I'm one of twelve speedrunners of this game [1] and this is a killing blow to our community. Those of us lucky enough to have the game installed are the only ones who can continue speedrunning this game, and we can never uninstall it or switch computers. No new speedrunners can enter the scene. It was enough work getting it to run over the years without Games for Windows Live, or at a modern resolution, or at a modern framerate, with horrible keyboard controls, and without crashing at boot due to driver issues.
Now, new players can't even get their foot in the door enough to see that there are fixes. Even with a crack, this is the end of speedrunning for us.
Why can't you speedrun with the crack? If everyone agrees on a common executable that works it can be verified via SHA256 and still be used for speedruns.
That doesn't seem like a high bar honestly. There's many games that much harder to get started with, you might need to buy an old console or buy a specific version of a game. Downloading and installing a cracked game should be easy.
Someone that is dedicated enough to potentially start speedrunning some 10 year old game, shouldn't really be stopped by having to install some extra "patch".
I have to ask, how does it feel investing so much time into something that just evaporated overnight?
Do you think your skills can translate to other games?
FWIW, I'm a big fan of the speedrunning community: Karl Jobst, Calebhart, kosmic, etc. I can't imagine what it would be like if, say, FF7 stopped working due to DRM and Caleb had to switch games. He'd be alright, but most of his audience comes to see FF7.
EDIT: It sounds like people have patched the game to work without SecuROM. Do you think that might coax new players into the scene? One positive way to look at this is that it's free advertising for this particular game.
I'm not too familiar with the relationship between developers and publishers, so maybe this doesn't matter, but Disney is the publisher. Tron 2.0 was made by Monolith which is still around today. Tron Evolution was made by Propaganda Games which shut down in 2011.
That certainly can affect how easy it would be for them to update it, but Disney should have the source code, and removing DRM should trivial if they have the source.
In the case of current DMCA exemptions, it’s even arguably legal to distribute.
> Video games in the form of computer programs embodied in physical or downloaded formats that have been lawfully acquired as complete games, when the copyright owner or its authorized representative has ceased to provide access to an external computer server necessary to facilitate an authentication process to enable local gameplay,
The risk is basically nothing. You get a notification saying "don't do that again". In my younger days I helped distribution with various scene groups to the tune of terabytes of files. I think I got a few notices that ended in the garbage. At the time I was getting cracked copies from employees of ILM and pixar
The EFF exists for a reason. Hopefully not a reason that you'll ever personally need, but if that day comes and the hammer comes down on you, you'll be thankful people prepared for that situation.
> The eff doesn't exist to defend pirates so that is irrelevant.
That depends on your definition of piracy. The EFF strongly fights against the DMCA.
> Pirating in every shape in form has to be one of of the lowest crimes to get caught for.
Low in terms of what? Punishment? A fair number of people have received harsh punishments, as already mentioned. You mention you were caught distributing a lot of pirated material, so the probability of getting caught seems high. The fraction of people that received a non-trivial punishment of those caught distributing a lot of pirated material is higher than 1/180 million.
No I did not mention I was caught in any significant way. I never had a worry in the world about getting caught. Outside of receiving a no consequence piece of paper in the mail that means nothing.
It matters for the people that create and distribute the cracks. Its much easier to simply dump the crack file/source on your website and freely distribute it if its legal to do so.
That doesn't let the original companies off the hook unless they release legal claims to the game and let people actually distribute that patch without fear of current or future legal repercussions - Disney in particular is never going to do that.
IANAL, but I believe that in Australia, you would be entitled to a refund. There is no fixed time limit on refunds, and it would be reasonable to suggest that a game like this should just keep working. You'd probably have to argue your case still, as the company isn't likely to just refund without a fight.
(As an aside, if you get a dishwasher and use it for 10 years, the "general wear and tear" would deny your refund, as it would be reasonable to suggest that ongoing usage would wear down the machine, especially, for instance, if you didn't do the regular maintenance suggested. )
I don't know about Australia specifically but usually when consumer legislation doesn't mention time frame there's still a limitation on how long after the contract of sale that you can bring a case against the seller, and this serves as the practical time frame as there's no way to enforce a refund without going to court.
