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BioWare technical producer Derek French has said that the PC versions of both Mass Effect and Spore will make use of copy protection that will require online validation every ten days in order for the games to continue working.

"After the first activation, SecuROM requires that [Mass Effect PC] re-check with the server within ten days (in case the CD Key has become public/warez'd and gets banned)," said French in a post on the BioWare forums.

If customers do not come online after ten days, the game will cease to function.

"After 10 days a re-check is required before the game can run," added French. "..An internet connection is not required to install, just to activate the first time, and every 10 days after."

The check is run when users activate the game's executable file, with the first re-check coming within "5 days remaining in the 10 day window."

According to French, Maxis' Spore will also make use of the same scheme: "[Electronic Arts] is ready for us and getting ready for Spore, which will use the same system."

French also noted that the online requirement will be clearly labeled on the games' packaging.

Link, for great justice!

Yes, I would imagine this will be popular and won't lead to a Bioshock-like debacle after launch.

Right...and what prevents the pirates from releasing a cracked executable that simply doesn't disable itself? And disables the need for the CD to be in the drive, in the process.

This will hardly slow the pirates down- it's only going to massively inconvenience legit users. Rather common for DRM.

Online activation is the only halfway decent thing that does seem to stop warez, even thought it doesn't stop anything.

Still, its like EA deceided for it and then just went a notch more annoying.

Well I'm disappointed. I was really looking forward to Spore too.

Note the following is not advocating piracy. It is simply making aware what pirates do.

The thing is that somewhere, somehow, someone is either A) going to find a crack to acess legitimate servers for content B) provide content from illegitimate servers. This happens with MMO such as Lineage 2, WoW, pretty much every one under the sun. Only games with HUGE processing requirements, like Eve Online and Star Wars Galaxies, aren't usually tackled, and even they are still managed to be cracked.

Well fuck that shit. Looks like I won't be buying Ass Effect for PC after all (not that big a loss, I got bored about a quarter of the way through on the 360). Looks like I may be holding off on Spore until I can be sure I won't have to put up with bullshit just because I decided not to play the fucking game for a little over a week too.

Blah Fuck spore then.

This sort of thing only makes me want to steal the game.

Praxis wrote:Right...and what prevents the pirates from releasing a cracked executable that simply doesn't disable itself? And disables the need for the CD to be in the drive, in the process.

This will hardly slow the pirates down- it's only going to massively inconvenience legit users. Rather common for DRM.

Isn't Spore going to be transferring creature data to/from the server regularly ?

So I'd expect some of the game to be lost if server access becomes unavailable. But in this case a check every 10 days doesn't make any sense, I'd put the check every time you accessed the server.

Mass Effect will be quickly cracked without any problems. Making the pirated version will be of higher quality than the legit one.

As for banning keys once they become public, won't that open grounds for lawsuits when someone steals keys from legit buyers ?

Looks like I won't be purchasing either. I might even hunt down their email addresses to tell them why they have lost me as a customer.

There'll be a hacked exe up for download from a thousand places on the internet within a week of launch. I'll still buy it, but that doesn't make it any less pointless. Gods, who has the bandwidth/patience to torrent a 20 gigabyte (or whatever it is) game, anyway?

EDIT: regarding lawsuits: no, because they'll just make you sign away your mortal soul in the EULA, and the cost in time and effort of making a lawsuit greatly exceeds the cost of buying another copy or downloading a warez equivalent anyway.

I'm not sure what all the hullabaloo is about. How often are you without a net connection these days? I mean, I suppose if I got the game at the airport and didn't have time to install it before boarding I'd be a little bummed, but otherwise whats the big deal?

InnocentBystander wrote:I'm not sure what all the hullabaloo is about. How often are you without a net connection these days? I mean, I suppose if I got the game at the airport and didn't have time to install it before boarding I'd be a little bummed, but otherwise whats the big deal?

