Fallout has DRM: SecuROM 7. Um... WHAT?!

Just out of interest, after 10-15 years, how likely will that be?

Mind you, I keep all my downloaded patches and utilities on a backup drive, but a decade down the track?

 

If the game is any good at all, I'd say it's pretty likely. For example, I just checked whether this is the case for Planescape: Torment (released in 1999 by Black Isle which no longer exists). A quick Google search turned up not only the file I was thinking of and the official patches (which cannot be obtained from an official source anymore), but also a widescreen version (which wasn't around when I last played the game) and a bunch of unofficial fixes. Something similar is true of the other Infinity Engine games. These files are a few kilobytes; all it takes is a few people willing to keep them on their websites.

 

Fair enough.

 

Well, unofficially I can download the whole game now and be free of DDRM if I want to, but that would be piracy. Downloading just the crack might not be piracy, but it would still probably be legally dubious. If you consider 'unofficial' methods of dealing with it than all DRM, be it disk checks or whatever, is meaningless, because you can bypass it all right away. 'Officially', however, my game will expire if their online activation servers go down.

Well, to be more precise, in my case, I simply won't buy the game, so I will not have to deal with the issue. Online activations are a definite red line for me in terms of DRM that I can accept on my games (unless the online activation auto-expires, but that's another matter).

 

Not necessarily. When this issue first came up on the Bioware boards, the developers said that if the servers were ever to go down, they would release an official patch that removes the online authentication. So if I want to still want to play the game many years from now and if their servers go down and if they lied about releasing that patch then and only then would I have to resort to the unofficial solution. However, that is a whole lot of ifs that relate to an event far in the future whereas the disk check happens every time I want to play the game now and there is nothing theoretical about it at all.

 

Several download sites have done the something similar in the past. About a month or two ago yahoo's canceled the old music service for a new one. Customers lost their accounts, but in exchange they where allowed to download and keep the songs they purchased since they couldn't log into the service anymore.

 

It's not a question of whether a company lies about it or not. If it is in the process of going bankrupt (which is the most likely scenario for the servers going down), than the last of its priorities is going to be producing, releasing and hosting patches for their entire library of X-year old games. There will be plenty of more important obligations (for them) that they will be unable to meet in those circumstances. So, to summarize yes indeed, I wouldn't trust them to do so. I will buy Mass Effect and their other games once such a patch is available for the game in question, but certainly not before. The only way I would accept online activation would be if it had an auto-expiry function that would remove the need for online activation after a set period of time without the need of further action by the company and without the need to check their online servers.

I was an avid buyer of BioWare games before EA took them over and imposed the new DRM scheme, which meant that I did not buy Mass Effect. I am monitoring Dragon Age (and posting on the BioWare Dragon Age fora - so we might even meet there without knowing it), but the DRM scheme for it has not been released yet. To be honest, if they have online activation and limited installs on Dragon Age too, then I will just give up on their games altogether and cease following them - there is no point becoming invested in a game and then finding out that it has this draconian DRM scheme and thus not being able to buy it. It is a bit of a pity - BioWare is (has been?) one of my favorite developers, but I think with BioWare in EA's hands and using EA's DDRM, our ways might be parting forever.

 

What's the big deal about DRM? So what if you have to pop in a disk to play a game? Blame it on the pirates in this world. If no one pirated, there wouldn't be a need for DRM.

 

If all DRM did was make sure the disk was inserted, (most) people wouldn't have an issue with it. Look up "Starforce" to see the worst that DRM has done. It's not the norm, but many DRMs are either pains-in-the-neck, or can cause system problems.

 

That would be true if they actually had to do any work for the patch to happen, but you forget that it already exists and it has been tested and they're aware of its existence. All they'd have to do is give their blessing to it.

I'm don't understand why you're so strongly opposed to this method. It's the same exact thing (well, plus Securom which is a leftover from the old era and should go away at some point) as is used with professional software like Microsoft Office. Only the gaming industry maintains something as annoying as a disk check.

 

Using a laptop, I love being able to mount ISO's of games. I don't have to lug around a case of cd's/dvd's and I can play my games anytime and anywhere.

