Tron: Evolution – SecuROM DRM expiration makes game unplayable 9 years later | Hacker News Reader

Tron: Evolution – SecuROM DRM expiration makes game unplayable 9 years later

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I'm one of twelve speedrunners of this game [1] and this is a killing blow to our community. Those of us lucky enough to have the game installed are the only ones who can continue speedrunning this game, and we can never uninstall it or switch computers. No new speedrunners can enter the scene. It was enough work getting it to run over the years without Games for Windows Live, or at a modern resolution, or at a modern framerate, with horrible keyboard controls, and without crashing at boot due to driver issues.

Now, new players can't even get their foot in the door enough to see that there are fixes. Even with a crack, this is the end of speedrunning for us.

[1]: https://www.speedrun.com/tronevolution

Why can't you speedrun with the crack? If everyone agrees on a common executable that works it can be verified via SHA256 and still be used for speedruns.

It's hard to get people in the community if you have to crack the game to even do a run.

Just FYI, cracking the game now that the DRM is expired is 100% Fair Use in the USA under the DMCA 1201 exemptions. Thanks EFF!

It's also fair use in at least Sweden if not whole Europe. If you own software, you are allowed to fix it so you can use it.

Do you have any link? I'd like to read more.

https://www.google.com/search?q=DMCA+1201

That doesn't seem like a high bar honestly. There's many games that much harder to get started with, you might need to buy an old console or buy a specific version of a game. Downloading and installing a cracked game should be easy.

Someone that is dedicated enough to potentially start speedrunning some 10 year old game, shouldn't really be stopped by having to install some extra "patch".

just in guide mention it as a community patch :)

If you're going to do that, at least send it to a security company to test for malware... or you could end up in deep trouble if unlucky?

I have to ask, how does it feel investing so much time into something that just evaporated overnight?

Do you think your skills can translate to other games?

FWIW, I'm a big fan of the speedrunning community: Karl Jobst, Calebhart, kosmic, etc. I can't imagine what it would be like if, say, FF7 stopped working due to DRM and Caleb had to switch games. He'd be alright, but most of his audience comes to see FF7.

EDIT: It sounds like people have patched the game to work without SecuROM. Do you think that might coax new players into the scene? One positive way to look at this is that it's free advertising for this particular game.

Isn't there a crack?

What about PSP, PS3, & 360?

In 2017, Disney updated TRON 2.0 (released 2003) for Windows 10 compatibility:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/07/01/cor-tron-2-0-jus...

https://www.gog.com/game/tron_20

To avoid any confusion, these are 2 separate games:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_2.0 vs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron:_Evolution

It demonstrates that Disney could update it, even though it's an old release.

I'm not too familiar with the relationship between developers and publishers, so maybe this doesn't matter, but Disney is the publisher. Tron 2.0 was made by Monolith which is still around today. Tron Evolution was made by Propaganda Games which shut down in 2011.

That certainly can affect how easy it would be for them to update it, but Disney should have the source code, and removing DRM should trivial if they have the source.

I think contrasting is what they were doing, not confusing.

I’m glad for the clarification on them being two separate games. I almost included but removed the text “the previous Tron game”. Should have kept it.

Wow, I remember trying to replay that game at some point, and not being able to launch it. I'm glad they patched it.

It was one of my favorite games from the early 2000s.

This game is worth playing for any programmers out there. There's a lot of in-humor that only programmers pick up on.

Fortunately, enterprising reverse engineers have already released a patch that allows the game to work.

In the case of current DMCA exemptions, it’s even arguably legal to distribute.

> Video games in the form of computer programs embodied in physical or downloaded formats that have been lawfully acquired as complete games, when the copyright owner or its authorized representative has ceased to provide access to an external computer server necessary to facilitate an authentication process to enable local gameplay,

Who cares about the dmca? Just ignore it and live consequence free

> Who cares about the dmca? Just ignore it and live consequence free

The people distributing the software are at greater risk than those downloading it.

The risk is basically nothing. You get a notification saying "don't do that again". In my younger days I helped distribution with various scene groups to the tune of terabytes of files. I think I got a few notices that ended in the garbage. At the time I was getting cracked copies from employees of ILM and pixar

A bunch of people have gone to prison, or been put on probation/house arrest and had to pay large fines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fastlink

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Buccaneer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Site_Down

The odds are lower than winning the lottery.

Yet people win the lottery every day.

The EFF exists for a reason. Hopefully not a reason that you'll ever personally need, but if that day comes and the hammer comes down on you, you'll be thankful people prepared for that situation.

