EA games and secuROM

Post Reply New Topic

I have been playing the Sims 2 since it came out, and unbeknown to me and every other player, the last expansion pack included a new anti-piracy "program" secuROM, which has causes serious damage to people's PC's, disabled the CD burn facility and caused drivers to malfunction, EA did not notify us of this before we brought the game, they tried to cover it up on the main Sims 2 forum before appologising after being accused of a cover up by players and dedicated a whole forum to the issue. They used to use an anti copy program called safedisk before switching to secuROM 7, which is a Sony product and is untested on newer machines apparantly. My PC is so far unaffected by this, but hundreds of others are saying it has made theor machine unusable.
The forum is full of people calling for the game to be recalled, but there is no way EA will do this.

It horrified me because my PC is my LIFE and I could not have afforded the repairs that some players have had to have done, some peopel have even had to reformat windows as a result, many of which use the PC for important work and college stuff.

What do you lot think of EA in general?

Was it sims 2 bon voyage or teen stuff. I installed bon voyage a while back, but am just wondering if what you are saying could have caused the problem with my computer the other day. I hope that my computer will not be rendered useless and that there will be something to correct the problem. Here is a link to the topic about my computer- http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt45138.html

This sounds VERY much like the secuROM issues people have been talking about on the Sims 2 forum, yes, it was included in BV and H&M stuff I think, buy certainly in BV.

This is a bit from a forum post where they are trying to cover their backs..

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SecuROM is an anti-piracy program that is designed to keep people from unlawfully copying software, in theory for the purpose of re-selling illegally. It's also designed to ensure that the game you are playing is a legitimate copy of the game.
EA products (The Sims 2 included) had previously been using a program called SafeDisc for copy protection up until about April of 2007. At this point EA switched to SecuROM. So far, SecuROM has been used for The Sims 2 Deluxe Edition, H&M Stuff, and Bon Voyage. We are using Version 7 of SecuROM.
SecuROM claims it is not spyware, malware, or any other kind of 'ware that would extract personal information from your PC. You can read all about what Sony says about SecuROM at their website. Three links for your reference:
http://www.sonydadc.com/file/securom.pdf
http://www.securom.com/support_faq.asp
http://www.securom.com/SecuROM_PC_Technical_Facts.pdf

Also the secuROM program is causing issues with PC security programs, disabling anti virus software etc.

Thanks for the links, do you have a link to the article posted by the Sims 2 website?

Here's a ton of info: http://bbs.thesims2.ea.com/community/bb ... b57294f376

Sony has already been through this, they were sued a couple of years ago for adding "rootkit" software which would be installed when you'd play certain Sony CDs. EA is in constant financial trouble, despite their always being in a hurry to lay off programming teams the day after a game is finished. Looks like EA has, once again, chosen a totally wrong solution to their problems. Cracked copies of the new Sims BV were available for bittorrent download the same day it was released, so EA has failed to accomplish anything but to alienate their customers.

Yeah, there were LOADS of posts on the bbs about THAT crack, all of them were deleted.

EA is a careless software corporation, which only cares about how much money it can milk out of games. It neglects its customers, and builds things in quantity rather than quality, for the most part. This new CP protection sounds annoying, but I haven't come across it myself yet. Possibly because my computer can't play the newest games since 2006.

I agree 100% with Anubis. I am not a fan of illegal software, so I put my faith in these companies to bring me stuff that's safe, and they put crap like this in it and fail to tell us what it can do to our PC's. There are hundreds of people on the forum who's PC's are 100% unusable due to secuROM. EA are eating the gaming industry alive, and I fear they might be the start of the end of what was once a great era of PC gaming.

They ate what was once the best gaming company in the world, Maxis, which was founded by the genious that is Will Wright, who I could swear is an aspie! People say Maxis was going down financialy, but EA only brought them out as they were a threat and a revolution in PC gaming.

I think it's quite an irony that the media business points to the risk of malware as one amongst many reasons not to pirate their products, and then we see perfectly legal, fully paid products pose the very same threat to the customers and their hardware...!

This is NOT written with a concealed agenda in favor of media piracy, but merely an explanation why I stick to freeware media on the Net -- free as in free the legit way...

I didn't buy Bioshock for the PC when I found out it also used SecuROM. I've only heard bad things about SecuROM.

SecuRom is crap and rootkit malware and should be treated as such.

If I was a security layman I'd tell you to purchase the game, leave it in the box and download a cracked copy.

But since I'm not a security layman, I'm an actual licensed professional. I'd tell you to not purchase any material with this malware included and write your local congressmen. Get with others and open a class action law suit. This is what it took to get Sony to reveal publicly what the security professionals knew all about.

Grimfaire: CISSP code got you by the short & curlies?

I let my cert expire a while ago, so I won't recommend against buying one copy and downloading another. Just go over your downloaded one with 3 or 4 different AV/anti-trojan scanners before you use it, because half of the cracked stuff I've seen has had non-Sony rootkits in it, and those are even less fun than SecuRom. Stuff in RAR format seems to be especially bad, since few AV packages know how to see through the compression like they do with ZIPs, etc.