I have been following Majesty 2 since before Paradox had it. There have been at least 3 games released this summer that I refuse to buy because of activation limits and online connection required to play because of DRM. I am still on the fence on Goo, but the idea is warming up to me, especially as opposed to activation limits. PLYMOUTH, Mich., June 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Stardock (www.stardock.com) announced today that publishing partner Paradox Interactive has adopted Stardock's Game Object Obfuscation (GOO) to protect Paradox PC game titles from piracy. Beginning with the Paradox title Majesty 2 and continuing on with other titles for both retail and electronic software sales, Paradox will wrap the games in GOO.
I have been following Majesty 2 since before Paradox had it. There have been at least 3 games released this summer that I refuse to buy because of activation limits and online connection required to play because of DRM. I am still on the fence on Goo, but the idea is warming up to me, especially as opposed to activation limits.
PLYMOUTH, Mich., June 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Stardock (www.stardock.com) announced today that publishing partner Paradox Interactive has adopted Stardock's Game Object Obfuscation (GOO) to protect Paradox PC game titles from piracy. Beginning with the Paradox title Majesty 2 and continuing on with other titles for both retail and electronic software sales, Paradox will wrap the games in GOO.
Announced by Stardock earlier this year, GOO is a new technology that developers can use to protect their game executable. When a protected game is run for the first-time, the player simply needs to enter in their email address and serial number. Once validated, the game can be played normally and typically never needs to connect to the Internet account.
Fredrik Wester, CEO at Paradox Interactive, said, "Stardock and Paradox have a long history of successfully working together, a history that dates back to our publishing Stardock's Galactic Civilizations II in Europe. We were among the first publishers to come on board Stardock's Impulse platform when that launched. Consequently, it was only natural that we tried Stardock's new DRM technology."
"In our testing, we found GOO to be very effective in protecting our titles, while at the same time offering a less obtrusive user experience," continued Fredrik. "GOO meets our needs while protecting the rights of our consumers."
Brad Wardell, CEO at Stardock, continued, "Stardock has been outspoken in advocating solutions that protect consumer's rights. At the same time, we also recognize that many publishers are going to seek to protect their properties via some type of DRM solution. Our goal in developing GOO was to find a middle-ground solution, a technology that would treat consumers not as criminals, but instead with respect. It is great getting feedback from partners like Paradox that we have succeeded in our goal."
More information about GOO can be found here: http://www.impulsedriven.com/developers.aspx. For more information about Stardock or Impulse, please visit www.stardock.com or www.impulsedriven.com.
More information about GOO can be found here: http://www.impulsedriven.com/developers.aspx.
For more information about Stardock or Impulse, please visit www.stardock.com or www.impulsedriven.com.
Quite nice! Paradox is a respectable company as well, and Majesty 2 is a fairly anticipated title, so hopefully this'll give a bit more publicity
Better than activation limits, obviously not as nice as just being DRM free (like Paradox's EU3 functionally was). Still, if they had to go with a DRM system, they could have done a lot worse. I'm certainly pleased that Majesty 2 (a title I've really been looking forward to) doesn't have to come of the "to buy" list because of its DRM scheme. Now the question is: physical copy or buy it off Gamersgate?
Well, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that it'll most likely show up on Impulse on release, what with the GOO thing and all. It will be interesting to see if you can buy on another service and download from Impulse, though, as that was one of GOO's features.
While I have no interest in Majesty 2, I am interested to see how GOO works out for consumers and how long it lasts before it's cracked.
No offense to Stardock but seeing as it's a Paradox game there'd be little advantage to buying it off Impulse. 1) Why saddle it with a client if you don't have to and 2) why not buy from the service run by the publisher, which you can be sure will always have the most recent patches and such? If GOO allows it to be downloaded through Impulse as well I suppose that's a nice bonus (if one I can't imagine actually using).
But there are two pages of Paradox games on Impulse already
It's a lot easier to buy off of Impulse then Gamersgate. My bet is Paradox developed titles won't use GOO, just the published ones like Majesty 2.
And the exact same logic applies to them. Why wouldn't you buy a given game from the source, if there's no disadvantage to doing so? If Stardock games were on Gamersgate the same logic would apply (that is, it'd make no sense to me to buy a Stardock game through anything but Impulse even if other options were available).
