I think it’s a heat issue. If I’d just booted up, I could usually get it to work without any hassle. If the laptop had been running for a while, it usually wouldn’t work. Wouldn’t be such a problem on my desktop, but then again I don’t play the game on my desktop.

I’m ambivalent about Steam. I’ve had far fewer problems with them, but I am leery of what happens when they stop supporting old games, get bought or sold or go out of business.

I’ve lost 2 DVD burners to Starforce, so no longer install (or even buy) games with Starforce. I don’t care what the company says, I lost one drive 2 days after installing a Starforce “protected” game, then after a complete system reformat and reload, lost another DVD burner 2 days after I installed the same game again. No longer will I install that game. :(

I bought Bioshock before I knew it had copy protection. Still have a sealed collector’s edition for the PC that I set aside once I found out about that. Now when possible, I buy via Impulse, Steam, Reflexive, Big Fish, etc., or I buy independent games direct from the creators.

Yes, the corporations obviously have the right to protect their profits. But we also have the right to not buy their product.
And if the way they “protect profit” is by lowering the value of the product (while keeping the same prices), then that does not encourage people to buy the game. And a game that can be activated 3 times is less valuable than one you can play forever.

In most industries, it is accepted that the way to encourage people to buy your product is to give you more for your money. Apparently, in the games industry, it is commonly thought that giving you *less* is a better approach.

Ultimately, the best way to avoid being robbed is to close your shop entirely. That is pretty much the way DRM is trying to go. Rather than encourage people to pay for the game, they try to discourage people from getting it for free. Which is fine, if you’re willing to end up with zero customers. If you want a nonzero income, you need to work on the other half, actually making your product worth buying.

For the Steam lovers… launching TF2 on a Quad-Core machine running off a 4-drive striped RAID array takes 45 seconds from when I double click TF2 shortcut on my desktop until TF2 actually shows up as a process in task manager. That time is spent launching Steam (which I don’t leave running since it hordes 100MB+ of RAM) and then validating my copy of TF2. This doesn’t even count the time taken for TF2 to actually do it’s own loading process. If that isn’t intrusive DRM I don’t know what is. It’s worse than 45 seconds of unskippable intro videos.

when a big pc game i’m interested in is released, i usually check to see how long before it’s cracked and leaking like a perforated slug all over the internet. (a morbid curiosity, i actually pay for my games).

i’m sure you can google this intrigue yourselves, but it’s been a week and a number of the big cracking superstars have already admitted defeat. the comment sections of certain sites make for particularly delicious reading.

too soon to call a victory for sure. but for a game like this to put up a fight for this long against such a concentrated effort (and due to it’s “10’s of thousands of small checks throughout the game” is uncrackable by conventional methods) is surely worth something noting.

the 3 activation limit is surely to prevent local piracy, i doubt ubi even in their wildest dreams thought tages would be this affective.