Crass Defect - SecuriROM

I live BioWare. I'm not afraid to gush over this development company and their output over the past decade or two. They've been responsible for some of the best RPG's ever, including Baldur's Gate and the original Knights of the Old Republic. Mass Effect (or Mass Erect to the vast majority of the generally unimaginative community due to the fervor regarding sex in the game) is yet another gem in the crown of the company, gaining almost universally positive reviews and decent sales to boot. Cruelly the game was only available to the console jockies for the longest time, but finally the title has found it's way onto the PC.

It's at this point that the dream ends and the nightmare begins. BioWare, having been acquired by EA (which is sort of like the Fox Corporation of games, absorbing companies like a colossal amoeba and lowering standards as it goes), were subject to the palaver that is the SecuriROM "scandal". Previous BioWare had used the software for their own purposes, but EA managed to up the ante one better by enforcing borderline Orwellian constrictions on players.

SecuriROM itself is just an authentication program designed to make sure players haven't been naughty little gamers and downloaded games illegally. PC's for some reason are subject to much more stringent methods that consoles have ever had to endure. For many consoles it's a simple act of burning the game onto a DVD, messing about with the hardware a bit and bingo; free games. Yet we never see the quite frankly ridiculous methods of game registration and confirmation of purchase that we see on the PC. For many years it was the dreaded "CD-Key", a long-winded, 24+ character line of algorithmically created nonsense. This worked to a point; you could just use the same CD-Key for any copy so it sort of defeated the point. Then companies realised that there was this big thingy that the younguns were using; the internet. With it they could "lock" games and only allow them to run if the player registers.

In terms of an online unlocking system there's way to make it work. Take Valve's Steam system. Besides a few teething issues due to the volume of people who needed to register once their opus Half-Life 2 came out, the system generally works quite well. Provided you have your login in details you can download the game whenever you please and get it working. There were some who complained about such a system being in place due to the fact that they didn't have an internet connection, but to be quite frank that's like someone complaining about using a remote control to turn on a TV rather than a button on the set itself. I found it genuinely humorous that there were PC users out there who didn't have the internet. You may as well puncture the tyres on your car since a PC without an internet connection is just as useless.

The key issue with Mass Effect's registration system is the limitations it imposes. At first it appeared that users would only be able to install the game three times maximum, meaning uninstalling/reinstalling would cause them to lose an installation. Eventually this was confirmed as being limited to three separate computers. Which is fine in theory, but in practice it's just ridiculous. It has several implications for consumers; for one thing if they happen to suffer a series of system crashes that renders their game installations useless, they'll have to call up technical support at EA to get a further activation. How EA is meant to decide if a person isn't just lying their ass off for a free copy of the game (two subsequent major system crashes is an unlikely occurrence at the worst of times) I'm not sure. I can imagine down the line though there will be a lot of irate consumers unable to play a game they legitimately bought.

Another issue is that the game will be impossible to sell on second-hand in a few years, unless BioWare come through on their tenuous promise to maybe remove the authentication after a while. Think of it like this; imagine you go into a media outlet and pick up a second-hand movie. You take it home and pop it in the player; It doesn't work. Want to know why? Because the previous owner played in three different DVD players before they sold it. Want to play what you paid money for? Tough shit, you can't. This is the exact same situation that second-hand copies of Mass Effect will suffer from down the line. For consumers this is a very bad situation; EA can effectively keep the price of the game at full indefinitely. Since players can't "lend" the game to others or sell it on at a later date once they are finished with it, EA holds total power over the distribution of the game. They're like a gigantic Mr Bumble, screaming at players who dare to return for more gruel (gruel being Mass Effect).

What's worst about this whole ordeal, as mentioned before, is that none of the console market players have to deal with this kind of crap. It seems that publishing companies are purposefully trying to cripple the PC market in some effort to get players to always buy the latest console and the latest games. Right now the average rating for Mass Effect is 2 stars out of 5 on Amazon, by virtue only of it's poor and crippling authentication system. While we still have some heroes left on the good ship PC, many are now banging holes in the hull to sink her and get us onto the HMS Wii or SS XBox360. Excuse the metaphor, I've just been watching boats today.

So until further notice I won't be buying Mass Effect until the corporate machine has been brought to it's knees. Chop chop.