A desktop PC (which you own in favor of a four thousand dollar "gaming laptop") makes a rather large carry-on that you never intend to use when you go on a vacation/business/camping trip for more than ten days.

EDIT: or when your harddrive/motherboard/dvd-drive dies and you have to buy a replacement and it takes eleven days to show up. Well, sorry, I guess your 50 dollar copy of Mass Effect has turned into a really shiny coaster.

EDIT2: and this makes it impossible to sell the game after your done with it, which further increases the effective cost of a product that is actually inferior to the warez version. Yay!

What irony and stupidity. By tripping over themselves trying to treat customers like criminals, EA will end up creating LOTS more pirates, pirates who don't want to lose their game because of a stay in the hospital or a two-week vacation. Spore and Mass Effect will lose tons of sales because of this stupid scheme.

After all, this is a game. When EA makes it ludicrously hard for legit customers to play their own game, people will just say "Fuck it" and open their favourite P2P software.

But they're doing that anyway. PC gamers are a bunch of robbing cunts, Call of Duty 4 was reporting a very high proportion of pirated keys online, and Titan's Quest had something like an 80%-90% piracy rate.

PC gamers are being treated like thieves because by and large they are.

InnocentBystander wrote:I'm not sure what all the hullabaloo is about. How often are you without a net connection these days? I mean, I suppose if I got the game at the airport and didn't have time to install it before boarding I'd be a little bummed, but otherwise whats the big deal?

It's all over DRM systems making more and more demands of the consumer, without actually doing anything to stop piracy. I might be a bit lenient if it actually combated piracy, but I don't accept any system which places extra demands onto me without doing anything useful.

Feil wrote:rding lawsuits: no, because they'll just make you sign away your mortal soul in the EULA, and the cost in time and effort of making a lawsuit greatly exceeds the cost of buying another copy or downloading a warez equivalent anyway.

Only in areas where the EULA is considered legally binding, even though you don't see it before the purchase and you can't usually get a refund if you did disagree with it.

InnocentBystander wrote:I'm not sure what all the hullabaloo is about. How often are you without a net connection these days? I mean, I suppose if I got the game at the airport and didn't have time to install it before boarding I'd be a little bummed, but otherwise whats the big deal?

There are several reasons I'll be attempting to avoid it:

• Who knows what they will be phoning home with? Using DRM this invasive already shows that they care more for their product than the enduser (a given, yes, but still irksome) and I daresay it's fairly common for a company to be unscrupulous when they have what could easily amount to a rootkit in every system it's installed on when combined with certian DRM software.
• I just loooooove being told that a CD I payed $50-60 for will not play on an offline box, period. I still have several computers in my house that I keep off the net for various reasons (be it testing things, secure information, storage, whatever) and it's basically the same as being told "Eh, nah, we know better than you what to do with the things you just paid for. Great huh?" Yes, I know the EULA usually prohibits... ect. ect., but you know what? Nobody actually does that single-install, delete if you want to install on another computer, ect. crap.
• What will they do when, eventually, the game is 20 years old and we need to access their servers to verify every 10 days? Make a patch to disable the server checking? Why not do that now, because it's going to be cracked within the first week anyway, and it's not the people who will be perpetually frustrated with the arcane methods they are using for copy protection but still trying to use it legitimately that will be doing it.
• A crack that disables the DRM shit riddling your computer like a virus from some pornsite will be on the web within a week of release, why the hell would I even think about a system resource eating rootkit that phones home every 10 days when I can have a clean version?

Vendetta wrote:But they're doing that anyway. PC gamers are a bunch of robbing cunts, Call of Duty 4 was reporting a very high proportion of pirated keys online, and Titan's Quest had something like an 80%-90% piracy rate.

PC gamers are being treated like thieves because by and large they are.

Are you sure that the high number of pirated keys wasn't because of keygens generating purchased keys ?