1 in a 180 million. What is your point?

The eff doesn't exist to defend pirates so that is irrelevant.

Pirating in every shape in form has to be one of of the lowest crimes to get caught for. And most cracks come from overseas so good luck there.

> The eff doesn't exist to defend pirates so that is irrelevant.

That depends on your definition of piracy. The EFF strongly fights against the DMCA.

> Pirating in every shape in form has to be one of of the lowest crimes to get caught for.

Low in terms of what? Punishment? A fair number of people have received harsh punishments, as already mentioned. You mention you were caught distributing a lot of pirated material, so the probability of getting caught seems high. The fraction of people that received a non-trivial punishment of those caught distributing a lot of pirated material is higher than 1/180 million.

No I did not mention I was caught in any significant way. I never had a worry in the world about getting caught. Outside of receiving a no consequence piece of paper in the mail that means nothing.

Jeffry Reichert was sentenced to 1 year in prison for soldering a modchip onto a Wii.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=138975038570173...

So he had a for profit business selling mod chips. That's totally different than downloading some files

It matters for the people that create and distribute the cracks. Its much easier to simply dump the crack file/source on your website and freely distribute it if its legal to do so.

That doesn't let the original companies off the hook unless they release legal claims to the game and let people actually distribute that patch without fear of current or future legal repercussions - Disney in particular is never going to do that.

Doesn't prevent it for going into the DRM Graveyard ( https://www.reddit.com/r/drmgraveyard/ ).

It would be reasonable for Steam to allow refunds for games that break like this, and bill the publisher for it.

IANAL, but I believe that in Australia, you would be entitled to a refund. There is no fixed time limit on refunds, and it would be reasonable to suggest that a game like this should just keep working. You'd probably have to argue your case still, as the company isn't likely to just refund without a fight.

(As an aside, if you get a dishwasher and use it for 10 years, the "general wear and tear" would deny your refund, as it would be reasonable to suggest that ongoing usage would wear down the machine, especially, for instance, if you didn't do the regular maintenance suggested. )

I don't know about Australia specifically but usually when consumer legislation doesn't mention time frame there's still a limitation on how long after the contract of sale that you can bring a case against the seller, and this serves as the practical time frame as there's no way to enforce a refund without going to court.

IANAL but I do run a business that's subject to Australian consumer law. The limitations are not based on the date of the contract of sale, but the date on which the consumer became aware (or reasonably could have been aware) the product was defective, and/or an action was taken by some party to render the product defective.

The consumer legislation does specify a six-year time limit from then on, but that clock only just started ticking.

However, a refund is not obligatory. Repair i.e. a patch is an acceptable remedy under ACL.

You may be right but my reading of this would breach the ACL for “Undisturbed Possession of Goods”. That is - unless you told the customer the game had a limited life you can’t stop them using it. Doing so triggers a “remedy” - which - for a “major fault” is a refund.

https://consumerlaw.gov.au/sites/consumer/files/2016/05/0553... (Page 17)

This can’t be hidden in a EULA. It has to be prominent or the term will be ruled invalid under the “Unfair Contract Term” provisions of the ACL.

For those not familiar, ACL trumps all consumer contracts with standard terms. There are penalties for misrepresenting ACL (eg “No refunds” signs are banned, so are limits to consequential damages. Warranties are for a “reasonable” time, etc. )

Whatever you or I might think of DRM, it's not a "major failure" to offer products with it. Other provisions apply, but not that one.

It is a major failure if the DRM causes the game to be unplayable after a few years.

No. The legislation's definition of "major failure" includes several clear statements that if a remedy can be/is made by the supplier, the failure is not a major failure.

Shouldn't that cover the duration of copyright, at the very least?

That applies to warranties, production defects or (as the GP says) things breaking due to normal use. It doesn't apply to things breaking because the publisher put a kill switch in the device.

It would be a refund in Australia as it is a faulty product. They may try stiff you on returning a physical disk (how do you prove it was faulty on sale?) but a good store will offer store credit at the very least because video games do not make money. The consoles do.

The only times a refund can be denied in Australia when a problem occurs is if it was caused by you or if you changed your mind on a purchase. Otherwise the purchaser can dictate how they are rectified (swap, credit or refund).

Edit: This is assuming you purchase it now. If you purchased it 9 years ago - it would be tough luck. The pivot is the condition at point of sale.

I always thought it was the other way around - that games make the money. Aren't consoles even usually sold at a loss?

