Hah, if only it was luck. Stardock just happens to be good at knowing their audience (both in desktop customization and strategy gaming), thus delivering a product their potential customers are willing to pay for.

-HM

My first reaction when I heard the news was somewhere in the neighborhood of "if they are going to treat me like an enemy, I will be an enemy. I'm playing the game but I ain't paying for it." I had planned to wait until a pirated version of each comes out and get a superior product for free. I don't even have a real interest in playing Mass Effect, I just wanted to make my own private statement that the the CP scheme they are using is wrong and abusive to their customer base and completely counterproductive. Whether I will still feel that way later, who can say? Right now, however, this news has made me more inclined to get their game through less than legal channels when before I was ready and willing to shell out my money to buy Spore just because it feels good to take a shot at them even if they never know it.

On another note, for those saying customer friendly CP schemes do not sell games, you are wrong. Very wrong. Stardock has made somewhere in the neighborhood of $280 (well, before factoring out the retail mark up) off of me alone ultimately because their copy protection scheme led me to buy two copies of Collector's Edition of GCII way back in the day, which, I loved so much I bought all related games since (including SoaSE). On the flipside, I want to play Portal, I would love to play it because everyone agrees it is fun and funny, and an all around great game. However, the last Steam game I got ruined my computer. I simply do not have the financial resources at my disposal to risk having to rebuild my entire machine because some clueless bureaucrat on the board of directors decided to include a defective, draconian bit of software in their games that amounts to the hardware equivalent of Russian Roulette.

Copy protection that treats customers as a necessary and valuable part of the market do sell games and will only sell more as the general public becomes increasingly aware of the problem. Copy protection that treats customers as optional, disposable, and mostly pirates anyway will continue to push people to companies like SD or out of PC gaming entirely as when I fire up a Wii I don't have to put up with EA's crap. Honestly, I don't see why StarDock hates copy protection so much, behind game quality it has probably earned you more customers than anything else.

20-40% of Australia dont have permement internet access.
so out of around 30 million people they have cut anyone who can buy it down by 6-12 million.

One has to wonder just HOW many people actually would pirate this game.

Then we need to wonder how many people will pirate this game just because they hate the copyprotection.?

Bioware was a game company I supported and always made sure I brought(even when I was tempted due to late Australain releases too download)

If this protection is indeed ture then Bioware is now on my blacklist.

I refuse to buy anygame with such protection after my experiances with Bioshock.



Infact I have to say I find the whole copyprotection measures across the board including movies counter productive.


DVDS you have to watch unskipable up to 5 min anti piracy clip before you can watch your movie.
Every time..... Talk about pissing off your customers.

Games have copyprotection so invasive you ahve to jump through hoops to make sure you can actually play your brought product.


If you had a car that you had to wait 5 mintues before you could drive it you would go bonkers
if you had a car that had to hook up to the internet every 10 days or it would refuse to start
you would go bonkers.

Ontop of this Govements would step in quick smart because such measures are downright dangerous and they waste time.

Western Society is developing a trend that ends up with shorter and shorter lesiure time for each generation.

On the otherside companies are developing longer and longer ways copyprotection can waste the time of a paying customer.

So the question the companeis have to ask themselves is.

Is this protection so annoying that someone willing to pay for my product would infact get a pirated version instead just so they wouldnt have to deal with it?

When the answer gets to yes.. then they need to reevaluate.

Personaly.. I think its already got to yes.

can you give a link to that? cant seem to find it on the bioware forum, if that was the place they said it

btw, take a look at the bioware FAQ post count, it got a total of 532, thats 500 more posts then yesterday

Not entirely accurate. Years ago when the whole Napster thing was in the news about music file sharing, there was a study done that showed music sales went UP since the whole Napster thing. Interviews showed that people were making more purchase of full albums after being able to sample a few songs on Napster.

I think part of the problem with these game companies (and recording/movie/etc companies too) is that they have gotten a free ride on bad products for far too long. By that, I mean that consumers cannot return opened games/music/movies when they find them to be unsatisfactory or even faulty. I know the problems with allowing people to return such things (rental chains would go out of business for one), but I think the absolutist position of disallowing consumers to return these things is where this rampant overstepping copy protection comes from. Fine, you find a game boring, you shouldn't necessarily be able to return it; but if it crashes or is unplayable for some other reason then that is a "manufacturing" defect, and if it fries hardware then that should warrant a lawsuit.

I've been chomping at the bit for Spore for probably longer than it has been under development, and I thought Mass Effect looked interesting ever since I saw the console commercials. Hearing this news, I have to say, puts these games in the same category as Bioshock for me, the "wish I could validate purchasing" category.

It was MadBoris who posted it but he must have removed it out as you can tell it no longer is there. I responded to it and he removed it. This guy is also a BioWare/EA employee IMO. Trying to control the damage by making everyone look stupid and crazy for wanting a better CP.

That was edited or removed as it had read they were lucky not fantastic timing it was changed and no edit sig so that has to be a forum admin.

That's not how it works. Even if forum admins edit posts on the BioWare forums, it shows that the post has been edited and by whom. The post was not edited.

I admit, I also thought he'd said they were lucky, but I think it's because the way he worded it (fantastic timing), there's no doubt that's exactly what he meant. Unfortunately people like him are slippery and you can't paraphrase them (or misremember their wording) or they'll jump all over it like he did.

