SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
In announcing its first major patch for Mass Effect: Andromeda last week, BioWare highlighted fixes to the game's much-maligned facial animations, as well as gameplay tweaks like larger inventories and skippable cutscenes. One thing BioWare forgot to mention in its patch notes, though, is an improved version of Denuvo DRM that is forcing pirates to use an outdated version of the game... at least for now.
[...] It's unclear why Mass Effect: Andromeda didn't feature the latest version of Denuvo in its initial release. In any case, the updated DRM leaves pirates stuck with a much less polished version of the game, and it could keep them away from months of further patches that are already in the works. It's a situation that reminds us a bit of Game Dev Tycoon and other games that intentionally make pirated versions inferior to legitimately purchased copies.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday April 12 2017, @07:13PM
There's also cases where they backfire -- the checks don't get coded correctly and misidentify numerous legit copies as being pirated. Then you get into an even bigger support nightmare, because they call support and support tells them to go buy a legal copy when they already own a legal copy. So then they're complaining online about having to jump through hoops to prove they bought it legally, while also complaining online about the game screwing with them, while also calling all your support channels demanding a patch, which you then have to provide...
If you've got hundreds of tests, how can you be sure none of them will ever give a false positive under any circumstances?
And if you don't tell anyone what's going on, how can you be sure they won't just give the product a ton of crap reviews, even if they pirated it?
And if you push back against those reviews, what happens when the customer you're pushing back against DIDN'T pirate the thing, you just screwed up a test?
And even if you don't make mistakes, pirates might still claim you did. Are the people going to believe your company, or the negative reviews?
And what about a customer who bought it and ALSO pirated it (I do this a lot because it's faster than finding the damn CD) so they post their complaints along with a "VERIFIED OWNER" badge from the retailer and they provide a legit CD key to the support staff when asked? Granted, they should remove the pirated version and install the real one before calling support, but if the game claims it installed successfully and doesn't complain about being pirated, they don't have any reason to suspect that as the cause. So it's likely that they won't do that and won't mention it to support either.
It may be *fun*, but otherwise I see nothing but problems with this approach...