No more 10-day online activations required

Showing respect for the gaming community, Bioware has taken feedback to heart and has decided to scale back their DRM somewhat.

A few days ago it was announced that Bioware would be requiring users to re-activate PC copies of Mass Effect, every 10 days. In that situation, if you lost your internet connection, you'd be stuck with a nice shiny DVD to play frisbee with, instead of being able to play the game.

Here is an excerpt from a lengthy post on the Bioware forums, where community manager Jay Watamaniuk related the following:

"There has been a lot of discussion in the past few days on how the security requirements for Mass Effect for PC will work. BioWare, a division of EA, wants to let fans know that Mass Effect will not require 10- day periodic re-authentication.

BioWare has always listened very closely to its fans and we made this decision to ensure we are delivering the best possible experience to them. To all the fans including our many friends in the armed services and internationally who expressed concerns that they would not be able re-authenticate as often as required, EA and BioWare want you to know that your feedback is important to us.

The solution being implemented for Mass Effect for the PC changes copy protection from being key disc based, which requires authentication every time you play the game by requiring a disc in the drive, to a one time online authentication.

This system has an added benefit of allowing players to seamlessly play the game without needing the DVD in the drive.

Key points---

•This solution allows gamers to authenticate their game on three different computers with the purchase of one disc. EA Customer Service is on hand to supply any additional authorizations that are warranted. This will be done on a case-by-case basis by contacting customer support.

• Games are authorized to the machine when the player installs and launches the software for the first time.

• We’ve all had those times when the discs get lost or scratched and you can’t play a game you’ve bought because you need a working disc in the drive. With the new system players will no longer need the disc to play the game, but can instead simply retain the disc as back up for re-installation.

FAQ---

Q: What is the difference between the old PC disc authentication solution and the new online model?

A: Two things have changed:

• First, authentication of discs has now gone from the physical format to the online format, freeing the need for consumers to have a disc in the drive at all times.

• Second, with online authentication consumers now connect to the Internet the first time the game is launched and are required only to reconnect if they are downloading new game content.

Q: What happens when I’ve reached the maximum # of computers for my game and I need more, say due to theft of computer, computer crashes, etc?

A: EA customer service is on hand to supply any additional authorizations that are warranted. This will be done on a case-by-case basis by contacting customer support.

Q: Did BioWare and EA change their mind on requiring that the game be re-authorized every 10 days?

A: BioWare has always listened very closely to its fans and we made this decision to ensure we are delivering the best possible experience to them. To all the fans including our many friends in the armed services and internationally who expressed concerns that they would not be able re-authenticate as often as required, EA and BioWare want you to know that your feedback is important to us.

Q: If the game isn’t going to require an authentication every 10 days, will it ever require re-authentication?

A: Only if the player chooses to download new game content."

While some of the more rabid anti-DRM folks are still upset with SecuROM's presence in Mass Effect, many more people applauded Bioware for at least removing the 10-day required activation system.

It'll support at least five years of content, anyways

Electronic Arts Mythic wants to come out swinging if it hopes to even dent World of Warcraft's mega-armor with Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. Speaking in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Josh Drescher provides reassurance that the Warhammer Online team will planning for the long haul in order to attract and keep subscribers.

...you need to spec the game out in such a way that you actually have those progressions in mind for later - so you don't wind up trampling all over the earlier experiences every time you expand the game. We have actually five years' worth of numerology out in front of us in terms of all that.

Content will definitely be important, if we're to keep the MMORPG war in perspective. Consider that the runner up online RPG in terms of sheer number of subscribers is in fact the free-to-play Runescape, at least according to the NPD Group's newest Online Subscription Tracker report. Their current MMORPG ranking is as follows:

1. World of Warcraft
2. RuneScape
3. Lord of the Rings Online
4. Final Fantasy XI
5. City of Heroes

With Funcom's Age of Conan also on the horizon, this list stands to be shaken up in the near future. Will these new titles last against the current old guard of MMORPGs?

Seems like its going to be available on -6- gaming systems

Call of Duty 4 was one of the biggest games of the year, so hardly anyone should be surprised that the work for Call of Duty 5 is already underway.

Some scant details were revealed in a conference call with some Activision investor-types yesterday. One noteworthy detail that emerged was the franchise is coming back to the PS2 and the Wii, in addition to the 360,PS3, PC and DS versions.

Call of Duty 5 will also take place in a brand new military theater -- rumors hint that the game might go back to the days of World War II.