Typically yes. I think Nintendo sometimes turns a profit on consoles due to optimising on other factors than cutting edge power. Consoles can also become profitable over their lifetime as technology matures.

> video games do not make money. The consoles do.

Where did this idea come from?

Standard Oil probably. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_and_blades_model

Except that consoles do work on this model, and they are the razor, not the blades. When did you ever hear of someone getting a new console for the game they already have?

Oh, I misread where the "not" was.

What? Australian consumer law has a limitation on 2 years or reasonable lifetime. Games don’t last forever and get obsoleted by newer operating systems.

Sure I can run wine/VMware but I can also keep my 100 year old washing machine running with regular repairs which isn’t fixing the issue of deprecation or end of life.

> Games don’t last forever and get obsoleted by newer operating systems.

That doesn't excuse it now failing to run on Windows 7.

If the bug was time based but not related to anti piracy would this even make the news?

What about disc rot? Or n64 not working because nobody uses RCA anymore?

There's a pretty vast difference between an N64 being less widely useful because it's hard to source an RCA display (hint: you can buy an RCA to HDMI adaptor cheaply) and N64s including a remote "kill switch" that one day gets flipped, destroying all N64s immediately.

Disney has sabotaged people's property by using (allowing a third party to use) a kill switch, and that shouldn't be acceptable.

If a washing machine called home and checked that it's okay to run each time it was connected to power anew, and one day all of a particular model of washing machine was remotely told to stop working, I'm sure that would make the news.

The N64 isn't somehow broken because "nobody uses RCA anymore". That's like saying your outfit is broken because nobody wears bell-bottom jeans anymore. If you want to play N64, RCA monitors are still readily available, as are converters. Nothing stops you from using them other than plain disinterest.

As for disc rot, I truly believe that if you sell discs with copy protection so that the consumers can't reasonably back them up, they should be eligible for replacements when the discs eventually break after normal use.

This, on the other hand, is first of all not a bug; it's the copy protection working as designed. Whoever decided to use a subscription based copy protection system must have known that they'd either have to pay for it for a very long time or eventually fuck legitimate buyers over. It's deliberate and calculated. That it's related to anti-piracy doesn't factor into it. It's not pirates who are suffering from this, which is what critics have been saying about SecuROM for the last decade.

Now, can you argue for the idea that using SecuROM is comparable to adopting an industry standard for video transmission that has proven to be so popular that it's still widely in use now, some 50 years after its invention, without the foresight to instead adopt standards that didn't yet exist?

Now, can you argue for the idea that using SecuROM is comparable to adopting an industry standard for video transmission

No, you can't, because the presence of SecuROM is completely orthogonal to the game features that customers are willing to pay for. This is a feature the publisher insisted on, not something the customer asked for.

Moreover, mitigations for the scenario you suggest do exist: you can buy convertors, even high-quality upscalers to convert 70s-era video signals to HDMI signals a modern TV can accept. "Convertors" that mitigate the damage of SecuROM are illegal, again because the publishers insisted on that.

> No, you can't, because the presence of SecuROM is completely orthogonal to the game features that customers are willing to pay for.

Yes, you can argue for it. That doesn't necessarily mean that the conclusion is right or even that the reasoning is sound. The point of arguing is to find out that it is, if it is. In this case, I was asking the poster I responded to to present his case because I have presented a case for the opposite conclusion, that these are not comparable situations.

> Moreover, mitigations for the scenario you suggest do exist

I think you may be getting my argument mixed up with some other argument, because I did not suggest that scenario, and I clearly argue for why I believe that it's an invalid comparison on the basis that a mitigation isn't even necessary in most cases since most TVs have a composite input and you can still buy new TVs that have composite inputs.

If it was just a time-based bug you could alter the clock or use software to fake it.

Look, already exists: https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/run_as_date.html

Disc rot won't affect anyone that made a backup, and anyone that didn't could find an iso I'm sure. An N64 still works the way it always did, just like if you installed this game on windows 7.

> Australian consumer law has a limitation on 2 years or reasonable lifetime.

It's a bit more nuanced than that.

The limitation comes from when the consumer could reasonably have become aware of the fault, not from when the purchase was made.

So in the case of SecuROM, that clock has only just started ticking.

Sure but as long as it runs on the latest version of Windows then does it matter? And based on other posters comments they updated it in 2017 to support windows 10.

>because video games do not make money

Fortnite made $300 million per month.

