IGN’s got a remarkably long Q&A up with some anonymous mouthpiece of the Rockstar hivemind, specifically detailing all the various copy protections and mandatory login guff next week’s murder simulator will require to install and run. There will, it seems, be quite a few barriers between you and your hooker-killing; the internet will not be happy.
First, the DRM. Gentlemen, start your squealing:
GTA IV PC uses SecuROM for protecting our EXE… Product Activation is a one time only online authentication when installing the game. GTA IV has no install limits for the retail disc version of the game, and that version can be installed on an unlimited number of PCs by the retail disk owner.
Which seems about as reasonable as SecuROM gets, but of course there are those who object violently to its mere presence. A few weeks ago, the RPS inbox was stuffed with outraged mails about Fallout 3 employing some fairly gentle SecuROM variant that didn’t, in practice, seem to impact installing or playing the thing at all; we didn’t post about that because, well, what’s to say? Similarly, there’s no Spore-esque installation restriction madness here, just the brief inconvenience of it checking your install key online.
Much more worryingly, there’s no offline activation option (e.g. a phone line) at all. If your PC isn’t on the web, you need to track down an internet-connected PC from somewhere else to register/activate your game on your PC’s behalf, via some as-yet unrevealed system. Could be annoying.
SecuROM will, I suspect, be the least of GTA’s problems. Certainly, what bothers me more – what, if I’m honest, makes me impotently rage like a common AIM – is that GTA IV requires both the unloveable Games For Windows Live and a further app known as Rockstar Social Club. Both must be logged into for online play, and both lurk and nag even if you play only offline. Bypassing or removing either one means the game will not run. GFWL is a bitter we’re getting used to swallowing now, and at least we know it does the Achievements thingy and multiplayer matchmaking. What isn’t at all clear is what RSC really brings to the table in addition to GFWL, or a convincing justification for it being mandatory.
Furthermore, while GFWL only runs when GTA4 does, the Social Club is an external application, which runs outside of the game. As well as this potentially eating up system resources and leaving yet another icon in our overburdened system trays, it’s heckuva lot of hoops to jump through just to play your game, no? Especially if you also throw in a Steam login, or whatever other digi-distribution app you might buy it through: that’ll involve three seperate usernames and passwords. Ludicrous.
I’ve experienced these two systems first-hand, having played GTA IV PC for a review. I believe I’m not yet allowed to discuss it, but what I will say is that GFWL and RSC are not invisible systems by any measure. They certainly make their presence known. Let’s hope their demands don’t trip up our driving’n'killing shenanigans too much.
If, however, all these mandatory checks end up simply wasting our time rather than genuinely improving our GTA experience (and there is every chance yet they will be a force for good – e.g. RSC’s neat video replay editing/sharing feature), then this will be a certain case of publisher paranoia and control-freakery causing them to treat their audience with contempt. Even at this stage, I strongly feel that Rockstar should patch the game to make RSC an option rather than a necessity. It might enable some cool stuff, but it’s only going to annoy people who just want to play the singleplayer mode. We’ll see how it all feels and what the community’s reaction is next week, anyway.
Again, read the full q&a here.
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Well, sort of. Of course, those other people are making money via the Evil Capitalist Machine… and they’re still making money anyway. People do still buy games, you know? And, of course, the only reason that pirates get to use the “noble software facilitators” argument is that the “other people” are failing to facilitate their software correctly – as has been previously mentioned in this discussion, you don’t get nearly as many people complaining about useful services that also provide DRM (as Steam does). So, it’s still a failure of the “other people” – admittedly, presumably more on the management side – that is leading to that issue.
Not that piracy wouldn’t happen anyway, of course, but it would at least stop this side of the moral argument (short of switching to a more sensible form of international economic system which isn’t fixated on limitless growth and inequality promoting principles of ownership, I mean).
@aoanla
Publishers publish, developers develop. Why punish developers for the deficiencies of publishers? Which ultimately is what happens at the end of the day when people pirate games. Developers future job security depends upon their games being commercially successful. If Astudio’s latest game has poor sales and part of that is due to piracy, it’s unlikely that they will have the finances to make future games, or will secure financing from publishers (who are going..did it sell well?). No source of revenue = no more company. Publishers are generally diversified to such a degree that they can take a beating here and there, but with developers that’s another story.
@Klaus
I may have exaggerated, but I hardly over-exaggerated. =)
I’m happy to say that with Steam I’ve had that simple 3 step experience with plenty of games, but it doesn’t mean that’s the norm. And it certainly won’t be the case with GTA from the article above.
All the other GTA games are on steam an install and play with minimal fuss, but now suddenly this latest one has to use three further kinds of copy protection??