Update: Word on the street is that Call of Duty 5 is actually already playable, and is going through quality assurance as I type this.

Admits the Xbox 360 is not "big in Japan."

Hah, get it?  Big in Japan?  Okay, as long as no one understands these Initial D jokes, I'm going to keep making them.

So anyway, Bill Gates went to Japan recently and made a pretty obvious assessment -- the Xbox 360 is not Nippon's favorite toy.  This is why we all pee'd our pants when Gears of War made top 10 in Japan when it was released, surprising much of the gaming community.

Gates sounded rather optimistic when he explained the situation:

"Product share varies from country to country. In the US and the UK, the share [of Xbox 360] is high, but besides Japan, there are other areas we haven't penetrated. From now on, I think the breakthrough's going to be the online service, and you'll be surprised if you look at that."

This makes you wonder what other regions of the world the 360 may it off with.  There aren't too many places where money can be thrown away so easily on leisure products, and the 360's image will need to be altered from country to country.

I personally love the Xbox 360 (I named mine 'NAVI,' and dressed it up with some Assassin's Creed decals), but how many regions around the world can afford to throw money into the console wars?  Should Microsoft concentrate on pushing their product in Japan?  I'd love to see what more they can do with LIVE, if that's the case.

Sort of like virtual spray painting and tagging

The other day, while well surfing the World Wide Web, I happened across a stimulating website called Paint That **** Gold.

The basic premise of the website is this: you write a url in this little box, then it takes a screen capture of the website, and then it gives you some tools to get to work. You can spray the URL image with paint, color it with markers, use stencils and stuff like that -- anything to help you get that pent up hostile artistic aggresion out. The website is fairly fun, in a let's-waste-time-on-the-Internet kind of way.

True to the site's witty name, the only colors you have at your disposal are black and gold. However, I did not let this stop me when I created this visual masterpiece, playing on an age-old, classic graffiti-inspired statement. I call this work of art "Barf":

I don't think it is possible to do anything better than that work of art, but be my guest -- your welcome to try.

The website was made to promote a hip-hoppery group named Atmosphere. From the site, you can listen to their music, check out the tour dates, write them hate mail, and do similar stuff like that.

Major increase in the first quarter

Looks like that format war victory is starting to show real results. Home Media Magazine reports sales of Blu-Ray discs have shot up 351 percent from January to March of this year.

This in turn saw consumer spending on home entertainment increase by one percent since the same time last year. Seems small? Not really, that one percent is worth $5.5 billion. This is also the first real rise in two years.

Video sales rose 2.3 percent while rentals decreased by 1.6.

Bernstein Research predicts one quarter of US households will own a Blu-Ray player inside three years, and it notes the process is going slower than for that of DVD.

Sony's new device turns PS3 into DVR

Sony has released something called PlayTV, a new device that will allow PlayStation 3 users to watch and record digital TV or radio via the console. The device will run you about $155 USD. No worries about compatibility either, it works with all versions.

PlayTV utilises a USB tuner and some included software to play, record or stream free-to-air digital programming (up to two channels at once are available), and doesn't require an external power source. Also, there's no copy protection for what you record. Streams are recorded in their original MPEG-2 format, so there's no quality degradation, and audio streams are recorded in MP3 format.

You'll be able to pause at any time, but buffering will only occur during pausing so as to downplay the strain on the hard drive, unless the user chooses to change this in the settings. Also, while you can't set it up to record your favourite shows automatically as with many other devices, PlayTV does have the advantage of a search by keyword function. It can, however, record specific timeslots.

It's a little bigger than its PC counterparts, about the size as an original Nintendo DS.

For those who happen to have a PSP as well as a PS3, you can enable remote play on your PS3, and watch programming on your portable system via wireless or from anywhere that emits a Wi-Fi signal.

Do you like maps, and making stuff? You could be a map-maker!

A new contest was announced by Sierra recently. The contest is called "The Official Map Making Contest." A stretch of intense research into the "Official Map Making Contest" has lead me to the discovery that the map making contest is for the game World In Conflict.

If you are a fan of the popular W.W 3 game, into making maps, or want to enter the contest just for no reason at all, you can do so over here, at the official Official Map Making Contest's Website website.

NVIDIA has thrown some prizes into the mix: the grand prize is 1000 clams, a fancy new video card (a 8800 GT I believe), and a good chance of seeing your map in a future World In Conflict game, or expansion pack. There are also some prizes for the chumps who win in the following categories: Best use of DX10, Best Assault Map, Best, Domination Map, Best Tug of War Map.