What now?
That doesn't necessarily make sense. People inevitably form preferences for their service. I didn't buy SoTS from Gamersgate, for example, but as soon as Ultimate showed up on Impulse I bought it because I happen to like Impulse.
For me, between Impulse and Gamersgate, Impulse is my preferred way of getting stuff, and I only check Gamersgate for sales - the only game I have from it is King's Bounty because it wasn't available on Impulse until very recently.
I'm aware that some people form attachments to specific services, but when you have a diversity of services that all work well and have no real disadvantages I really don't understand that. It's exactly the same as the throngs of Steam-lovers that won't buy from anyone else, it just looks totally irrational to me.
I prefer Impulse over GG because of the localized pricing method.
It's perfectly rational for me - I know Stardock, I know their support, I know Impulse. I am more content buying something from Impulse because I know that if I have some issue I have people I can ask and e-mail. On top of that, I want to see Impulse grow, and the more sales Impulse gets the more weight it will carry in the marketplace and the more titles it will get.
There's nothing irrational about it. I have games from every service - Impulse, D2D, Gamersgate, and Steam. But given the option, I'll always buy it from Impulse first because that's what I'm comfortable with.
And buying games from vendors that don't have their own outlet (or only have a crappy outlet) from Impulse makes perfect sense, as a result. Here's my confusion: if you buy a Paradox game through Impulse, there's only so much Stardock support's going to be able to do for you. Ultimately, the care and feeding of that game is in the hands of the publisher and developer of the game. So by purchasing it through Impulse you've created a multi-level support issue where sometimes you're going to have to do to Stardock and sometimes you're going to have to go to Paradox. Furthermore, some services (I don't know how much of a problem this is on Impulse but it's RAMPANT on Steam) have problems getting updates from third party publishers in reasonable amounts of time.The one place you can pretty much guarantee you'll see a game update first is through the publisher's own service.
But, ultimately, it's a matter of taste and you're welcome to yours, I just wanted to explain why I'd said what I said at the top of this discussion. I like Impulse well enough (I'm not crazy about clients, but it's less obnoxious than Steam's phone-home routine) and certainly hope it continues to do well. I like Gamersgate as well, and hope it doesn't go anywhere either. Healthy competition is always a good thing, and god knows Steam needs to be given a run for its money.
But really, it's a multilayered support issue with Gamersgate as well. It isn't like you can email GG support for game crashes, they just handle the downloading/account/payment stuff, the same as Stardock for 3rd party games. It may be owned by Paradox (actually, didn't it sort of separate into its own a while back?), but it still has its own support service, while Stardock's is generic. Game stuff, Impulse stuff, apps stuff all goes to one support service.
Your point on patches is definitely solid, and Steam does tend to be bad with it from time to time. You can also add modding to that, see the recent oops with Oblivion on Steam.
Ditto Options are always good.
Edit: Though I think at this point we're talking about two different things. I was saying that it'd be fairly natural at this point for Paradox to put the game up on Impulse since they 1) have lots of games on it already and 2) just spoke pretty highly about SD and are using GOO. You're talking about where it makes sense to buy from.
Oh. Yeah, I guess we ARE kind of talking past each other, aren't we? Ah well, it's straightened out now anyway. Cheers!
Yeah the internet part is the only part that makes me hesitant. I think it has to do with signing in and attaching it to your e-mail. I am not sure many people change their e-mails often, but I am wondering if you do, how hard is it to change. That sort of thing. And the validation server, not sold on that either. I am looking at it another way though. I hate limited activations. I simply won't do it. There is a game that was released at 50 dollars when it came out and is now floating around 14.
I am still hesitant because of that limited activiation. I am also not thrilled about online validation because it seems likely that a company could just cut that validation support and leave you with nothing.
Roughly 3 games released so far this month that have let me down. Two of them advertised multiplayer components up to and on the day of release, and neither of them actually have online components, though one of them still has many sites saying they do. All of them have online validation and 2 of them have limited activation. The result is, I am not buying a new game this month, probably not next month either. My best bet is that in the fall, one of the games I want will be released with reasonable DRM. If Majesty 2 is going GOO, then at least that's not Securom or Tages.