Steam doesn't even care if the developer drops all support, they are more than willing to charge for it and not tell you that there is no support, continued development, and such.

It is one reason I am loathe to buy anything on that platform. they should be required to notify you when you browse a game that it has no support.

They do offer refunds for under 2 hours gameplay. This doesn't help when you have been playing for years and then it stops working but it does prevent you from buying a broken game today.

Only up to a week after the purchase. Make sure to TEST every game you buy on a sale; otherwise your old, never-played but doesn't-work games are dead without refund.

Apparently I still own Max Payne 3 because they lied in the game description that it doesn't require you to be online for single player.

Three months after purchase when I got around to starting it, it was too late for a refund...

Only after having lost in an Australian court relatively recently?

Steam refunds were introduced in June 2015: https://www.ign.com/articles/2015/06/02/steam-introduces-ref...

My point : 4 years ago, while Steam was released 16 years ago.

It's the kind of contempt for customers that is common for software vendors but is enough to prevent me from buying hardware from them. Valve's just EOLed the Steam Controllers and their next game won't support SteamOS on Steam Machines, so why should I now feel comfortable dropping $999 on a VR headset to play it?

At least I could crack Tron Evolution

But isn't like taking your Picasso and refunding you back five shillings ten pence your ancestor gave for it? For many players the game is not than just the fifty bucks they payed, it's countless hours spent with it. It's far beyond the purchase price.

The countless hours they've spent on it is the value the consumer has extracted from the game, not some investment to be recouped.

Assuming that the publisher still exists.

A nice way to solve this would be for steam to require all games provide a drm free version to valve and in the event where the DRM breaks and the publisher is gone steam will replace everyones copy with the drm free version. Although these days I don't think valve is really in the position to demand such a thing.

"A nice way to solve this would be for the governments to require all software provide their source code to them in the event where the source code is lost before the copyright expires." (And also be legally liable to replace all copy-protected goods for no fee other than the cost of manufacturing a copy for the duration of copyright.)

There, fixed that for you. ;)

You don't own the things you buy on steam, it's more like renting. When the game stops working, you loose the right to play it.

That's what valve says. Luckily not everything in their nonsense license agreement is enforcable as a judge recently ruled: https://www.polygon.com/2019/9/19/20874384/french-court-stea...

Ok, so it seems to be that :

2012 EU ruling : "software is a good that can be resold"

2014 German ruling : "games are not just software, but also "art"(?), they can NOT be resold" https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/02/10/german-court-rul...

2019 French court ruling : "Steam accounts are just software(?), they can be resold" https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108209-ufc-que-choisir-vs-va...

But then a German court ruled otherwise, so the jurisprudence doesn't seem to be clear yet?

I cannot find a source for that. Care to share?

Not sure about Germany, but here's a thread about the French court decision: https://www.neogaf.com/threads/steam-forced-to-authorize-the...

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/02/10/german-court-rul...

my solution is to buy games on gog when i can and save a cracked copy of any game I end up buying on steam. best of both worlds really. When it works, the minor sacrifice of my privacy isn't too high a price for the deals and convenience Steam offers, but when it fails (and I've been locked out of my steam purchases once already) it's nice to know I can still play the games I paid for.

I am left split between choosing between gog which support drm free games but seemingly don't give a shit about linux and valve which allow drm but literally have multiple people dedicated to making linux gaming better. Recently a valve developer submitted a patch to linux which fixed a regression in a logitech gaming device driver. None of that has anything to do with valve and yet they pay people to do it anyway.

For now at least I will be sticking with valve and if for some reason my access ever gets cut off I will pirate a copy of every game I owned.

> gog which support drm free games but seemingly don't give a shit about linux

I'm curious why you say that. I only run Linux games these days, and most come from GoG. Most tend to have quite good support, and I've had bugs I reported get patched.

Actually there are a lot of games on GoG that don't include the versions for the lesser platforms even when they're available on steam.

They're also behind on patches, and sometimes it matters.

I still have GoG as my preferred store, because Steam needs a little competition to stay honest. (No, Epic is not competition.)

That's less GoG and more the company publishing with them, if I understand the process correctly.

Game companies aren't great at making sure they've added artifacts for all platforms, across all the publishing platforms. Even on Steam different platforms often lag behind each other, and they make the process dead simple.

They still don't have a linux client years after the windows one came out. Also compared to valve they do basically nothing other than simply allow publishers to add a linux version.

Valve essentially created linux gaming as a real and viable thing.

"How to run [some] Steam games offline forever" : https://www.gog.com/forum/general/how_to_run_steam_games_off...