Vendetta wrote:But they're doing that anyway. PC gamers are a bunch of robbing cunts, Call of Duty 4 was reporting a very high proportion of pirated keys online, and Titan's Quest had something like an 80%-90% piracy rate.

PC gamers are being treated like thieves because by and large they are.

Here's the thing though, and we have to look at it practically.

Yes, morally speaking pirates are pirates. They're stealing. However, the measures the companies enact to try to prevent this are:


1. So far, almost completely useless and does nothing to stop the inevitable crack from popping up anyway.

2. Inconveniences legit users.



If you try to approach this from a one-track moral approach you're not going to get anywhere.

Take Stardock's GalCiv2. No copy protection whatsoever, and yes there were pirated copies, but the game sold well enough for two expansions.

Vendetta wrote:But they're doing that anyway. PC gamers are a bunch of robbing cunts, Call of Duty 4 was reporting a very high proportion of pirated keys online, and Titan's Quest had something like an 80%-90% piracy rate.

PC gamers are being treated like thieves because by and large they are.

Hypothetically, I have a legit copy of a certian DRM infested product. Because I cannot stand the shit it pulls on my system when installed, I would seriously consider downloaded a pirated copy and playing that instead. Does this make me a thief? Because I daresay I would be reported in that 80-90% statistic if I had.

If I was hypothetically stupid enough to use a pirated key online, that is.

The solution here is not to introduce more restrictions on how you can use it, because that just makes the pirated version better and better in comparison.

InnocentBystander wrote:I'm not sure what all the hullabaloo is about. How often are you without a net connection these days? I mean, I suppose if I got the game at the airport and didn't have time to install it before boarding I'd be a little bummed, but otherwise whats the big deal?

Dude, when I was in the navy It was a massive pain in the ass to register games. I had HL2 for about 8months before I could register it.

Quick question. If you are away for more than ten days and the game ceases to function, can you reactivate by going to whatever relevant website? If the latter is possible then I can deal with the inconvenience(sp?).

I suspect if you've been offline for more than the ten days it'll just either tell you to go online the next time you start the game, or it will wait and do it's next authentication check when it next detects a network connection. It will happen in the background, rather than you going to any websites or anything.

10 days is a retardedly stupid limitation, even for bullshit like this. Sometimes I'll uninstall a game for months before I get the urge to reinstall and play it again. If it kills the ability for me to use a game by virtue of not having it installed after I install it once, there's no reason for me to even consider buying it in the first place. They're effectively asking you to keep the fucking thing installed at all times so your copy doesn't become a coaster.

Vendetta wrote:But they're doing that anyway. PC gamers are a bunch of robbing cunts, Call of Duty 4 was reporting a very high proportion of pirated keys online, and Titan's Quest had something like an 80%-90% piracy rate.

PC gamers are being treated like thieves because by and large they are.

Do you have sources for those claims?

I'd say you guys that are thinking that once deactivated, the game won't activate again are misunderstanding things a bit - from reading the article, and from a bit of common sense, it seems to me that whats happening is that you can't run the game after not connecting to the server for 10 days until you manage to get that connection, and not that not connecting for 10 days makes your game useless.

Anyway, its a moronic attempt at DRM. Experience already shows that consumers do indeed balk at stupidly retarded methods (Starforce, the utter non-success of the various early online movie watching ventures that were similarly anal). I honestly expected better from Bioware.

The funny thing is that some of the smaller publishers like Stardock and Paradox have already come up with a very workable model - don't treat your customers as the enemy, while still retaining incentives for not pirating. In both those companies' cases you have easy download options, no DRM, and patching protected through mandatory registration to give that incentive to get the legit game. Its a scheme that works, as proudly stated by the head honchos of both the companies, and yet the major players still prefer the user-hating-shrinkwrap approach with various levels of being obnoxious (CD-in-drive until now, not this assholery) and then crying that the gaming community prefers downloading the more accessible (to people with broadband who don't have to go to the shop with the game), less irritating (no CD needed) pirated/warez version.