What do you means by exactly limited activation concerning GOO?
If there is a remote validation process, it can be limited. I mean really, EA shut down their servers for some titles. Doesn't take much to pull the plug, so to speak, on the other end.
Yeah, but that's EA. They're ****s.
Yeah, but they didn't start that way.
Ture. Just look at this post http://frogboy.impulsedriven.net/article/339313
Yes but the online activation... that's the part that gets me. Here is an examppe from the consumerist.
After an iBook-death forced her to migrate to another computer, Lisa found that she couldn't activate her legally-purchased copy of Macromedia StudioMX 2004. Adobe insisted that the software was too old to be reactivated. Too old? It's software! It took several calls and emails before Lisa found an employee who was able to help, not by activating her old software, but by sending her a free new copy of Dreamweaver CS4. Lisa writes: Recently, my ancient iBook died (again, but that's another story). I'm not in a position to replace it right now, so I installed my equally ancient, but legally purchased and owned Macromedia StudioMX 2004 on my PC. Installation was fine, serial number checked out fine and then I tried online activation: fail. Since I wasn't prescient enough to deactivate the software before my hard drive failed, my iBook was still the active computer. I called the activation hotline, figuring I wasn't the first person who had a hard drive fail. Ann was pleasant but defaulted to "Too old. Can't activate." I cruised around a bit on the Adobe forums where a helpful Adobe employee named Dov told other old software owners that Adobe promised to honor all legacy software with activation, age notwithstanding. His advice was to call back and escalate. I got Ann again who escalated me to Daphne, who said "Company policy. Too old. Can't activate." I'd love to be able to get a shiny new MacBook Pro and CS4, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. MX2004 worked just fine before my hard drive crashed and I wasn't looking for product support, just activation. On an off chance, I emailed Dov who responded in less than an hour and said that while he couldn't help me directly, he'd pass along my issue to customer care. Another few hours later, I got a call on my cell phone from Bing who wanted to help. She tried to contact the old Macromedia activation server with no luck; she reserialized my software and we tried again. No dice. She had been so nice and had really tried to fix everything, so I was sad, but content. Then she knocked my socks off: she asked me to confirm the mailing address in my customer record and then told me she was shipping me a brand new copy of Dreamweaver CS4. Full retail, at no charge. We spoke at 7 pm Thursday night; I got the software in the mail today. As soon as I can get my shiny new MacBook Pro, I'll spring for the whole web design suite.
After an iBook-death forced her to migrate to another computer, Lisa found that she couldn't activate her legally-purchased copy of Macromedia StudioMX 2004. Adobe insisted that the software was too old to be reactivated. Too old? It's software! It took several calls and emails before Lisa found an employee who was able to help, not by activating her old software, but by sending her a free new copy of Dreamweaver CS4.
Lisa writes:
I'd love to be able to get a shiny new MacBook Pro and CS4, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. MX2004 worked just fine before my hard drive crashed and I wasn't looking for product support, just activation. On an off chance, I emailed Dov who responded in less than an hour and said that while he couldn't help me directly, he'd pass along my issue to customer care.
Another few hours later, I got a call on my cell phone from Bing who wanted to help. She tried to contact the old Macromedia activation server with no luck; she reserialized my software and we tried again. No dice. She had been so nice and had really tried to fix everything, so I was sad, but content. Then she knocked my socks off: she asked me to confirm the mailing address in my customer record and then told me she was shipping me a brand new copy of Dreamweaver CS4. Full retail, at no charge. We spoke at 7 pm Thursday night; I got the software in the mail today.
As soon as I can get my shiny new MacBook Pro, I'll spring for the whole web design suite.
I mean the online activation can be pulled at anytime by any company, and they don't have to do a thing for you. In this case, they did the right thing but later, who says they will do it again, that some pencil pusher won't nix that idea assuming the company is still in business when you do need to beg them. It's not as if a lot of games should be placed by or even has sequel. And don't tell me a company like Adobe could never go down, would never, there is a large list of companies that people thought would last forever and didn't. Seriously doubt most people expect WAMU to take a nose dive even a few years ago.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