IANAL but I do run a business that's subject to Australian consumer law. The limitations are not based on the date of the contract of sale, but the date on which the consumer became aware (or reasonably could have been aware) the product was defective, and/or an action was taken by some party to render the product defective.
The consumer legislation does specify a six-year time limit from then on, but that clock only just started ticking.
However, a refund is not obligatory. Repair i.e. a patch is an acceptable remedy under ACL.
You may be right but my reading of this would breach the ACL for “Undisturbed Possession of Goods”. That is - unless you told the customer the game had a limited life you can’t stop them using it. Doing so triggers a “remedy” - which - for a “major fault” is a refund.
This can’t be hidden in a EULA. It has to be prominent or the term will be ruled invalid under the “Unfair Contract Term” provisions of the ACL.
For those not familiar, ACL trumps all consumer contracts with standard terms. There are penalties for misrepresenting ACL (eg “No refunds” signs are banned, so are limits to consequential damages. Warranties are for a “reasonable” time, etc. )
No. The legislation's definition of "major failure" includes several clear statements that if a remedy can be/is made by the supplier, the failure is not a major failure.
That applies to warranties, production defects or (as the GP says) things breaking due to normal use. It doesn't apply to things breaking because the publisher put a kill switch in the device.
It would be a refund in Australia as it is a faulty product. They may try stiff you on returning a physical disk (how do you prove it was faulty on sale?) but a good store will offer store credit at the very least because video games do not make money. The consoles do.
The only times a refund can be denied in Australia when a problem occurs is if it was caused by you or if you changed your mind on a purchase. Otherwise the purchaser can dictate how they are rectified (swap, credit or refund).
Edit: This is assuming you purchase it now. If you purchased it 9 years ago - it would be tough luck. The pivot is the condition at point of sale.
Typically yes. I think Nintendo sometimes turns a profit on consoles due to optimising on other factors than cutting edge power. Consoles can also become profitable over their lifetime as technology matures.
Except that consoles do work on this model, and they are the razor, not the blades. When did you ever hear of someone getting a new console for the game they already have?
What? Australian consumer law has a limitation on 2 years or reasonable lifetime. Games don’t last forever and get obsoleted by newer operating systems.
Sure I can run wine/VMware but I can also keep my 100 year old washing machine running with regular repairs which isn’t fixing the issue of deprecation or end of life.
There's a pretty vast difference between an N64 being less widely useful because it's hard to source an RCA display (hint: you can buy an RCA to HDMI adaptor cheaply) and N64s including a remote "kill switch" that one day gets flipped, destroying all N64s immediately.
Disney has sabotaged people's property by using (allowing a third party to use) a kill switch, and that shouldn't be acceptable.
If a washing machine called home and checked that it's okay to run each time it was connected to power anew, and one day all of a particular model of washing machine was remotely told to stop working, I'm sure that would make the news.
The N64 isn't somehow broken because "nobody uses RCA anymore". That's like saying your outfit is broken because nobody wears bell-bottom jeans anymore. If you want to play N64, RCA monitors are still readily available, as are converters. Nothing stops you from using them other than plain disinterest.
As for disc rot, I truly believe that if you sell discs with copy protection so that the consumers can't reasonably back them up, they should be eligible for replacements when the discs eventually break after normal use.
This, on the other hand, is first of all not a bug; it's the copy protection working as designed. Whoever decided to use a subscription based copy protection system must have known that they'd either have to pay for it for a very long time or eventually fuck legitimate buyers over. It's deliberate and calculated. That it's related to anti-piracy doesn't factor into it. It's not pirates who are suffering from this, which is what critics have been saying about SecuROM for the last decade.
Now, can you argue for the idea that using SecuROM is comparable to adopting an industry standard for video transmission that has proven to be so popular that it's still widely in use now, some 50 years after its invention, without the foresight to instead adopt standards that didn't yet exist?
Now, can you argue for the idea that using SecuROM is comparable to adopting an industry standard for video transmission
No, you can't, because the presence of SecuROM is completely orthogonal to the game features that customers are willing to pay for. This is a feature the publisher insisted on, not something the customer asked for.
