Hi, fellow fans
I wish someone had told me this bit of information before I bought and installed Kingdoms, so this may be useful to people like myself who are averse to having unremovable third-party software on their systems. It's the same issue that has got gaming communities like NWN2 and now Bioshock riled up, and it's easy to see why.
Whether Securom can be trusted and is totally harmless is open to debate, but I totally reject having anything installed with my game without my consent and a clear way of removal. Hopefully you feel the same way, and Sega can be persuaded to release a patch for its removal (however unlikely). My post in the official .com technical forum:
Nobody answers his question? Well I will. Yes, unlike the original M2TW, Kingdoms uses the latest version of Securom - v7. If that sounds familiar, yes it's the same version used by Bioshock that has been associated with a rootkit. I know this because after installing Kingdoms (European release) yesterday, I find a registry entry "!CAUTION! NEVER DELETE OR CHANGE ANY KEY" under Securom that I can't remove. As reported in Bioshock, this entry shows up in RootkitRevealer, and the timestamp points to Kingdoms as the culprit. Ironically, I chose to buy Kingdoms over Bioshock because I didn't want this kind of unremovable junk on my system and now I still got it anyway. I am very disappointed and hope others know this is the copy protection they are getting with the game.
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