Gears of Wars PC Edition
Owners of Epic’s Gears of War were in for quite a interesting predicament when they tried to play the game on January 28th. Turns out that the DRM that came bundled with the program had a digital certificate that deactivated on that date and thus rendered the game useless.
If we’ve learned anything from the debacle that was Spore’s DRM, which limited you to only 3 activation of a single copy of your game, is that unrealistically restricting customers who spend their hard-earned money on your software is usually a bad idea.
To this day, there are games that I purchased in the late 90′s that I will install and play just for the nostalgia or to relive an absolutely wonderful story. I paid for the game so why would anyone restrict me as to when and how far apart I play the game?
This obviously begs the question as to why Epic would put an arbitrary drop-dead date about 3 years after the release of the game. I know that Gears of War is a trilogy and the second installment is available for the XBOX 360, but this is surely no way to forcing paying customers to grab the second installment.
These kinds of boneheaded issues is why I’m a wholly converted console gamer now.
Cheers