I hate these moronic piracy debates and the aggressive profit-protection measures that inevitably spawn them. For all you pirates out there (and I do not claim that never in my life have I pirated or stolen anything) piracy is in fact illegal and is at best morally questionable. Yes, piracy can lead to game sales in some cases because a pirated copy provides a much better idea of a what a game is like than the pathetic excuses for demos that I've seen lately. Anyone who claims pirates don't buy the games they pirate has never met any of my friends. At the same time, there are also plenty who pirate and don't buy. Some of them would never have bought to begin with, but I suspect that doesn't cover everyone. Here's where we get to the part that drives me insane. One side argues thus:

1. DRM schemes hurt the legitimate customer by requiring him/her to go through extra steps in order to use the product he/she paid for. In some cases DRM can result in unnecessarily and unusually poor performance or the total inability to play a game that one paid for, whereas pirates do not suffer these ill effects because the DRM is removed or circumvented.
2. DRM is inevitably defeated by pirates, just as any defensive measure (chainmail, the Maginot Line, whatever) is inevitably defeated by someone who dedicates their time and energy to finding a way to do so. DRM cannot, therefore, cause piracy to cease.
3. DRM is therefore a bad idea because it decreases the experienced quality of the product for some paying customers while failing to achieve its main purpose of limiting or preventing the use of the produce by non-paying customers.

The other side comes back with
1. Piracy is theft in that pirates are making use of someone else's invention without providing due credit or payment to the owners thereof.
2. Owners of IP have the right to protect their IP from those who would use it without permission. If you buy the product you agree to the EULA, so you've got no room to complain about the protection measures you agreed to.
3. The problems caused by DRM are experienced by a minority anyway, so that's not a valid reason to remove them.

Now that we've laid out the background, everyone fails to see how these two viewpoints do not contradict each other in any way and are in fact almost entirely compatible with each other. Instead, people accuse each other of piracy, try to give examples of cases in which piracy has not hurt a game (and get accused of piracy) or try to claim that the corporate greed driving DRM justifies piracy. (two wrongs make a right! yay!) Have I missed anything?
Personally, I'd like to see companies (like Stardock) drop less money on DRM and more on ensuring the release of quality products that are worth paying for and then supporting those products with patches and updates. Pirates are a problem, yes, but Stardock had it right on when they (I forget who made the post) pointed out that the product should be designed primarily to function for the customer, and not to ferret out pirates. Unfortunately, I don't think human beings in general trust each other enough for this to become the norm. I have to echoe the complaint of an earlier poster that, 20 years from now when Spore and ME are old games that we want to play because no new games catch our interest, we may not be able to play anymore because of the every-10-day nonsense. I'm sure by then our EULA will have run out and we won't legally be entitled to play anyway, but that's little consolation.

No, they've chosen something equally as distasteful.

Sadly, this means that I will not be buying Mass Effect and Spore, both games which I have been anticipating for a long time and looked forward to getting. Same thing happened with Bioshock; after reading about a few people having problems with the DRM and the developer/publisher being unwilling to do much to help, I decided to give it a miss. Maybe I'm in a minority here, but all the same I am another example of DRM costing a company sales as opposed to earning them due to DRM.

There's a few reasons I choose not to buy these games, despite wanting them a lot:

1. After buying Galciv II and experiencing first-hand what it felt like to buy a game from a company that didn't instantly suspect me of being a pirate, I decided I would no longer support companies that use intrusive and impractical DRM schemes that only affect paying customers, not pirates. Like those really annoying and unskippable "Piracy is a crime" ads you get on bought DVD movies, the people who actually steal the product neither actually see or even care about the message on the disk, the downloaded movies start up as soon as you load the file. No hassle. The pirate gets a superior product over the paying customer. Same with games with excessive DRM: The pirates get the most user friendly product, and for free. The paying customers get all the hassle and all the technical problems from DRM issues gone bad.

2. While internet is something most people have, it is not a constant. Around April last year I had some financial issues, and as a result I was unable to pay my internet bill. In that month I did not have internet, and I really experienced just how dependent I was on it for my daily routines and how bad it felt not to have it. Forums browsing, reading news, instant chat with various friends I've met online, my house phone (as I have IP phone), all gone. Not just that, but it was also during a period where I was massively addicted to WoW, and the withdrawals were quite bad.

There is sadly no guarantee for me that this can't happen again, or that I for whatever reason (like moving house) won't be without internet for extended periods of time. As such it is really not in my best interest to support a move towards single player games phoning home several times a month in order to run. Can you imagine a few years down the line if this were to become an industry standard? Even if you very rarely are without internet for extended periods of time, when it happens you'll suddenly be unable to play any game you own, even if it has no other online component than the verification. Why on earth would I want to support that? No, I'm afraid I'll keep supporting companies like Stardock (which we need more of) instead of those that may ultimately make my game collection useless.

Yes, you can crack copy protections through various schemes, if you're willing to visit a ton of dodgy sites in order to track down a working crack. However, if you're forced to use "it can be cracked so it's not that bad" as a rebuttal to someone complaining about DRM, you've pretty much lost the entire justification for having DRM there in the first place. Besides, who is to say that cracks will even be easily accessible in the future if they actually manage to arrest more of the cracker groups out there (like Drinkordie or whatever their name was)?

DRM is part of a failed business model. You can't put intrusive/impractical/user unfriendly copy protection on something, sell it at full price and expect to realistically compete with a free, user friendly equivalent. DRM is punishing legitimate buyers for following the law, and the pirates offer the cheaper and better alternative. This needs to get changed. I just want to slap stupid corporate suits who create a game, put an obnoxious DRM on it and afterwards ask themselves why so many people are still pirating it despite the "awesome" DRM they put on it.

Make being a legitimate customer have some perks instead of a punishment. Create a user friendly infrastructure where you offer bonus content etc for paying customers if they verify they are legitimate customers, accessible when the customer so pleases. Stop with the stupid "you will pay for our DRM and you will like it" policy already >_<