Grand Theft Auto IV PC Getting Slammed

And not the good kind of slam! Considering the rather good ports of Grand Theft Auto 3, Vice City and San Andreas, its downright sad that Rockstar’s latest incarnation has been conceived in such a poor way on its originating platform - PC. Read more

Gabe Newell Hates DRM

The godfather of Valve and the genius behind Half Life games and Steam and hates DRM. very much. Gabe Newell expressed his opinions regarding DRM in a reply to a rather dumb user email. Always interesting to read what Mr.Newell has to say about gaming….. Read more

Good Old Games Signs Epic Games

CD Projekt’s GOG.com has snatched up Epic Fail, erm, Epic Games to distribute their Unreal titles. Without any DRM. Nice. Read more

EA Won’t Lock You Out, Afterall

Apparently, the whole news about EA forum trolls getting locked out of their games was just a “misunderstanding”. As EA contacted Shacknews and gave them an explanation:

Posting in EA Forums is enabled by an EA Nucleus account — but access to the forums and access to the games are separate. Players who have been banned from EA Forums are not automatically banned from online access to their other EA games. Players can be banned if they breach the Terms of Service or Code of Conduct in a forum, game or service. Each forum, game and service is managed independently by customer support representatives responsible for that specific forum, game or service.

EA Continues Being a Nazi, Gets Hardcore!

Do you hate EA? Ofcourse you do! But don’t dare say that or anything similar that can and might offend EA on their forums. Otherwise, you’ll get locked out of your EA games. forever. Yes, that’s right, EA’s latest policy means getting banned on their forums will get your account axed, alongside the games.

Your forum account will be directly tied to your Master EA Account, so if we ban you on the forums, you would be banned from the game as well since the login process is the same. And you’d actually be banned from your other EA games as well since its all tied to your account. So if you have SPORE and Red Alert 3 and you get yourself banned on our forums or in-game, well, your SPORE account would be banned to. It’s all one in the same, so I strongly reccommend people play nice and act mature.

Far Cry 2 DRM is Logical

Following the latest DRM trend (that is bundling annoying activation system with every PC game) Ubisoft has revealed that FarCry 2 will in-fact use online activation a la Crysis: Warhead, Mass Effect. Full details below:

Some DRM points that will hopefully answer some of your questions and will clarify some misunderstandings about our DRM and SecuROM:

- You have 5 activations per machine on 3 separate PCs.

- Uninstalling the game “refunds” an activation. This process is called “revoke”, so as long as you complete proper uninstall you will be able to install the game an unlimited number of times on 3 systems.

- You can upgrade your computer as many time as you want (using our revoke system)

- Ubisoft is committed to the support of our games, and additional activations can be provided.

- Ubisoft is committed to the long term support of our games: you’ll always be able to play Far Cry 2.

The funny thing is, this’ll only annoy customers. Far Cry 2, just like pretty much any other PC title, will get a 0-day release and the activations will get cracked within few days of it’s release. For what it’s worth, Far Cry 2’s DRM is much more logical than those of EA games.

Spore Sells 1 Million Copies, 25 Million Creatures Uploaded

Despite the annoying copy protection and it’s assorted DRM fiasco, Will Wright’s Spore has managed to sell a million copies and so far, over 25 million creatures have been uploaded to SporePedia. Gee, I wonder what this tells about PC Gaming…. Perhaps after hearing this, developers would stop being such thick-headed nazis and stop implemanting intrusive/annoying DRM that actually hurt the game sales instead of stopping piracy. And maybe, just maybe, developers would listen to us orphaned PC Gamers?

Crysis: Warhead Will Contain Annoying DRM

It seems EA didn’t learn from Spore Piracy fiasco, the company’s now becoming almost trademark-esque Online Activation will come embedded in Crysis: Warhead, too. Crysis’s game designer shed some light on the DRM situation, confirming the game will indeed limit Installs:

Just to get that clarified, you can install warhead as often as you want on your PC as long as you do not make major changes to your hardware or re-install Windows.

So you can activate the game on X different PC’s, whereas the number has not yet been clarified in the end, but you can install the game as often as you want on each of the PC’s.

- Alex

With Crysis: Warhead getting Steamed, everyone is anxious to know if the Steam version too, will limit activations, as was the case with Steam version of BioShock.

Valve’s Steam Client Gets Updated

Another update for Valve’s Steam client. Restart Steam to apply the fresh update. The most major addition being the “new” look of Steam store.

Steam Client

• Updated the Steam client to use our new store website
• Updated the fallback URL for content-server banner ads
• Fixed empty login dialog at startup
• Fixed offline mode sometimes not working

Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 will pack Annoying DRM

Details of Red Alert 3’s DRM have surfaced and the initial picture doesn’t look pretty. According to the Executive Producer Chris Corry, the strategy title will require one-time online activation similar to Spore/Mass Effect and the installation is limited to 5 computers. Read more

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