Good info! According to that thread they've fixed the issue I ran into years ago when I was working offline for months before steam refused to run at all without authenticating. I'm not sure I buy that it was a bug exactly, but even if it was it just goes to show you never know what will go wrong without a cracked backup.

Yeah, getting into a place without Internet, launching Steam in offline mode... and Steam insisting on phoning home in order to switch to Offline mode was infuriating !

You would of thought, there again - what happens when Steam raises its requirements and that stops you playing the game(s).

Indeed, have they given any refunds for (the few) Windows XP-only games when Steam dropped support for that OS ?

Not as far as I'm aware, or Vista(1) users and indeed, Windows 7 stalwarts will have an awakening moment in the next year or so.

Their EULA kinda covers them fully into not offering refunds in such circumstances as well.

Which does raise the issue, if the OS the game was written for initially loses support and you don't see Microsoft offering refunds, why should games when you have had years of fun. Sure it's a sour pill and back in board game days - nobody expected to purchase Monopoly and suddenly due changes later like an emissions zone introduction, find that they was unable to play that game anymore as their playing pieces all exceeded the emissions limits! Mad analogy I know, but does help curry perspective upon this.

However, it gets down to - did the game being sold mention any of this or forewarned, or indeed - have an expiry date! Nope. Heck, does an OS like XP come with an expiry date or any form of notice that it would ceased to work as sold? I'd guess not.

So much in the land of software and consumer rights or at the very least some level of guarantee is needed or at the very least, existing protection is updated or inforced to shake up this limbo state of consumer miss selling. Which it is when you get to the crux of it.

Still, another way to view it mad-analogy wise is that software is like fuel and if your car stops being unable to get spare parts or is unable to drive down roads it used to be able to due to some new regulation that came in. Well the fuel still works in newer cars that conform and is it the fuel companies fault if you unable to use that fuel in your car any more?

So many ways to look at this, but it certainly makes linux gaming more appealing for longevity and equally makes open source games more appealing as it the edge case, you have the power to fix the issue yourself if you encounter one.

Thinking about it, the only OS that comes to mind that is sold with a definitive support end date from date of purchase would be ChromeOS upon chromebooks.

[EDIT ADD] (1) https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/1736595227854...

Note that Steam only dropped XP support 4 years after Microsoft did.

Software, even sprinkled with art, is not a usable fuel or a perishable good.

As I said elsewhere, I have no issues with software companies deciding to drop support, but they should also then forfeit their copyright (earlier than normal) and release the source code.

For a store/launcher like Steam, they should remove the DRM. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, Gabe specifically promised to do that when Steam was first introduced, to assuade the fears over DRM !

EDIT : I stopped reading what passes for "communication" on that link on the first page. Note also that I'm raising a somewhat different issue : Steam dropping support for an OS, which OS is the only one that some of the Steam-sold games are working on. (This is certainly going to concern many more games for Win7 than it did for Vista, XP, 2k(?)...)

Safe to agree, that this is a story that will play out for a while until a solid consumer position is put in place.

Wouldn't you expect the default action of SecuROM to ENABLE all installations if the contract goes bad?

I would urge all companies to stop using them if this is their stance.

No, I think that this makes sense. Failing open would make the DRM useless if you could trick the client into thinking the contract was expired.

OTOH, SecuROM is also “securing” their software from modifications, so if it were to fail open, it would still at least be working to keep binary integrity and obfuscation working; obviously SecuROM does not want to offer this for free.

In my mind the correct action would be for the developers to release a patch that removes SecuROM. Similar was often done for other games that had CD based authentication; it was often removed years after original release, which makes sense to do after the pirates have long compromised the security. I think it makes just as much sense for online authentication for a game this old.

Aside: I am trying to avoid injecting my personal opinions about DRM here since they aren’t relevant, but just to be clear I am not trying to express sympathy or support for either party. This is amazingly dumb in my opinion.

> Failing open would make the DRM useless if you could trick the client into thinking the contract was expired.

That's the DRM's problem to solve. Paying customers shouldn't have their stuff stolen because someone else might be a non-paying customer.

Really, I think it falls on the company that chose to license DRM in the first place. Unfortunately, there’s nothing compelling vendors legally speaking that I’m aware of, but there damn well should be. I also think unavailability due to DRM downtime or issues should have ramifications, as well.