The SecureRom alone is a deal breaker for me – I buy all my games through Steam to AVOID stupid DRM like that, but this time its not worth it. But on top of that, they’ve stuck Games For Windows Live because Microsoft offered them a big pile of dosh to make it an exclusive. And then they have to stick their OWN extra DRM program on top of GFWL, Steam and SecureROM.
I know people think I’m making a big fuss over nothing, but if people don’t make a fuss over this shit it’ll just get worse and worse until we have to buy hardware dongles and install keyloggers on our machines before we can play GTA V or Spore 2.
I’m off to see if I can get a refund for GTA before the game goes live.
@Kadayi
You’re focusing on the wrong thing entirely. I’m not advocating piracy as some kind of noble, robin-hood like pursuit. I’m saying that DRM has no effect on pirates. None. In fact, they more than likely see it as a challenge.
And before we go round and round again with the argument of developers trying to make a living, that is NOT THE ARGUMENT. I agree developers are trying to sell games to make a living, and I agree that piracy is hurting that (although not nearly as much as their publishers claim) but putting strict DRM on the games has no effect other than to irritate people who buy it. Developers seem to forget that once pirates release the game on the net, the DRM will have been stripped away or negated, and it won’t have any effect on ANYONE who uses the pirate copy.
So to sum up, it won’t stop the dedicated crackers, and it won’t even be present on the pirated versions. So who gets the DRM? the paying customers. And since we’re the ones paying for the bloody game, why should we have to put up with the DRM?
If pirated copies of a game provide a better game experience than paid copies of the game, there is no incentive to pay, other than a sense of moral obligation which is fast disappearing from this planet.
@Kadayi: Well, perhaps Developers should stop using certain Publishers, then? Of course it’s unfair that developers would be punished by actions taken in response to the actions of the publisher – except, of course, that the developers presumably chose to use that publisher. The same is arguably true in other industries – look at the Music Industry, for example.
(That said – the WoG evidence suggests that the rate of piracy isn’t altered by your use of DRM or otherwise, so developers are probably better off self-publishing and making better games. It seems to work for Introversion (the Multiwinia issue is more that Multiwinia just isn’t quite as good as their previous games), and apparently works so-far for 2DBoy, although it’s early days there. Cut out the middleman, and you’ll get more profits for you…)
With these restrictions, I predict Grand Theft Videogame.
I only read through half of the thread so forgive me if i’m reiterating someone else…..
But my main problem with this (online authentication is second) is that rather than having to rely on one service staying around to be able to play the game you instead have to rely on three…. and if any one of those goes offline then you’re stumped – you can’t play you game. It’s just bad planning and common sense.
I remember one place i worked in and there were above 150 people there… when being trained we were told that in the event of an accident there were two designated first aiders for everyone. My simple question was – what happens if both of those people are away/out? What do we do then?
The initial response was along the lines of well, that’s quite unlikely but i’ll ask them what we’re supposed to do. The trainer came back and apologised because both first aiders were away on a staff training day but told us that they would find out the next day and amend the knowledge base of the whole office so that more people would know what to do and perhaps get more first aiders.
These situations (of authentication DRM and required programmes) are exactly the same. IMO, the chances of two people being off at the same time is quite high because of the fact that they are affected by some of the same factors due to working in the same office. Similarly, tying your game purchase to a service or services is extremely short-sighted because of how stable the gaming industry is with regards to studio closures, game server closures and company take-overs.
There’s no consumer protection to force the industry to act in the best interests of their customer if one of those three events happens and so it’s unlikely that anything would be done if it hasn’t been planned and implemented already.
“Well, perhaps Developers should stop using certain Publishers, then? Of course it’s unfair that developers would be punished by actions taken in response to the actions of the publisher – except, of course, that the developers presumably chose to use that publisher.”
Should they perhaps go to the Federal reserve and ask for funding? Publishers are as much about having an existing marketing infrastructure, as they are about distribution and finance. It’s not remotely sensible for a developer who might publish a game once every 2 years to do that sort of thing in house. Also by and large most companies don’t have the vast limitless pots of gold necessary to provide them with complete freedom to pick and choose with whom they do business. Even Valve were up against it financially when HL2 got delayed, why else do you think they pimped those ATi cards so much. Was it because ATi pumped $8 Million their way? Could be.
The thing that bugs me most about this is that whomever was giving the interview was pretty close to tone-deaf as far as this issue went. I’m not a huge anti-DRM guy, and I actually think their policy seems pretty reasonable; reading that article, I couldn’t help but want to be outraged.
The dry, inhuman corporate tone (broken only by its outright condescension to ‘board posters’) is like fingernails on a chalkboard here.
@Klaus: Steam automatically patches all your games by default, but it can be disabled on a per-game basis just by unchecking a box in each game’s properties window. Note that some games (especially Valve’s) require you to have the latest patch in order to play online. You also can’t choose which patch to install as you can with non-Steam games: updating a Steam game always patches it to the very latest version.