Moreover, mitigations for the scenario you suggest do exist: you can buy convertors, even high-quality upscalers to convert 70s-era video signals to HDMI signals a modern TV can accept. "Convertors" that mitigate the damage of SecuROM are illegal, again because the publishers insisted on that.
> No, you can't, because the presence of SecuROM is completely orthogonal to the game features that customers are willing to pay for.
Yes, you can argue for it. That doesn't necessarily mean that the conclusion is right or even that the reasoning is sound. The point of arguing is to find out that it is, if it is. In this case, I was asking the poster I responded to to present his case because I have presented a case for the opposite conclusion, that these are not comparable situations.
> Moreover, mitigations for the scenario you suggest do exist
I think you may be getting my argument mixed up with some other argument, because I did not suggest that scenario, and I clearly argue for why I believe that it's an invalid comparison on the basis that a mitigation isn't even necessary in most cases since most TVs have a composite input and you can still buy new TVs that have composite inputs.
Disc rot won't affect anyone that made a backup, and anyone that didn't could find an iso I'm sure. An N64 still works the way it always did, just like if you installed this game on windows 7.
Sure but as long as it runs on the latest version of Windows then does it matter? And based on other posters comments they updated it in 2017 to support windows 10.
Steam doesn't even care if the developer drops all support, they are more than willing to charge for it and not tell you that there is no support, continued development, and such.
It is one reason I am loathe to buy anything on that platform. they should be required to notify you when you browse a game that it has no support.
They do offer refunds for under 2 hours gameplay. This doesn't help when you have been playing for years and then it stops working but it does prevent you from buying a broken game today.
Only up to a week after the purchase. Make sure to TEST every game you buy on a sale; otherwise your old, never-played but doesn't-work games are dead without refund.
It's the kind of contempt for customers that is common for software vendors but is enough to prevent me from buying hardware from them. Valve's just EOLed the Steam Controllers and their next game won't support SteamOS on Steam Machines, so why should I now feel comfortable dropping $999 on a VR headset to play it?
But isn't like taking your Picasso and refunding you back five shillings ten pence your ancestor gave for it? For many players the game is not than just the fifty bucks they payed, it's countless hours spent with it. It's far beyond the purchase price.
A nice way to solve this would be for steam to require all games provide a drm free version to valve and in the event where the DRM breaks and the publisher is gone steam will replace everyones copy with the drm free version. Although these days I don't think valve is really in the position to demand such a thing.
"A nice way to solve this would be for the governments to require all software provide their source code to them in the event where the source code is lost before the copyright expires." (And also be legally liable to replace all copy-protected goods for no fee other than the cost of manufacturing a copy for the duration of copyright.)
my solution is to buy games on gog when i can and save a cracked copy of any game I end up buying on steam. best of both worlds really. When it works, the minor sacrifice of my privacy isn't too high a price for the deals and convenience Steam offers, but when it fails (and I've been locked out of my steam purchases once already) it's nice to know I can still play the games I paid for.
I am left split between choosing between gog which support drm free games but seemingly don't give a shit about linux and valve which allow drm but literally have multiple people dedicated to making linux gaming better. Recently a valve developer submitted a patch to linux which fixed a regression in a logitech gaming device driver. None of that has anything to do with valve and yet they pay people to do it anyway.
For now at least I will be sticking with valve and if for some reason my access ever gets cut off I will pirate a copy of every game I owned.
> gog which support drm free games but seemingly don't give a shit about linux
I'm curious why you say that. I only run Linux games these days, and most come from GoG. Most tend to have quite good support, and I've had bugs I reported get patched.
That's less GoG and more the company publishing with them, if I understand the process correctly.
Game companies aren't great at making sure they've added artifacts for all platforms, across all the publishing platforms. Even on Steam different platforms often lag behind each other, and they make the process dead simple.
They still don't have a linux client years after the windows one came out. Also compared to valve they do basically nothing other than simply allow publishers to add a linux version.
Valve essentially created linux gaming as a real and viable thing.
Good info! According to that thread they've fixed the issue I ran into years ago when I was working offline for months before steam refused to run at all without authenticating. I'm not sure I buy that it was a bug exactly, but even if it was it just goes to show you never know what will go wrong without a cracked backup.
Yeah, getting into a place without Internet, launching Steam in offline mode... and Steam insisting on phoning home in order to switch to Offline mode was infuriating !
Not as far as I'm aware, or Vista(1) users and indeed, Windows 7 stalwarts will have an awakening moment in the next year or so.
Their EULA kinda covers them fully into not offering refunds in such circumstances as well.
Which does raise the issue, if the OS the game was written for initially loses support and you don't see Microsoft offering refunds, why should games when you have had years of fun.
Sure it's a sour pill and back in board game days - nobody expected to purchase Monopoly and suddenly due changes later like an emissions zone introduction, find that they was unable to play that game anymore as their playing pieces all exceeded the emissions limits! Mad analogy I know, but does help curry perspective upon this.
However, it gets down to - did the game being sold mention any of this or forewarned, or indeed - have an expiry date! Nope. Heck, does an OS like XP come with an expiry date or any form of notice that it would ceased to work as sold? I'd guess not.
So much in the land of software and consumer rights or at the very least some level of guarantee is needed or at the very least, existing protection is updated or inforced to shake up this limbo state of consumer miss selling. Which it is when you get to the crux of it.
Still, another way to view it mad-analogy wise is that software is like fuel and if your car stops being unable to get spare parts or is unable to drive down roads it used to be able to due to some new regulation that came in. Well the fuel still works in newer cars that conform and is it the fuel companies fault if you unable to use that fuel in your car any more?
So many ways to look at this, but it certainly makes linux gaming more appealing for longevity and equally makes open source games more appealing as it the edge case, you have the power to fix the issue yourself if you encounter one.
Thinking about it, the only OS that comes to mind that is sold with a definitive support end date from date of purchase would be ChromeOS upon chromebooks.
Note that Steam only dropped XP support 4 years after Microsoft did.
Software, even sprinkled with art, is not a usable fuel or a perishable good.
As I said elsewhere, I have no issues with software companies deciding to drop support, but they should also then forfeit their copyright (earlier than normal) and release the source code.
For a store/launcher like Steam, they should remove the DRM. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, Gabe specifically promised to do that when Steam was first introduced, to assuade the fears over DRM !
EDIT : I stopped reading what passes for "communication" on that link on the first page. Note also that I'm raising a somewhat different issue : Steam dropping support for an OS, which OS is the only one that some of the Steam-sold games are working on. (This is certainly going to concern many more games for Win7 than it did for Vista, XP, 2k(?)...)
No, I think that this makes sense. Failing open would make the DRM useless if you could trick the client into thinking the contract was expired.
OTOH, SecuROM is also “securing” their software from modifications, so if it were to fail open, it would still at least be working to keep binary integrity and obfuscation working; obviously SecuROM does not want to offer this for free.
In my mind the correct action would be for the developers to release a patch that removes SecuROM. Similar was often done for other games that had CD based authentication; it was often removed years after original release, which makes sense to do after the pirates have long compromised the security. I think it makes just as much sense for online authentication for a game this old.
Aside: I am trying to avoid injecting my personal opinions about DRM here since they aren’t relevant, but just to be clear I am not trying to express sympathy or support for either party. This is amazingly dumb in my opinion.
Really, I think it falls on the company that chose to license DRM in the first place. Unfortunately, there’s nothing compelling vendors legally speaking that I’m aware of, but there damn well should be. I also think unavailability due to DRM downtime or issues should have ramifications, as well.
I think personal opinions are quite relevant here, legally speaking the law is clear and we've all got a problem with that - concurrently, legally speaking any game you've got through steam is a leased copy so if steam revoked your ability to play it tonight you wouldn't have a clear legal way to challenge them (unless the game is a subscription and they continue to collect that fee)
Regardless of the EULA, there are legal arguments [1] to be made that Steam's games are goods, not services, and buyers whose games are remotely disabled due to auth servers being shut off should be entitled to either a refund, a reasonable patch to keep the game working locally or have a clear expiration date stamped on the storefront since day one.
This recent French court's ruling [2] indirectly supports this interpretation.
Well, from SecuROM’s perspective I think everything makes sense. Personally I think the responsibility should fall on the developers to ensure that people who paid for something can access it.
Consumer protection really hasn’t caught up here. Desperately need it to, imo.
> Failing open would make the DRM useless if you could trick the client into thinking the contract was expired.
Depends on the kind of failure.
You could have failure-to-reach-SecuROM fail closed, but you could have publisher-no-longer-has-a-license-with-SecuROM fail open (serverside at SecuROM).
The latter is probably better from SecuROM's standpoint: it makes end-users less likely to avoid SecuROM protected content.
On the other hand, it doesn't make end-users scream at their customers that have failed to renew.
Meanwhile you can just torrent the cracked version without inSecureROM with much less effort and no time limit. Piracy: it's cheaper and easier. If a company puts up too many roadblocks. Fuck them.
For a publisher, DRM really helps with securing the game for the first few months when it gets most sales, the protection will be broken anyway. So protection doesn't matter that much later.
For SecuROM blocking after expiration is a better strategy, because blocking games that were purchased will encourage publisher to renew the subscription.
I think for the Disney it would be best to simply release patch that removes the copy protection, that is assuming they still have the source code.
Seems like a case could be made for treating DRM like cell phone carrier locking. Legislation could be passed to permit DRM only for the first 12-24 months of a games life post release and require developers to provide patches that remove said protections thereafter.
We live in a world where patents can be extended almost endlessly. Intellectual property is also treated in the same way, and I think unless there's a big cultural shift in company incentives this will remain for a long time to come.
> For SecuROM blocking after expiration is a better strategy, because blocking games that were purchased will encourage publisher to renew the subscription.
Yes and no. Stories like this make me even more nervous to acquire SecuROM-protected content.
If the server is contactable, and the server goes from returning a signed KEY_IS_VALID response to a signed KEY_IS_ALWAYS_VALID_BECAUSE_DISNEY, it has the same level of security as the existing solution. It does give SecuROM less subscription revenue security, though.
Remember how the same company basically made a (copyright-violating!) rootkit installed on 22M CDs, and now makes Denuvo, a DRM that Steam doesn't list as DRM ?
A lot of people saying this, but the games could still have to connect to SecuROM who would then approve them all. Of course, it won't protect customers against SecuROM itself shutting down, but that's not the problem here.
I can't think of a reason other than encouraging customers to continue to pay.
In a 'fail closed' scenario like this one, customers not only lose the DRM protection, but SecuROM gets a customer's end users to harass the customer, which punishes the customer for not paying.
In a 'fail open' scenario, the customer can choose to end their relationship with SecuROM with basically no side effects; they lose the DRM protection, but end users don't notice and can still play the game.
Another point is that in both scenarios, SecuROM has to spend cycles handling auth requests for people playing the game while not receiving any money to do so. From their perspective it's better to make customers remove SecuROM vs. 'fail open' and authorize games 'for free'.
I was given Farcry 4 a few years ago. I tried to install it last week and the key was used already. The game was in plastic wrapper still, I just opened it. Support said there was nothing they could do. Luckily I found the receipt and got the money back from MediaMarkt instead. Never buying boxed games again.
Had a similar experience with my steam copy of red alert 3 a couple of years back (before the GameSpy shutdown, so the servers were still up). Logged in after not having played for years, the online system kept reporting invalid CD Key, EA told me Steam had to issue a new key, Steam insisted that it was EA's fault, end result was I couldn't play my game online
When support staff is unhelpful, it's always a good idea to request to be forwarded to a higher tier of support staff. I was once stuck in a dead-end 10+ email thread with the basic support, when the upper tier support fixed the issue immediately.
It was cute and all, but you played through a 'flow' like cell phase, a simple tribal phase, a slightly more complex civilisation phase and then went space and ... meh.
I wanted to love it, and I did play it through a few times, but from the hype you'd have thought it was the game of a generation where ultimately it was unsatisfying and played out more or less the same each time.
Agreed. It took me a while before I got a copy and I was ultimately pretty disappointed. I think some of the ideas still have a lot of potential though. I hope to see other games explore things at that scale in the future. Some elements of this seem to be present in No Man's Sky which I haven't played, but that's the only thing that I can think of that relates.
Buy the product, get the crack. Since you paid, you can't be accused of a pirate, and you won't suffer from DRM.
This is actually quite a popular thing to do among users of certain niche software in the manufacturing and logistics industries, where DRM failure means far more than not being able to play a game.
For what it is worth, this is absolutely not true and (regardless of what legal prescient may or may not imply) companies still sue people for such activities. While it has been shown several times that circumventing DRM does not explicitly run afowl with the DMCA, that does not mean you are not in the clear with the EULA of the software which leaves open an avenue for you to be sued in civil court for EULA violations.
If you go to court you may be able to defend yourself (depending on the circumstances of your DRM circumvention activities, the wording of the EULA, and the quality of the lawyers on each side), but it will still cost you a huge amount of time and money--a fact that is commonly exploited by litigative companies to punish people accused of such practices.
Legitimate users of media software can also be affected by DRM. Many years ago I paid for a professional encoder for a very popular surround sound format, but the DRM servers are dead and the original company has been sold several times over.
At least in California, you can go after the manufacturer or the retailer:
Unless disclaimed in the manner prescribed by this chapter, every sale of consumer goods that are sold at retail in this state shall be accompanied by the manufacturer’s and the retail seller’s implied warranty that the goods are merchantable. The retail seller shall have a right of indemnity against the manufacturer in the amount of any liability under this section.
No implied warranty of merchantability and, where applicable, no implied warranty of fitness shall be waived, except in the case of a sale of consumer goods on an “as is” or “with all faults” basis where the provisions of this chapter affecting “as is” or “with all faults” sales are strictly complied with.
Any waiver by the buyer of consumer goods of the provisions of this chapter, except as expressly provided in this chapter, shall be deemed contrary to public policy and shall be unenforceable and void.
Came to suggest the same... hopefully the fines are significant enough to deter this kind of behavior in the future or to get them to provide an "unlock" after DRM servers shut down.
It's terrible. There are out there such good games completely screwed by DRMs. I long miss the old days were a CD was enough to play a game and do whatever you wanted to do with it (give it to a friend, resell it, reinstall the game in another machine).
What is super frustrating is that the industry has talked the Swedish government into puting a tax on all media (harddrives, usb memory, CDs, tapes and so on). This tax is supposed to pay for private copying, a leftover from the mix-tape days. We still pay this tax on all media and it goes directly to the industry but we still can't copy media between friends because of DRM. In general DRM should not be allowed here.
No different to purchasing a game on physical media. You only own the physical media itself, not game stored on it; the license is the same regardless.
Some physical copies of software have gone even further; the disc itself remains property of the publisher.
Quite arguably, this puts the consumer in a stronger position in this one case: they purchased a perpetual license for the content, the license was unanimously revoked by the actions rights holder, they now deserve a refund.
And now you know why data hoarders ("digital archivists") ride the line of legality just to have a working copy of something that MAY work indefinitely.
Great find, and I'm curious who's trying to play a nine year-old single-player average game that's a tie-in to the somewhat forgettable Tron: Legacy movie. Looks like gamers were trying to play this and reported it on the Steam forums and elsewhere, but why this game specifically and why now? Was there a sale?
Really goes to show that games are no different a medium from books or film, and must be preserved and maintained in perpetuity in case that latter generations will want to consume them.
There's what, 20 or 30 years worth of games now, and some of them are still great (e.g. Half Life: Opposing Force). 9 years is nothing. It's even more true for music (luckily that's generally not hobbled by DRM though).
I understand the sentiment around this specific instance is overwhelmingly negative, but I find the general concept of an exploding game to be fascinating. Consider a game that requires a buy-in of N dollars and explodes after a month. Upon exploding, the player with the most progression (e.g. level) gets the entire pot.
Since DRM is designed to restrict access to content, I'd say that it's doing what it's supposed to do!
I'm joking, obviously. I really think that DRM is damaging to the industry. That's why I always buy non-DRM versions (for games, this mostly means I'm buying from GOG.com)
Steam doesn't even list Denuvo, a DRM by basically the same company as SecuROM, as a "3rd-party DRM"...
(Not to mention which one of their own DRMs, if any, a game uses...)
Now, new players can't even get their foot in the door enough to see that there are fixes. Even with a crack, this is the end of speedrunning for us.
[1]: https://www.speedrun.com/tronevolution