I believe the comma after "best" is a typo -- it's not really its own category. Furthermore, as for the "Best use of DX10" category, for those of you that have been following the contest, it was previously called the "Best Map That Slows Down Your Framerates, Yet Does Not Add Any Better Visual Effects" category (evidence.)

If you want to get into the wacky world of game design, you could do worse than win a contest like this. So hop to it.

(Oh yeah: and the map editor is free. So you don't even need the game to make the map. Though this may make the whole 'design' phase somewhat tricker.)

45nm goodness to come soon...

AMD's 45nm quad core, "Shanghai" is apparently on-track for production to start in the second half of this year. Initially it will be offered as a server product, it will include "coherent" Hypertransport 3.0 for processor to processor communications in multi-socket systems.

Shanghai will be an incremental change to Barecelona, consisting of a geometry shrink to 45nm, some IPC (instructions per clock) and core tweaks - as well as increasing the L3 cache to 6MB.

Potentially more interesting will be next year's "Istambul" six core processor. Slated for Socket F1, the current 1207 pin socket, it is intended to increase performance without having to radically change the AMD architecture by the simple expedient of adding two additional cores, bringing us hex core processors sometime in the second half of 2009.

AMD also apparently plans to introduce a Socket G34 in 2010, and this new socket will apparently bring DDR3 and non-coherent HyperTransport 3.0 with the upcoming RD890 chipset as well as provide an additional HyperTransport link.

In 2010 AMD will also apparently offer six and 12 core Opterons, presumably using a multiple chip per module like Intel, by placing two six core dies into a single package - with a code name of "Magny Cours"

If the past is any indication, these "server" chips will also probably appear as "consumer" chips.

Yet another franchise that just won't die.

id Software has announced that it has started production on the next DOOM game and is currently hiring fresh talent for the task.

“DOOM is part of the id Software DNA and demands the greatest talent and brightest minds in the industry to bring the next installment of our flagship franchise to Earth.  It’s critical for id Software to have the best creative minds in-house to develop games that meet the standards synonymous with our titles," said Todd Hollenshead, id CEO.

DOOM is a practically a trademark, having once been rated “one of the ten most influential games of the decade” by PC Gamer.  But having already suffered a horrible movie adaptation and currently in line to experience a sequel, which will no doubt be just as pathetic, isn't it time to let the franchise rest?  It's had a good run.

Still, if anyone is interested in replying to id Software, here is their little pitch and contact info:

id Software is looking for talented, ambitious and passionate individuals eager to join its accomplished team of developers working on the industry’s most innovative and anticipated games. For a complete listing of available positions, visit www.idsoftware.com. Resumes can be submitted via email to jobs@idsoftware.com. All applicants must be authorized to work in the United States.

 A co-worker, who shall remain anonymous, had this to say about the upcoming DOOM game:

"DOOM 3 was ew....4 will be ew too I bet."

Honestly, doesn't id have anything better to do?  You know, like better games to make.  All they brought to the table in DOOM 3 was a series of cookie cutter monsters ripped out of every sci-fi horror survival etc. video game.

VP of Content Relations says solution is more copy protection

Roy Taylor, NVIDIA's Vice President of Content Relations, says, in a Eurogamer interview, the future of PC gaming will see "more digital authentication, and we're going to see more of an approach that says that PC games aren't products - they're a service."

By this he means additional content, expansions and all that stuff for sale, because "pirates are just killing the developers - and I think it's really unfair, what they're doing."

It's certainly a divisive issue. Taylor is pretty hard in his stance though, expressing his disheartenment at the situation:

"One of the things that I find frustrating is that PC gamers tend to be very passionate, and they love the people that make great PC games. If you ask any PC gamer what they think of John Carmack, they'll say he's a hero. What do they think of Tim Sweeney? He's a hero. Ken Levine is a hero. And yet many of them, sadly, will go and steal from them. I just don't get that, I really don't."

Well, it's easy to blame the overall low PC sales on piracy, but there are examples that contradict this theory (inside and outside the gaming industry, take the music industry for example). A couple of months ago a developer from Sins of a Solar Empire posted an article about this on his game's forums. Empire, by the way, contained no copy protection, was under an independent development house, and topped the PC sales charts a few weeks after being released. Read on:

"Our games sell well for three reasons. First, they're good games which is a pre-requisite. But there's lots of great games that don't sell well.

