May 10 2008
Controversial SecuROM Copy Protection
EA has come under fire recently for its decision to use SecuROM’s new copy protection for video games. What is so controversial about the new scheme is that for you to play the game, you need to have your PC connected to the Internet and the game has to “phone home” and authenticate itself every ten days. Yeah, not just once, but every ten days. WTF?!
Piracy has been a huge problem in the PC game market. Some companies have scaled back publishing for the PC because of it. I’ve seen some figures that were downright scary from a game developer/publisher standpoint. As much as half of the installations of some games are illegitimate.
CD keys aren’t working. I don’t mind this copy protection scheme so much. But when I put the CD back in the wrong case, then it becomes a problem.
So online authentication sounds like a good idea… in theory. Not everyone has their gaming PC connected to the Internet. Not everyone gets into the multiplayer aspect of games.
Anyway, what happens when the game’s developer goes out of business? EA isn’t likely going to go under anytime soon, but we’ve all seen developers and publishers come and go over the years. If the company shuts down, how would I authenticate the game? Some of the best games I have are almost ten years old now. Not all companies are in business for that long.
If online authentication becomes the wave of the future, I hope the companies look into creating some sort of system that can be hosted/shared by all of the companies so that if one company goes down, people can still authenticate their game(s). They need to share some sort of centralized system for this to win me over.
The pirates always find a way to get around copy protection. They always will.
With this, they’ll probably set up some sort of fake server to authenticate the games… it just creates more and more trouble for the paying customers, which may in turn cause even more piracy out of frustration.
And how many of those claimed losses are really lost sales? I’d think just those that have been deceived and bought the game from pirates, thinking it was genuine.
Some people don’t really want the game that much, but will play it if they can get it for free.
Reminds of Steam! from Valve. I hated that “phone home” crap when playing Half-Life 2; if you got disconnected from the Internet, the game would crash! I hope the SecuROM crap works better. But, the very idea of them doing a “phone home” makes me wary, anyway.