[conspire] No Sony DRM around here; I'm proud of you

[Jeff Frasca]

On Sun, Dec 11, 2005 at 09:31:26PM -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
 
> Also, I'd be incredibly wary of the major _gaming_ firms:  Considering
> the intolerable actions carried out by, for example, Blizard
> Entertainment (makers of World of Warcraft, StarCraft, etc.) to sue out
> of existence volunteers at the former "battle.net" domain who wrote an
> _independent, from-scratch_ daemon compatible with their Warcraft game
> software -- using, naturally, DMCA thuggery.
> 
> Given that level of scruple, and their famous liking for copy prevention
> (er, "protection") software sabotage, what _other_ sorts of system
> trojaning are they likely to hide in their binaries?  At minimum, keep
> reading those EULAs:  If there are odd rights they're asserting, you
> should wonder why.
> 
> Me, I would not let a Blizzard Entertainment product -- or any of its
> untrustworthy competitors, near any of my machines.  (Blizzard products
> are not welcome in my house at all.)

I second these rules.  I'm even of the opinion that Transgaming 
are a bunch parasites, they rip-off wine, put a bunch of cheap 
hacks in to replace the DirectX code and sell it under the 
Alladin license (or worse, I haven't been paying attention to 
them recently).  (I have a legacy game that I periodically fail 
to get working with wine...  I'm also pretty sure of its safety, 
being that it was published before all this bs became common, not 
that wine works.) 

I've made one major exception in the past: Id Software.  They 
seem to have an unsullied reputation.  They consistently port
their games to Linux natively[1], they release code under the GPL at
the end of the cycle, and they aren't on the anti-piracy-arms-race
bandwagon (I've only played the Doom3 demo, however, I know the
copy protection on Q3A was minimal).  

I also happen to play FPS games exclusively, mainly Quake and Q3A, 
so I don't feel I'm missing anything by ignoring all the other big
name games (any other gaming desire I have can be solidly sated
with open source games :).

I just wanted to say that there is at least one studio that
seems to understand the stupidity of the arms race and has been
generally supportive of and savvy with the community.  I'd still 
read the EULA, just in case.  

As far as anyone else goes, I sure hope that Steam isn't the
future of game distribution.  I'll continue to stay away.
(Besides the fact that they won't port...)

Jeff

[1] Funny note about their native ports: they started this with
Quake.  A cracker broke into their servers, stole the Quake code
and posted it on the 'net.  A friendly Linux hacker ported it and
sent a patch back to Id.  Instead of prosecuting, they accepted
the patch and released the port.  They've ported every engine 
since.