The other two reasons are:

* Our games work on a very wide variety of hardware configurations.
* Our games target genres with the largest customer bases per cost to produce for.

It's irrelevant how many people will play your game (if you're in the business of selling games that is). It's only relevant how many people are likely to buy your game."

Obviously, there are a lot of PC gamers here. Why do you pirate or purchase PC games?

You'll have to re-activate Mass Effect every 10 days at the latest

On the heels of Crytek cry-babies saying that PC piracy ruined Crysis,  Bioware has announced some krogan and draconian copyright enforcement measures for the upcoming PC version of Mass Effect.

The first line of defense will be SecuROM. Used in many games over the last few years -- notably including last year's Bioshock -- SecuROM endeavors to make copying the DVD very difficult. Additionally however, Mass Effect will require a internet connection to validate its install not just  when the game is installed -- but every 10 days! 

Here's Derek French, Bioware's Technical Producer explaining their DRM choice in Bioware's forum:

"Mass Effect uses SecuROM and requires an online activation for the first time that you play it. Each copy of Mass Effect comes with a CD Key which is used for this activation and for registration here at the BioWare Community. Mass Effect does not require the DVD to be in the drive in order to play, it is only for installation.

After the first activation, SecuROM requires that it re-check with the server within ten days (in case the CD Key has become public/warez'd and gets banned). Just so that the 10 day thing doesn't become abrupt, SecuROM tries its first re-check with 5 days remaining in the 10 day window. If it can't contact the server before the 10 days are up, nothing bad happens and the game still runs. After 10 days a re-check is required before the game can run."

Needless to say, community members of the Bioware forums are going nuts. Some are in favor of the system; many are not so cheery about it.

Personally, I'm very much looking forward to Mass Effect, and I'll buy it if it requires a retinal scan and a 60-character alpha-numeric code to be manually typed in every time I play -- but nonetheless, I do have some troubles with the system. Previously, with Bioshock, that DRM was annoying enough -- as a video card testing guy, I had to re-install that game many times, on different benchmarking systems. Even though the game would only be installed on one system at a time, my legitimate serial code would de-validate itself, and eventually, it would not install at all. But this Mass Effect system is even more extreme. What if, say, you move to a new apartment and no longer have internet access? You should be able to play a single-player game somehow, without requiring access to check some serial on the Internet. At least in my perfect world anyways.

While I can understand Bioware's position, I do not think it'll be effective. There has never been a single single-player game that was not cracked -- (and quickly cracked) -- by the all the dark-side programmers out there, cracking away. Multi-player games are a different story, but single-player games invariably have their anti-piracy methods bypassed.

Piracy is not as big of a problem on the consoles because of how much of a hassle it is. Really: it is not so much about the money. It's the hassle. In North America, chipping your console and getting pirated games is probably a pain. Downloading a problem-free, pirated game on the PC from your home the day it is released is easy, and here is my point: once it becomes far less of a hassle to play a pirated game than a legitimate one, then we have a problem. I point to the success of Steam to backup my claims. Game-buyers appreciate convenience. And people who don't have enough money to buy games, well, you don't have to worry about them pirating all that much, because they aren't the people buying games.

What's a better solution for Bioware? I can think of one in about five seconds -- okay, done: you put a in-game anti-piracy droid in the game. Make it a full in-game character. In order to get Commander Shepard into certain randomized solar systems in the game, you have to meet this droid in-game, where he authorizes you to travel further. In each game you start, say the droid can appear in 40 different randomized locations in the galaxy. For each of the 40 different positions, have a different DRM-key that needs to be checked online. All 40 of the DRM-keys are derived through algorithms from the one serial code that you enter when you first install the game. That way, people would be able to play if they did not have internet access at the moment. And with 40 different keys at randomized positions, it would be far more difficult to crack. And then, on top of this, you release bi-weekly updates to the game, which only tweak the game in very small ways, or squash the small inevitable bugs that pop up, but additionally, you study the anti-cracking methods out there, and shut down whatever methods they use with these updates. For the money that Bioware pays to SecuROM for their DRM, Bioware could instead pay some comp. sci. intern to develop these updates for them.

The thing with game piracy is that the crackers and warez groups do it for props. Releases older than a couple of days mean nothing to them. If games were updated often, the skilled crackers would lose motivation fairly quickly to work on the game.