 

It looks like SecuROM wants thier crown though - Some may remember StarForce from games such as X2, which installed it's own drivers and killed a lot of peoples DVD/CDRW drives completely. SecuROM doesn't physically kill hardware, but it has killed a lot of software such as ISO Mounting and burning tools HOWEVER, the code installed on ring 0 (where it gets absolute admin rights) can potentially disable any hardware attatched to the machine - what if it went wrong and told you you had no 3d card installed?

DRM like this is wrong, plain and simple. If I buy a game I want to be able to play it without being told i can only install it so many times, and not have the risk of my entire system being screwed.

 

I already got screwed out of $30 by Crysis Warhead thanks to EA, which unfortunately I found out had a 5 install limit yesterday. I wanted to install it on my laptop and it wouldn't let me play. The game now resides in my garbage can since it is useless to me.

DRM in the forms EA is using is utterly wrong, I agree. It treats paying, legit customers like you and me as petty criminals, and the pirates still get away with stealing. I will be writing a letter to EA explaining why I will no longer be buying any games sold under their name, nor any game sold with ridiculous restrictive DRM controls. The only way to teach these companies a lesson is to hit them in the pocketbook.

 

I am sincerely sceptical that it already exists. Unless, of course, you mean the pirate version, which would be the height of irony on the part of the SecuRom infesters!

Luckily, I have never encountered it in professional software - maybe it is because I am entitled to using the volume install versions thanks to my institution.

I am so strongly opposed to it, because it makes us dependent on an external source to actually use our legitimately purchased games. Plus, want to be able to install and play games in places where I don't have access to the internet (and there are many such, our cottage for example, or when I move somewhere else, which I do relatively frequently, and don't have internet there). I guess everybody has different red lines for acceptability of DRM software. I am fine with disk checks, but this crosses the line for me. Other people might have different red lines. Such is life.

I don't really find the disk check that annoying. It is at most a very minor inconvenience for me.

 

I feel sorry for you. The software you legitimately purchased is rendered useless by EA's control-freak practices.

This is a good time to cut spending on EA games. With the recession and their declining profit, now is the time they can least afford to lose customers. Unfortunately, they seem to be determined to do exactly that with their anti-customer policies. The only lesson they will understand is loss of market share and loss-making business. Of course, there are too few of us to really engender that, but we can still do our best!

 

If you don't want to deal with DRM at all, download the drm-free version via torrent, buy the game with a legitimate CD-key, and install the pirated copy using that CD-key. This way you should be able to play online and you don't have to deal with DRM.

 

That is the unfortunate truth. The number of people who are aware of this issue, and willing to act on it, is very small in relation to the total population of computer gamers. While I would like to believe that a type of boycott action would result in enough "damage" to their profits to cause them to reconsider their stance on this type of DRM, the simple fact is there are likely not enough of "us" in order to make it work.

The other alternative is to seek some kind of legal recourse against DRM. I believe this was brought up in an older thread pertaining to Spore. I do not believe we would find the courts too friendly to our cause. At most they would simply require EA and other companies to put disclaimers on the box telling us that we have to install their DRM software in order to play the game.

 

Yes, that's what I mean. I think there was even a case of some company using a pirate-developed solution because their DRM made too many consumers unable to play the game. I can't remember who it was though.

You are right, this is a pretty bad thing. However, to some extent it is already true anyway because most games nowadays require a patch to be compatible with quite a few hardware combinations -- and even if you're lucky enough not to own any of the incompatible hardware, you can still be almost assured of some irritating (though not showstopping) bugs.

You are assuming they will understand the reason you did not buy their game and neglecting the fact that their track record in doing this is rather poor. Most likely, they will blame the poor sales on piracy (as they've done for the past decade) and when you try to suggest that maybe it was the DRM, the more gullible people on forums across the internet will tell you how huge a problem piracy is (perhaps even using the ridiculously inflated statistics that one gets when assuming that every pirate would have bought the game if (s)he were unable to pirate it), that even stricter DRM is necessary to combat it and that it the company's right to protect their intellectual property. That's more or less what happened to me when I suggested that the system requirements had a lot to do with why certain games sold poorly.

 

Yeah, I don't thinkg there are enough of us to make a sufficient impact to make them reconsider. There are enough of us to have a measurable impact on sales, I am sure, but that alone will not make them reconsider, because they might gain more from the prevention of resale of games than they lose from us.

