Your DRM experiences

[RikuoAmero]

Just like it said on the tin. What's the worst experience you've had with DRM? I'll start the ball rolling with two examples.

First, is about a year ago, I ordered Bioshock 1 for PC through Amazon. I pop it in the drive, install, but it has to go online to get the Bioshock.exe. Three guesses as to what happened (no prizes). Not only that, but the installer is cheeky enough that when it failed to get the exe, it deleted the folder it had just installed. I spent about five hours trying to solve the problem. I even wrote a guide for this problem on Amazon, but it was deleted by their moderators. Guess they didn't want their customers to know their product didn't work as advertised.

Dragon Age Origins is my second example. I pre-ordered it with Awakening, and the DLC available at the time, but was I able to log in and play? No! Had to wait about a week and a half before I could connect to the EA servers. And in both cases, my own internet connection was fine. Problem was the company servers.

[hyperion86]

I have played several games that use DRM, the last one being C&C4, which was a huge disappointment, specially since the connection with EA servers kept getting lost and the game became unplayable at times. Pretty similar to what you describe with Dragon Age Origins.

It was suppposed to be a system to replace CD-checks and allow direct-to-hdd games, but is just as bad as the systems replaced or even worse, in my opinion. Is just wrong to force players to be connected to internet to play single-player mode in games.

[nightraven]

It was suppposed to be a system to replace CD-checks and allow direct-to-hdd games, but is just as bad as the systems replaced or even worse, in my opinion. Is just wrong to force players to be connected to internet to play single-player mode in games.

The sad thing is it has no effect on the pirating of the software it just makes the end user suffer with crap DRM. I have given up on most EA games just due to the DRM they use and 90% of the time there servers are down the day I want to play.

[Jªvª]

hehe, game drm is literally a joke now. What was a pain back in the day was the music industry DRM. Encoding it literally into the track itself. Funny thing apple didn't realize how easy to bypass it from their itunes app. Burn it and rerip from CDRW disc.

[Cello]

Hoo boy, DRM is a funny thing. I believe it's what's killing the game industry.

I can't stand knowing I have to be connected to the internet in order to play the majority of my Assassin Creed games I've purchased, not to mention my cousin purchased UNPLAYABLE Prince Of Persia games he purchased from Steam. The most horrible part about it is Steam sells these games despite them being unplayable due to DRM. He didn't get refunded either.

Also, I can't even begin to describe to you how much money I pumped into iTunes. Easily a couple of hundred bucks down the drain when my hard drive crashed. That's the last time i'll ever buy an MP3 on a site other than Amazon.

[RikuoAmero]

Hoo boy, DRM is a funny thing. I believe it's what's killing the game industry.

I can't stand knowing I have to be connected to the internet in order to play the majority of my Assassin Creed games I've purchased, not to mention my cousin purchased UNPLAYABLE Prince Of Persia games he purchased from Steam. The most horrible part about it is Steam sells these games despite them being unplayable due to DRM. He didn't get refunded either.

Also, I can't even begin to describe to you how much money I pumped into iTunes. Easily a couple of hundred bucks down the drain when my hard drive crashed. That's the last time i'll ever buy an MP3 on a site other than Amazon.

I've never bought off of iTunes myself, but I've heard that they don't have DRM in their music tracks. And wouldn't your purchases be linked to your account anyway? So that when your hard drive crashed, you could just redownload them (unless there's a limit to the number of times you can download, I don't know, as I said, never used iTunes)

[Jªvª]

I've never bought off of iTunes myself, but I've heard that they don't have DRM in their music tracks. And wouldn't your purchases be linked to your account anyway? So that when your hard drive crashed, you could just redownload them (unless there's a limit to the number of times you can download, I don't know, as I said, never used iTunes)

Well they don't now due to the fact that the DRM tracks could only sit on one computer. Then on worst scenarios people couldn't download their DRM tracks even after verifying themselves. Only few online music stores did this, Itunes and few Windows Media Player stores. But basically they dropped DRM on music just for the fact they were losing money on top of the whole pirating of music.

Plus the DRM wasn't hard to bypass.

[Cello]

I purchased music from the iTunes store years ago. I don't know how it is now but back in the day they didn't allow you to re-download music you buy. Back then I unfortunately didn't prepare for the worst either and failed to back up most everything that was costly or important to me. D: