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SecuROM isn't meant to stop piracy! |
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Tuesday, 09 December 2008 20:19 |
Written by Dairuka Sutain
I've been saying this for a long time now. Something which is fueled by my fateful and unfortunate experience with Spore's limited installation license. SecuROM isn't meant to stop piracy, something which should be absolutely clear after you take a gander at the 1,700,000 downloads of Spore in the past three months since it's release.
No, Piracy is the excuse which is used to satiate the masses who fail to understand SecuROM's true purpose. The constant lie about piracy actually hurting the industry (Newsflash: Pirates don't matter.) is meant to nail your eyelids shut to the real truth of the matter.
SecuROM is meant to rip off legitimate customers.
Think about this little line: "Please purchase another registration code, reinstall and try again."
Now think about the fact that SecuROM thinks you're on a different computer if you do common computer things such as, Update your BIOS, Flash your CMOS, Changing or Replacing your Video Card, Changing or Replacing your Processor, Changing or Replacing a Hard Drive. All of which have been vindicated by Electronic Arts' very own customer service employee.
That means that everybody is bound to run into this error message. It's only a matter of time before you, your friends, your family, anybody who owns a game with a license limitation such as SecuROM 7 is going to see this error message, or one like it.
Now, can you imagine being a parent who knows nothing about computers, and being asked by your child who is equally computer illiterate to buy Spore again because the limitation was reached through no fault of your child or your own? You'd do it, and you'd be falling prey to the exact trap that EA is hoping to force hundreds of thousands of gamers into.
Piracy be damned. It's a scam and a con. We're all unwilling pawns in EA's money-grubbing game of chess.
To make matters worse, this installation limitation completely and maliciously kills off the second-hand value of every single game that has SecuROM on it. This is a factor that attracts evil corporations such as EA and Ubisoft to it. They hate your capitalist idealism, they feel you should shut up and buy their products at full price. If you don't like the game? Tough ball-sacks you Jabroni, you can't return it, and you can't resell it. You're stuck with it, and there is nothing you can do about it.
It's a sad truth that we've let things get this far. Perhaps if we all were a little more outspoken about SecuROM's predecessor Starforce we could've prevented things from spiraling this far down the rabbit hole. Still, it's not too late. We as consumers still have a voice; which means that no matter how bad these root-kit rip-offs get, we can always shout with one resounding voice "HELL NO!" to any game company that decides to use them.
The problem is, we need to get all gamers on board to make anything work, and the only way to do that, is to inform everybody of SecuROM's true purpose... but hey, they're your friends, they're your family, it's up to you to tell them. It's up to all of us to stop SecuROM.
* The Ideas/opinions expressed in this article are the authors ideas/opinions and may not neccessarily reflect the ideas/opinions of RYG/Prism.
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