Spore and Mass Effect copyright protection discussion

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

People who pirate a game probably wouldn't buy it if they couldn't copy it. Stop worrying about piracy and sell to the people who will buy.

Also, release more demos before releasing the actual game. It's a huge turn-off for me at least to see that the demo will come after the game's release.

[Xiahou]

I have somewhat less a problem with this for Spore, as it's an online game anyhow- although I still don't like it. For Mass Effect, on the other hand, it's completely unnecessary and unjustifiable, imo. I didn't buy Bioshock because of this nonsense and won't be buying Mass Effect either for the same reason.

I've got too many games anyhow, this is one less to worry about getting.

[ElectricEel]

That's two games I won't be buying, then. I'm not going to support the use of hare-brained copy-protection schemes that inconvenience only legit customers.

[Lemur]

Just gonna confirm that this story is legit, and then I'm off to cancel my pre-order for Mass Effect.

-edit-

Looks legitimate, order canceled. Too bad. I was looking forward to that game.

[Zenicetus]

Just gonna confirm that this story is legit, and then I'm off to cancel my pre-order for Mass Effect.

-edit-

Looks legitimate, order canceled. Too bad. I was looking forward to that game.

Even that information from the developer is disingenuous:

"Q: How many installations will SecuROM allow from my copy of MEPC?

A: Since SecuROM has nothing to do with the installer, you can install and uninstall on the same machine over and over again without any problems. SecuROM also allows you to activate the game on 3 different machines."

Right, as long as you don't make any significant hardware changes like hard drive swaps or OS upgrades that trigger SecureROM's system profiling, so it thinks its running on a new machine.

The FAQ also doesn't address whether the SecureROM files and profiling will be removed when the game is un-installed, which is a critical point for many of us. It's a mega-thread so I didn't read it all to see if that was answered down-thread, but prior history on SecureROM removal (with a game uninstall) hasn't been good.