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Comment by UI_at_80x24 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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