Kadayi: I note once more that Introversion seem to manage perfectly happily picking their publishers (or lack of them), or at least did so until Multiwinia (which, arguably, wouldn’t have done much better if they had had a publisher for it). Introversion also don’t have great pots of money and also almost died out as a developer due to lack of said money, and may do soon in any case. This didn’t cause them to lose their moral perspective on their choice of business partners and publishers. Obviously, other developers may chose other approaches – they shouldn’t be surprised, however, if these choices impact on how people perceive them and how people treat their games.
(And, yes, I accept that most of the problem here is one of funding – but that’s partly a result of the broken economic model that the world works on in general, not that that makes it any better for the developers in question. I also accept that this doesn’t make developers Evil – but it does make them naive if they are genuinely supposed to be able to be surprised by working with a particular publisher having a negative effect on their own image…)
I’m just gonna pirate it. I don’t need the hassle.
@Sam
Introversion are about 10 people deep as a company and although they produce interesting games (I’m a fan), they aren’t exactly competing in the same game space as Epic, Valve, DICE, Bungie, Lionhead etc etc, in terms of product delivery and expectation. There exists just about enough of an enthusiast market interest to sustain them at present, but whether they can actually build upon that market successfully and retain any personal philosophies remains to be seen. Still the Story of Introversion is barely more than a couple of chapters in right now, so it’s hard to say whether it’s going to turn into a 400 page epic or a short novella.
Another game I’d probably love that I won’t by buying because the devs are cocks. No doubt the pirated version will be sans GFWL and RSC so, once again, the pesky pirates will get a better experience.
Thanks, Rockstar!
To add to Kadayi’s point, my copy of Steam is currently only using 8MB, and if you don’t like that you can just close it when not gaming. I like Steam. I like the Steam friends list, I like the distribution method, I like the free and optionally automatic updates to any games purchased, I like a single place to launch my games from.
The thing is, I don’t need/want any other programs imitating what Steam already does and forcing me to use them as well. Although, if they’re optional and provide something Steam doesn’t then I don’t see why not.
@ Bhazor:
Your argument is flawed, and your information is misleading.
Mass Effect currently has many many more torrents, seeds and leeches than you say, going off public trackers. By my sources there are dozens of Mass Effect torrents and only counting the the top ten torrent’s seeders and leeches gives 2333 seeds, 4045 leeches.
The reason that your argument is flawed, is that Fallout 3 has just been released – there would have been a similar number of torrents seeds and leeches at the time of Mass Effect’s release as there are currently for Fallout 3. So, there you go – securom isn’t really stopping pirates.
I wrote this before I saw all the other responses to your post, jeez this page is long.
Well, at least consoles have ONE advantage over PC’s nowadays.
This is disappointing. I’ll tolerate the copy protection – although activation + disk in the drive is annoying – but not the bloatware. I realize some folks think that such bloat is minimal or even trivial, but I disagree. I had been looking forward to this purchase. It’s a shame.
I’ll continue to read about the issue and hopefully either the bloat will be made optional (at the loss of some features) or it will be reported that the resources expended really are trivial, at which point I’ll reconsider.
Well, I lol’d. All of that to play one game? You also need to have Windows-LIVE, securom, and RGSC running. If the pirated version requires DOWNLOAD, COPY/PASTE CRACK, PLAY, I’ll be lol’ing some more.
lol, I’ve had trojans from time to time, and every time what is involved is me ignoring commonsense. i.e. “I shouldn’t click on that, but I waaaannnnt (software) sooooo baaaaaddd! *click* *shutdown* Shit…” hasn’t happened in years though. Experience!
I also have never had a pirated game crap out on me, primarily because I read for such issues beforehand. I hear Mass Effect crapped out on many people who bought the game, and the pirates. So….
@Kadayi: Yeah, and I accept that. The real problem here is that, as apparently in the music and film industries, the big publishers have so much power over the majority of the money in the entire industry that they can, to a large extent, do whatever the hell they want to a developer’s game. Which is why Introversion are still tiny, and why I tend to blame this on the currently popular theories of commerce (as I’ve ranted about before here, I, and I suspect others, would be happy to pay developers directly for previews etc of their new products (I hope everyone on RPS donated to the Auditorium guys on their website…), thus giving them slightly more wiggle-room with publishers.)
PC version was cracked and posted on bittorrent today, 1 day before NA release. Anyone surprised?
Nope.
Will also not be purchasing this until a patch removes all the unncessary crap. I can tolerate online activation, although I think this should make the disc check unneccessary, I can tolerate them both together. But the crap-ware/bloat-ware/shit-ware/were-ware is too much especially after the disasterous farce that was Bully on the PC which STILL hasn’t been fixed.
I’m not a fan of GTA but was considering buying this until now. All well, it makes the choice easier.