I think personal opinions are quite relevant here, legally speaking the law is clear and we've all got a problem with that - concurrently, legally speaking any game you've got through steam is a leased copy so if steam revoked your ability to play it tonight you wouldn't have a clear legal way to challenge them (unless the game is a subscription and they continue to collect that fee)

Regardless of the EULA, there are legal arguments [1] to be made that Steam's games are goods, not services, and buyers whose games are remotely disabled due to auth servers being shut off should be entitled to either a refund, a reasonable patch to keep the game working locally or have a clear expiration date stamped on the storefront since day one.

This recent French court's ruling [2] indirectly supports this interpretation.

[1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw

[2]: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/09/19/steam-should-let...

Ok, so it seems to be that :

2012 EU ruling : "software is a good that can be resold"

2014 German ruling : "games are not just software, but also "art"(?), they can NOT be resold" https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/02/10/german-court-rul...

2019 French court ruling : "Steam accounts are just software(?), they can be resold" https://www.nextinpact.com/news/108209-ufc-que-choisir-vs-va...

Well, from SecuROM’s perspective I think everything makes sense. Personally I think the responsibility should fall on the developers to ensure that people who paid for something can access it.

Consumer protection really hasn’t caught up here. Desperately need it to, imo.

> Failing open would make the DRM useless if you could trick the client into thinking the contract was expired.

Depends on the kind of failure.

You could have failure-to-reach-SecuROM fail closed, but you could have publisher-no-longer-has-a-license-with-SecuROM fail open (serverside at SecuROM).

The latter is probably better from SecuROM's standpoint: it makes end-users less likely to avoid SecuROM protected content.

On the other hand, it doesn't make end-users scream at their customers that have failed to renew.

Meanwhile you can just torrent the cracked version without inSecureROM with much less effort and no time limit. Piracy: it's cheaper and easier. If a company puts up too many roadblocks. Fuck them.

There are zero legal consequences for doing so

... and then these games were put on Steam, and Steam's (optional!) DRMs were added to them...

For a publisher, DRM really helps with securing the game for the first few months when it gets most sales, the protection will be broken anyway. So protection doesn't matter that much later.

For SecuROM blocking after expiration is a better strategy, because blocking games that were purchased will encourage publisher to renew the subscription.

I think for the Disney it would be best to simply release patch that removes the copy protection, that is assuming they still have the source code.

Seems like a case could be made for treating DRM like cell phone carrier locking. Legislation could be passed to permit DRM only for the first 12-24 months of a games life post release and require developers to provide patches that remove said protections thereafter.

We live in a world where patents can be extended almost endlessly. Intellectual property is also treated in the same way, and I think unless there's a big cultural shift in company incentives this will remain for a long time to come.

> We live in a world where patents can be extended almost endlessly.

Why do you say that? Twenty years from filing and everything in your patent is now available for anyone to use.

Various parts of our IP system are pretty broken, but "patents last forever" isn't a thing.

Taking it a bit too literally. 10+ years is a lifetime in the tech and gaming industry.

I'm not so sure: they wrote "extended" which makes me think they're thinking about copyright or something?

> For SecuROM blocking after expiration is a better strategy, because blocking games that were purchased will encourage publisher to renew the subscription.

Yes and no. Stories like this make me even more nervous to acquire SecuROM-protected content.

> "Wouldn't you expect the default action of SecuROM to ENABLE all installations if the contract goes bad?"

No, because it would probably take all of 5 minutes for pirates to figure out a way to leverage that to bypass the protection.

If the server is contactable, and the server goes from returning a signed KEY_IS_VALID response to a signed KEY_IS_ALWAYS_VALID_BECAUSE_DISNEY, it has the same level of security as the existing solution. It does give SecuROM less subscription revenue security, though.

> Wouldn't you expect the default action of SecuROM to ENABLE all installations if the contract goes bad?

Wouldn't this mean that you could theoretically bypass the DRM simply by temporarily turning off internet on your laptop?

No, because you have the client treat the inability to reach SecuROM's servers as failure, but on the server treat non-renewed license as success.

Remember how the same company basically made a (copyright-violating!) rootkit installed on 22M CDs, and now makes Denuvo, a DRM that Steam doesn't list as DRM ?

In that case you'd be able to dodge the DRM just by yanking your ethernet cord.

A lot of people saying this, but the games could still have to connect to SecuROM who would then approve them all. Of course, it won't protect customers against SecuROM itself shutting down, but that's not the problem here.

If we're talking about a scenario where the server must be online and working, then why have an expiry mechanism at all?

I can't think of a reason other than encouraging customers to continue to pay.