That depends on the jurisdiction. European laws are generally friendier to end-users than in the U.S., for example, but Europe also has a culture where people rarely litigate, so no lawsuits are likely to be filed there.

 

You are right - I also remember one company 'pirating' the crack from the pirates, so to speak, but I also forgot which one it was. It may have been Ubisoft. They did pull it back, though, after an outcry.

You are, of course, correct. The quality control in games seems to be getting worse and worse for most titles (there are exceptions, but they are too few and too far in between). But at least once we download the patches, we are good to go and can save the patches on the HDD or burn them on a CD or store them for perpetuity in some other way. I suppose if they made the retail version of the game unplayable at start, but you could download a patch from them to make it playable (but would have to have the legitimate copy of the game to do so), which you could then store and use in perpetuity, I would reluctantly accept that kind of DRM.

I did see an article that BioWare might try to rely on downloadable content instead of DDRM to fight piracy. If so, that would be great! For some reason, I suspect that poor little BioWare will be overruled by their EA overlords on this one though! And to think that I initially thought that EA's takeover on BioWare will have no appreciable impact and I even 'defended' it.

Still, I am at least slightly hopeful, that the article was correct (I think it was an interview with Ray and Greg, but I cannot remember precisely any more).

I think many people working for EA do understand that DDRM is causing them lost sales in measurable numbers (though certainly not enough to make or break the company - that's for sure). They may, however, calculate that this number of lost sales is smaller than the number of sales gained in the long-term by preventing the resale market from operating. I wish they would just cut a deal with Gamestop and other resale retailers to get a cut of the profits and be done with it, instead of trying to fight it through DDRM. Or just do downloadable content tied to only one account per copy purchased.

As to blaming the lost sales on piracy, yes they do this constantly publicly, but internally, I think many of their employees are smart enough to understand the underlying real reasons and this does probably filter up to the management. Of course, they cannot simply admit that they want to prevent the resale of games. Such a course of action might even be illegal in some jurisdictions (I am not a lawyer, but so I have heard), so they have to claim that DDRM is there for fighting piracy.

This is completely correct. Some people are just too gullible!

Man (or woman!), I feel for you. These people can be like hounds. I suspect you are talking about Crysis, the poster child of EA claiming that piracy killed it...

 

So...back to the original topic...

Can anyone confirm whether Fallout3 actually installs SecuROM on your computer, or just runs SecuROM off the disc?

The Mods on the Bethsoft forum have stated that it only runs SecuROM off the disc, and doesn't install it, but I must admit my level of trust in these companies isn't very high at the moment...

 

I have bought Fallout 3, but have not installed it yet, as my new computer has not yet arrived, so I won't know until then. Actually, probably not even then, as I would not know how to check for that. Nevertheless, I would trust Bethesda if they explicitly stated that it does not install it - Bethesda is using a relatively mild implementation of SecuROM (no limited installs, no online activation required) and that's precisely what they said they would use (to be accurate, they said a DRM with a CD-check - did not specify the type of program). Though I must agree that if it were the EA speaking, I would not trust them at all.

 

This asinine inquire, in addition to the ridiculousness you added to the Dead Space thread, makes me **** positive that you are a meaningless troll.

 

What's a troll? what does it mean when someone is called a troll on forums?

 

Trolls are people who post to start arguments and generally cause trouble, just to **** people off and get reactions. They try and bait people into getting angry online.

As for securom, it always installs on your computer - it cannot and does not run off cd - no exceptions, and for fallout 3, I know it to be true in this instance because I've checked the registry entries and removed them (uninstalling securom is a painful task in itself).

 

An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang, is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum or chat room, with the intention of provoking other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion. Continue...

 

Has anyone tried the SecuROM removal instructions on reclaimyourgame? Do they work?

 

They do, but it'll reinstall every time you run the Fallout 3 launcher

The game itself is not actually protected - if you have your graphics set to the setting you want, you can uninstall securom and then run the fallout3.exe directly.

 

Honestly...its a DVD check. Get over it.

If you really feel that strongly against it get the noDVDcrack. Just be warned if and when they patch it you might be screwing yourself