Publishers encouraging piracy
by poedgirl on 26/06/09 at 8:59 pm
Today, I bought the game Saints Row 2 on PC. I had played it before on PC, yes, a pirated copy, and thought it was good enough to buy. However, as soon as I got it home, my mind was completely changed.
The problem all stems from the fact that this specific game uses the Steam distribution method to verify if it is a legal copy. When I put the DVD in my drive, it asked me to enter my CD Key, which I did. Once I pressed the Next button, the program just sat there saying it was activating the key. A few minutes later it said it couldn’t communicate with the server. I know for a fact there is nothing wrong with my network, not to mention all other parts of Steam work perfectly fine on this same network.
I tried again quite a few times. I sent a message to Steam support, which has been ignored. I sent a message to THQ, they told me to just go to Steam support. I tried to post a message on the Steam forums, but there seems to be some secret that I have yet to figure out to be able to post on that damn forum. I signed up as normal on a forum, went to post and was told Access Denied, no idea why. It was at this point that I responded to THQ saying that if the situation wasn’t resolved before tomorrow morning, I was going back to EB Games where I bought it from and returning it. I said they can thank Steam for a lost sale.
The funny thing about this is that when I had the pirated copy, I just installed it and was ready to play, no activation, no bullshit. Seriously, these kinds of things encourage piracy more than prevent it.
A simple message to all game publishers out there, STOP USING DRM. The only thing it does is encourage piracy.