@Guhndahb
Hear Hear. A real shame
@Gorgeras
Were-ware! I like it.
Well I don’t like it but i like the term.
I love the GTA series, I have even considered buying a console to play 4. However I just cant let go of the M+K control I get with the PC. I bought GTA 4 last night knowing that my system barely met the min sys reqs. However I believe in supporting the games I like.
After installing it, I wanted to clear up what the GTA 4 PC ver really does on the system.
1. It installs Windows live without checking for a previous version which Fallout 3 had already installed. The first time you load the game it checks for updates to Windows live and requires you to download that before playing. The windows live component also loads a program to act as a redistribution node for the update to other on the net
2. Rockstar Social Club is installed and is set to startup when the system boots. If you disable it in MSconfig, the next time you start GTA4 is puts itself back in. It prompts you for a login with no way to permanently ignore it each time the games starts or if it loads at startup then it prompts you when you login, even if you don’t plan on playing the game.
I don’t really mind DRM but only because I have not had any problems with my system. But I know others have had nightmares dealing with it. I personally wouldn’t mind the whole windows live thing because it is invisible in fallout 3 unless I go and specifically pull it up.
However the GTA 4 PC version has turned my PC into a console with programs loading at startup and no options to choose “JUST PLAY GAME.” I like the fact that I can start a game and choose continue or load and I am back in the game.
Hopefully someone will release a patch/crack that will let me do just that “START…LOAD….ENJOY”
I was really looking forward to this game as i enjoyes the GTAIII series very much. So i preordered GTA4 w/o knowing about the DRM hassles and these (insanely?) high system reqs. I only intended to play offline, so no way i would ever need this windows live crap or this (what is good for?) social club thing. And last but not least the securom stuff sucks big time too, though this was the least annoying thing.
For as much as i have seen from the game itself, i really liked it. But the whole control of the game was completely inconsistent. It may work fine using a xbox controller but is extremely annoying when using mouse+keyboard.
I felt a bit sad when i finally removed the from my pc because i would really have enjoyed playing it, but at least for me it’s absolutely unplayable. Additionally the whole online stuff is absolutely unacceptable, the securom protection even more and did i mention the 3 crashes i had in 2 hours of driving…
They messed it up.
For me is was a huge waste of time and money.
GJM
Ive had fallout 3 and GTA4 installed on my PC for a while now, and since GFW and rockstar clubs hog of a programs, wont let me connect ingame even tho I have done before in the past and played it for a day or so, but after a a few days of play both programs dont connect ingame anymore, and this really makes the game worthless. No more saves and the added crap that u can get, that really is just a little bonus and nothing much of a wow factor.
Since being a paying customer makes me wonder If I got my moneys worth, When a game forces you to change this and that in windows just to maybe hope to see if it works.
And maybe wait until some one gets there ass in gear to release a patch that fixes most unimportant problems in a game anyways, which again allows you to wait further.
Until you
A: Fix it your self, by looking at tons of forums etc
B: download some sort of 3rd party hack/fix thing.
C: Wait longer for a patch………
D: Put it on a shelve and wait even longer for a Patch or etc and revert back to the games that do play and does not require you to sign in etc.
But Ive got some Questions tho, What the hell is GFW anyways? what does it really support you with? Apart being like a big brother type of deal.
ALL YOUR SAVES ARE BELONG TO US!!!
What does Steam, GFW and all the other band wagon jumpers all have in common? What happens if they go bankrupt? There mainframe has a fire and u lose all your accounts anyways?
If you want to stop pirates an etc, then what stops me from doing a snach and grab at a video game store and giving away alot of free cd keys and its games?
Since GFW uses hotmail account what stops a hacker etc from getting every ones personal detail? and changing there log on pws etc? OR changing who evers stats to there liking?
Why does software protection stuff feel likes its an afterthought?
Why is there not a GFW or steam like program that is just one big massive database you can download patches for any game. So any game can connect to it an download instead of random sites or Do it yourself find a patch etc. Whats the deal with Rockstar social club? I dont want to socialise with people if I am in a game, thats what myspace facebook, steam friends list etc is for.. I just want to drive around and kill people in game.
Why are games turning more to online reg when there is solid proof that this is still unstable.
If GFW crashes my game and I crack it with a hack does that make me a pirate that i still get to play my legit copy of my game?
Any why does GFW and other band wagon jumpers force you to have to purchases a new game just to play on a Lan?
Games used to be made by gamers. But now games are made by sponsors… which is said because at the end of the day they couldnt care less about fixing any problems since they still got the fair share of $$$ worth in there from their selected selling game.
I don’t even see why we should tolerate this kind of behavior. Being able to play and save your game has been a standard of PCs since the beginning. What right does Microsoft have to remove this basic functionality?
This calls for a petition:
http://www.petitiononline.com/StopGFWL/