and pirates are touting to download it for free to make your “voice” heard. Legally, you can make your voice heard by setting up a class action lawsuit and so it begins!
“Although consumers are told the game uses access control and copy protection technology, consumers are not told that this technology is actually an entirely separate, stand-alone program which will download, install, and operate on their computer,” read the complaint. “Once installed, it becomes a permanent part of the consumer’s software portfolio. Even if the consumer uninstalls Spore, and entirely deletes it from their computer, SecurROM remains a fixture on their computer unless and until the consumer completely wipes their hard drive through reformatting or replacement of the drive.” (gamespot)
It seems everything boils down to the how EA went about protecting their assets. Nobody faults the publisher for trying to keep their products out of the hands of pirates. The pure fact that EA has chosen to install separate products that snoop on your operations and can malfunction your system is the hart hitting point. Rubbing it in worse, pirates had the game broken and free to download prior to the release of Spore in the US.
Although the license agreement will state the product uses a digital rights management technique, it fails to explain the details of the SecuROM’s stealth install and inability to remove itself without wiping the hard disk.
The suit accuses EA of “intentionally” hiding the fact Spore uses the SecurROM.
In before Herr_Alien. 🙂
Come on Paul! How many podcasts are you going to miss?
@GOG says customers hate DRM: Of course they do! Just like you said, DRM only hurts the customers and not the pirates. And yes, please bring back games filled with physical content, I would love to have stuff like that.
@QOTW: Sorry, don’t know of any DRM that I could tolerate. I know that pirates shouldn’t be accepted, but unfortunately there’s nothing that can be done about them.
@DynamicJul
😀 Actually it is a nice change. The time zone difference usually works in my favor (Eastern Europe), but it’s not completely impossible for somebody from US to get in first.
@EA forum bans cause game bans:
So apparently they didn’t fix the issue yet … they’re still using one database to handle the authentication for both systems.
If you think of it, you don’t even need two databases with the same user/password data, you only need separate databases to store forum bans from whole-account bans.
Correcting the bug should not be that difficult and it will make a huge impact for the better.
@piracy’s up 20% in past 5 years:
Games for free? Who would think this would ever be a lucrative business? 😛
I for one would pirate the shit out of Assassin’s Creed 2, just to point out that intrusive DRM is not ok. I’m not that much into that kind of game though, so …
@GOG sez customers hate DRM
And for good reason. As long as the code reaches the client, any DRM measures in it will be bypassed. Not might be bypassed, not could be bypassed, WILL be bypassed.
As for physical content, well, you still have those Deluxe editions.
@Steam user database cracked:
Not the best of the possible news. I don’t like to have the credit card info stored on servers, and in my envision of an online store, the credit card info is never stored. Yes, with every purchase you would need to type in the number again, but unless you check out very often (instead of putting more items in the basket then checking out) it should be quite ok.
@QOTW:
Steam, and the regular CD-key.
Jonah, regarding DynamicJul’s comment, I think you mean pseudo-code. And it’s not really about pseudo-code; as long as you know (1) what you want the program to do and (2) how to do it in one language, it will be easy to get the same thing from another language. The main hurdle in all software companies is not about learning a new language, is more about figuring out what the software you’re making is supposed to do.
Actually my time zone is GMT +1 so it’s the same. Also, I forgot to mention that my country doesn’t have things such as ‘Microsoft offices’ or ‘video game shops’ so I have to buy everything off the internet and it isn’t possible to fix an Xbox 360 over the internet.
Wait… taking fallout 3 apart and putting it back together again? This time it’s a brand new engine, so even if they learnt some stuff from the previous games, it’s not like they could reuse that much this time as they have done between previous games.