In a 'fail closed' scenario like this one, customers not only lose the DRM protection, but SecuROM gets a customer's end users to harass the customer, which punishes the customer for not paying.

In a 'fail open' scenario, the customer can choose to end their relationship with SecuROM with basically no side effects; they lose the DRM protection, but end users don't notice and can still play the game.

Another point is that in both scenarios, SecuROM has to spend cycles handling auth requests for people playing the game while not receiving any money to do so. From their perspective it's better to make customers remove SecuROM vs. 'fail open' and authorize games 'for free'.

My hunch is that they turned down the endpoints that the clients are trying to connect to.

Another example of the pirated version being superior to the retail version.

I was given Farcry 4 a few years ago. I tried to install it last week and the key was used already. The game was in plastic wrapper still, I just opened it. Support said there was nothing they could do. Luckily I found the receipt and got the money back from MediaMarkt instead. Never buying boxed games again.

Had a similar experience with my steam copy of red alert 3 a couple of years back (before the GameSpy shutdown, so the servers were still up). Logged in after not having played for years, the online system kept reporting invalid CD Key, EA told me Steam had to issue a new key, Steam insisted that it was EA's fault, end result was I couldn't play my game online

When support staff is unhelpful, it's always a good idea to request to be forwarded to a higher tier of support staff. I was once stuck in a dead-end 10+ email thread with the basic support, when the upper tier support fixed the issue immediately.

You didn't miss much - the game's rubbish.

I had a legitimate copy of spore back in the day but I never got to play it since I didn't have an internet connection and the DRM required it :/

It wasn't worth the hype.

It was cute and all, but you played through a 'flow' like cell phase, a simple tribal phase, a slightly more complex civilisation phase and then went space and ... meh.

I wanted to love it, and I did play it through a few times, but from the hype you'd have thought it was the game of a generation where ultimately it was unsatisfying and played out more or less the same each time.

Agreed. It took me a while before I got a copy and I was ultimately pretty disappointed. I think some of the ideas still have a lot of potential though. I hope to see other games explore things at that scale in the future. Some elements of this seem to be present in No Man's Sky which I haven't played, but that's the only thing that I can think of that relates.

Buy the product, get the crack. Since you paid, you can't be accused of a pirate, and you won't suffer from DRM.

This is actually quite a popular thing to do among users of certain niche software in the manufacturing and logistics industries, where DRM failure means far more than not being able to play a game.

For what it is worth, this is absolutely not true and (regardless of what legal prescient may or may not imply) companies still sue people for such activities. While it has been shown several times that circumventing DRM does not explicitly run afowl with the DMCA, that does not mean you are not in the clear with the EULA of the software which leaves open an avenue for you to be sued in civil court for EULA violations.

If you go to court you may be able to defend yourself (depending on the circumstances of your DRM circumvention activities, the wording of the EULA, and the quality of the lawyers on each side), but it will still cost you a huge amount of time and money--a fact that is commonly exploited by litigative companies to punish people accused of such practices.

Legitimate users of media software can also be affected by DRM. Many years ago I paid for a professional encoder for a very popular surround sound format, but the DRM servers are dead and the original company has been sold several times over.

“DRM: Defective by Design (TM)“

I forgot where i heard that quote but it seems apropo.

Probably from the Free Software Foundation:

https://www.defectivebydesign.org/

What were the original terms? If they didn't allow for this, sue in small claims court. Disney would really hate to have to show up and lose.

It's the retailer you'd have to sue, as they sold you the dodgy product. Even if you won, they're unlikely to take Disney to court.

At least in California, you can go after the manufacturer or the retailer:

Unless disclaimed in the manner prescribed by this chapter, every sale of consumer goods that are sold at retail in this state shall be accompanied by the manufacturer’s and the retail seller’s implied warranty that the goods are merchantable. The retail seller shall have a right of indemnity against the manufacturer in the amount of any liability under this section.

No implied warranty of merchantability and, where applicable, no implied warranty of fitness shall be waived, except in the case of a sale of consumer goods on an “as is” or “with all faults” basis where the provisions of this chapter affecting “as is” or “with all faults” sales are strictly complied with.

Any waiver by the buyer of consumer goods of the provisions of this chapter, except as expressly provided in this chapter, shall be deemed contrary to public policy and shall be unenforceable and void.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.x....

In my jurisdiction the manufacturer is responsible. The seller's liability is only 30 days.

Wonder if there is enough for class action lawsuit for this.

