It's worth noting the Sony Rootkit scandal which resulted in a massive outcry, two class action lawsuits and a state lawsuit not to mention a tightening of various regulations to ban similar actions in the future. It intentionally searched your computer for suspected pirated work and ended up deleting large swaths of bad-matches and became a gigantic vector for attacks - oh, and installed without your permission in the first place. And also violated copyright laws too using code they did not have permission to use but that's a hilarious side note. Microsoft would need to be insanely cautious before trying to pull any stunts.
The XBox One angle actually gives a context that makes sense to this story: Microsoft has an instant way that would plausibly let it enforce piracy deletion and that would be if pirate copies attempt to connect to their servers. It's likely this is consistent with existing policies for the XBox 360 and the XBox Live structure which would've needed to enforce all of those variations just to ensure that nobody was playing with modded content by hacking their XBoxes. That's harder to control on a PC so they're giving themselves broad leeway to ensure that they can manage it and everything can be done in the name of not anti-piracy but rather in maintaining equality in online matches - both PC and XBox version are verified to be the same and behave the same.
I'm generally anti-anti-piracy measures. I think having Product Key checks for installation and online server connections are fine but changes that remove my ability to play offline (read: on a trip with limited Internet access), changes that make me jump through dozens of hoops, changes that make it so that I, as a paying customer, have a harder time playing than non-paying customers, those drive me nuts. I've yet to see a solution that has prevented piracy (during the SecurRom days, the games trying out the latest piracy prevention invariably ended up near the top of the piracy charts) but I've seen tons of solutions that make me strongly suspect that the pirated version is just plain easier to work with - and Ubisoft's f-ing thing is one of the worst. That's part of the brilliance of Steam's solution is that it does try to prevent piracy while making it easier to play games.
This kind of issue is what the TPP and TTIP are for. To make sure when things go wrong YOU pay for it ESPECIALLY when they caused the problems. If you haven't already, look TPP and TTIP up.
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GREAT ... I am now going to hear Ash and Meg chanting in unison Like the twins in "The Shining"
Oh, Big Brother.
The difficulties with just wanting to play a game on PC always pushes me back to consoles.
I tried playing Fallout 3 yesterday, only to spend an hour or more trying to make my steam copy work on windows 7.
Every PC game I buy shouldn't come with a checklist i need to google to get it to just work.
Gabe help me if I ever go to windows 10.
I seem to recall Microsoft eagerly spying on everybody in secret at the behest of the NSA. More spying say you? That keeps with the character of the behemoth. When you're so filthy stinking rich, you can't do wrong. You can steal billions (and trillions overall) from the tax payers as banks or monopolize an industry but you dare not rob a bank and you dare not legally challenge the anti human forces of Walmart and Microsoft through their towers of lawyers. Now, I want a tower defense game built around lawyers and corporate headquarters. "Defend the monopoly, lawyers. The Corpirate can't be stopped!"
First the kinect watches me in my sleep... now my computer checks itself for fake stuff... i dont throw away a pair of sunglasses or a shirt of my back if i find out it's a fake of the original..
microsoft, i have a directive for you: Fuck Off and stop pestering the people who still buy your fucking James Bond machines.
I'm no fan of piracy, but it seems like you guys missed the big goddamn problem with this EULA modification: It allows Microsoft to go in and unilaterally make changes to your personal computer system without specific consent, and without any ability to overrule their decision. That raises some truly staggering privacy and ownership concerns, and effectively means that using Windows 10 requires us to essentially allow Microsoft complete monitoring rights over our systems and contract away our rights to exclusive control over our own computers. You writing this off as somehow "no big deal" is more than a little disturbing.
Couple that with Microsoft's refusal to allow users to make changes for the DRM problem because it might create a backdoor for viruses, and it seems like Microsoft is actively attempting to take control away from the users who, at least in theory, are supposed to actually own the system. Windows 8 was widely blasted for not allowing users to make system changes, and it seems like Microsoft has gone even further down that path. They don't seem to grasp the concept that we're the ones who own our computers, not them.
Whenever I hear a story about pirates I like to picture the swashbuckling sort sitting in front of a monitor in a hardcore gaming session.
As cited, the EULA only mentioned monitoring of games published by Microsoft. That seems reasonable from the developer of the OS. Criticizing an OS that has been putting back-compat at the top of its feature list for 30 years (way above any competitor) and finally breaking the chain is a little harsh. SecuROM has its own list of deficiencies. Wanting to retain back-compat forever at the risk of overall security is absurd. If this is a big issue of people playing older (and very specific) games, then you should provide some ball park numbers to support its breadth.
Should we also be mad that PCs don't come standard with floppy disk drives too?
How many games will y'all lose access to once SteamWorks DRM hits a similar bump in the road? I'm at 80 ...
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