The game has no copy protection but you need the a purchased copy to update it.
If you don't update it, you probably can't play it.....
Sadly.... this is probably the most effective copy protection system out there.
Although honestly I think this is "accidental" maybe not.... maybe stardock is staffed by evil "geniuses"!
Considering the fact that CD version is unplayable there is no 'if'.
I don't think it was on purpose or the first couple of updates would have fixed everything. Which they didn't.
There is an if, in the strictest sense. We're talking about the DRM principle here. Yes, the game on the disk is.. bad, to say the least. But if it does start without an activation, then there is no DRM.
Obviously to get any mileage out of Elemental specifically people will need to patch the disk version, but that's not because of any DRM scheme, rather because the version that got put on the disk ended up being pretty crappy - and that's certainly not intentional.
Or you can go to anywhere.impulsedriven.com and download a full offline installation of the game that can be installed without an internet connection, so even the digital version technically doesn't have DRM.
I read some of the responses.....
Just FYI, this post was sort of meant as a joke before people get too serious about the issue Feel free to post anything you like though, but keep in mind I was just kidding.
Everyone knows the only Evil Genius in the world is me
Incorrect. Wine Is Not an Emulator. It's an implementation of Windows API. Performance hits happen, because it's not a perfect implementation, but absolutely not always. Funny, they even implement various Windows bugs if they affect compatibility.
The knowledge that the game developers will have a paying job come next week?
Are you for real ? Developing software is hard work, especially in an obscure, new direction or where no one likes to go. People are and will be paid for it. People pay even for development of popular free software, including Firefox, OpenOffice and Apache. Even today the actual producers (programmers) are not paid for every sale of a copy of software. Mostly they are paid monthly. In the much glorified days of great works, people were paid to create specific works. You ordered a painting or a new music composition. There's a big disjoint between the work programmers are doing today and the way they are paid. It can't last forever.
I focus on programmers so much because they're one of few blocks which are set in stone. You can replace middlemen. There are areas where ease of use by an education-averse person is preferred to quality. For example, Microsoft Word and especially Excel is a database for technophobes, synchronised by @mail.
Yes, but if the end product does not sell, the organization can't attract money to pay for later development. There's simply no support. It doesn't matter if developers get royalties - what matters is that the people with the money to pay those developers can see that there is enough of a return on investment to fund additional development. At some level, there is a business involved and businesses need money to, at the very least, stay in business.
Games that do not sell well generally mean that a studio will close. That's simple fact.
I'm well aware that freeware can be paid for. But there's a very real reason that free projects take a lot longer to produce. The people that work on freeware projects, be it mods or open source or whatever, have to make money to pay the bills - that's just a fact of life. They can't devote all their time and effort into something when they have mouths to feed. As much as we would love to have entertainment for free, we can't ignore the fact that a bunch of people spent months and years making it. Without our support, we'd see a lot less produced by them because they won't be free to entertain us. They'll be busying doing other things to support themselves.
Those are sponsored projects, and the sponsors benefit from the products, their development or their wide-spread usage. How many open source games are funded by companies? I can't think of a single one.
Warzone2100
Isn't that a failed commercial project that was then made open source? (Genuine question, that's just what I recall.)
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