Quote:
Originally Posted by Neal Stevens
Yeah. And I acknowledge that even though the SF did not admit to some physical damage, or danced around the subject, that does not mean SF does not damage drives. I've never held a rock solid belief that SF did not damage drives, I just have never found really good 3rd party, unbiased tests.
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I did read that link earlier yes, I like to read :-).
The DRM software installed itself silently and also installed itself in such a way that bypassed the normal way the software is meant to talk to the hardware and caused problems by interrupting the OS when it tried to talk to the CD/DVD. The remedy, if I remember correctly, was to flash the firmware of your drive, but as the DRM maker in question didn't admit to anything, no one really knew what to do. This was compounded by Ubisoft's attitude to customer support. All they knew was they bought a game they'd been waiting for, went home and some time later, their DVD drive was not working. Here is a test link, which provides details of the slow down and security problems. Eventually some people's drives got so slow that they were unusable as they would timeout.
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/30..._malware_.html
The aove site, as well as CNet got a letter threatening to sue, with a warning saying they had contacted the FBI - that's pretty scarey isn't it? Some might call it a scare tactic... remember that for later. Ubisoft were apparently deleting all references to the problems, so that compounded the problem of getting help (can you say 'customer service'?), so everyone was left feeling like they were on their own, even though if you watched the forums, you could see the LOTS of threads being created and deleted. This forced the hand of some and:
http://kotaku.com/gaming/legal/5m-cl...rce-164303.php
Because, you can only go so far without being listened to.
Some of the statistics being banded about, like 10 pirate copies for every game sold, I wouldn't be surprised if they had emerged from a source that has a vested interest in the paranoia over piracy and scare tactics. OK, the publishers get their figures from the industry experts, but who are the industry experts? Well, the people that make anti-piracty software of course. After all,
some companies makes large amounts of money due to piracy prevention - can you guess the name of one of those systems? Can you think of any reason why they'd inflate the piracy figures? All this, plus the link I am about to post make me feel distrustful of those that say they are working for the games industry and I bet a large amount of the distrust the publishers have for the consumer can be put down to certain business practices and scare mongering.
Don't have DRM? Then looks like a certain DRM company won't be on your side. Questionable business practice perhaps?:
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3148721
Was this ethical? Perhaps it was punishment for not using DRM, or perhaps a dangerous new idea (DRM free software) that needed to be stopped if money was to be made, I mean piracy was to be defereated. Here is the screenshot of the incident:
http://www.galciv2.com/temp/starfo2.jpg
There's more than one reason to hate DRM.