But a big fan of lawsuit normally, I would definitively support it if I am on the Jury.

Came to suggest the same... hopefully the fines are significant enough to deter this kind of behavior in the future or to get them to provide an "unlock" after DRM servers shut down.

It's terrible. There are out there such good games completely screwed by DRMs. I long miss the old days were a CD was enough to play a game and do whatever you wanted to do with it (give it to a friend, resell it, reinstall the game in another machine).

What is super frustrating is that the industry has talked the Swedish government into puting a tax on all media (harddrives, usb memory, CDs, tapes and so on). This tax is supposed to pay for private copying, a leftover from the mix-tape days. We still pay this tax on all media and it goes directly to the industry but we still can't copy media between friends because of DRM. In general DRM should not be allowed here.

Yep, this is incoming for bulk hard drives in France too... (most of the other storage forms have been taxed for years).

It seems absurd that they would "deregister" copies of the game instead of "releasing" them.

Of course that's the better "business" between the two options, that ultimately screws over the consumer.

A confusation on Steam though. You don't own the game, you rent it.

"The Content and Services are licensed, not sold. Your license confers no title or ownership in the Content and Services"

No different to purchasing a game on physical media. You only own the physical media itself, not game stored on it; the license is the same regardless.

Some physical copies of software have gone even further; the disc itself remains property of the publisher.

Quite arguably, this puts the consumer in a stronger position in this one case: they purchased a perpetual license for the content, the license was unanimously revoked by the actions rights holder, they now deserve a refund.

Yes, but you are purchasing the license. The content is licensed, the license to the content is sold.

Then the steam-button shouldn't say "Buy" but "Rent".

And now you know why data hoarders ("digital archivists") ride the line of legality just to have a working copy of something that MAY work indefinitely.

Great find, and I'm curious who's trying to play a nine year-old single-player average game that's a tie-in to the somewhat forgettable Tron: Legacy movie. Looks like gamers were trying to play this and reported it on the Steam forums and elsewhere, but why this game specifically and why now? Was there a sale?

Speedrunners: https://www.speedrun.com/tronevolution

Really goes to show that games are no different a medium from books or film, and must be preserved and maintained in perpetuity in case that latter generations will want to consume them.

I’m very grateful for the efforts of the likes of archive.org, that tirelessly dedicate themselves to the preservation of digital media.

There's what, 20 or 30 years worth of games now, and some of them are still great (e.g. Half Life: Opposing Force). 9 years is nothing. It's even more true for music (luckily that's generally not hobbled by DRM though).

Right, but this one isn't like a beloved classic and there's no third TRON on the horizon to get people suddenly interested:

Tron: Evolution received "mixed or average" reviews on all platforms according to the review aggregation website Metacritic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron:_Evolution#Reception

I don't have Disney+, maybe some people were newly watching the second movie and wanted to play the tie-in game.

Does it matter? They paid for it, they should be able to play it.

Why not? It’s interesting to ask why an old, average to mediocre game had enough users trying to play it to discover this problem.

As long as people continue to pay good money for defective products, there will be people selling them.

Vote with your wallet.

How is this legal when people have already bought the game? Would this be a sound basis for a lawsuit?

I understand the sentiment around this specific instance is overwhelmingly negative, but I find the general concept of an exploding game to be fascinating. Consider a game that requires a buy-in of N dollars and explodes after a month. Upon exploding, the player with the most progression (e.g. level) gets the entire pot.

Since DRM is designed to restrict access to content, I'd say that it's doing what it's supposed to do!

I'm joking, obviously. I really think that DRM is damaging to the industry. That's why I always buy non-DRM versions (for games, this mostly means I'm buying from GOG.com)

If you think this is bad wait until streaming-only games get killed.

This is why I never buy a game, before a crack is out. For me DRM has the opposite effect of intended - it delays my purchase.

I'm curious if Spore the game will become victim to its DRM at some point in the near future as well.

Arguably, Spore was a victim of its own DRM from day one. I think the sales would have been much higher if it hadn't been for the awful DRM.

https://www.gog.com/game/spore_collection

So in this version of the story, the MCP defeats TRON.

And another reason why DRM absolutely sucks.

Broken by design.

Steam isn't much better in terms of rights, but at least valve ensures some sort of "it works".

Steam doesn't even list Denuvo, a DRM by basically the same company as SecuROM, as a "3rd-party DRM"... (Not to mention which one of their own DRMs, if any, a game uses...)

Nope. Those having this issue purchased Tron: Evolution on Steam.

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