If you’re a fan of older disc-based games with the two notorious DRM measures, Windows 10 might not be for you.
Microsoft’s Boris Schneider-Johne was interviewed at Gamescom by Rocket Beans TV about Windows 10 over almost three-quarters of an hour. It’s in German, but Rock Paper Shotgun has a translation that might be a bit of a red flag for some people.
“Everything that ran in Windows 7 should also run in Windows 10. There are just two silly exceptions: antivirus software and stuff that’s deeply embedded into the system needs updating – but the developers are on it already – and then there are old games on CD-Rom that have DRM,” the translated quote, which was provided to RPS from readers, says.
Schneider-Johne reportedly adds that the antiquated DRM systems are “deeply embedded” and Windows 10 would never permit such software. “That’s where Windows 10 says ‘sorry, we cannot allow that, because that would be a possible loophole for computer viruses.’”
There is more information about how Safedisc DRM is affected as well — namely that it’s not and probably won’t be supported whatsoever. If you’re a fan of older games that rely on these ancient methods, the developer will have to patch the game or supply a workaround. RPS also has some suggestions on homebrew solutions if you want to go down that path.
Comments
20 responses to “Reports: Windows 10 Doesn’t Support Securom Or Safedisc DRM”
This is a good step in the right direction towards stopping the broken drm fest of the 00’s repeating itself in the future.
It’ll repeat.
As much as people like to believe they’ll still be able to play their games once Steam has closed, Valve don’t own all of the properties they distribute. That’s going to be a massive potential problem down the line.
PT is a great example of content control in a digital-only environment. Gone.
Shit’s going to get real nasty in the future unless something changes.
Steam has repeated many times in the event they ever shut down (unlikely to happen in our lifetime) they can flick a switch so that games do not require steam services to launch
http://i.imgur.com/4sa1Ln6.jpg
Yes but when the OS updates making then unplayable, you are still burned. Which is what this is about.
Thats the fault of the OS though, not steam
Yes. The fault of the OS. What the article is about. Which is what I was saying in the above comment.
I was more replying to what scrumptatoes was saying, he was implying that if steam shutdown, we would lose access to all your games
Or just do what everyone else did back then when DRM was being a pain in the ass and preventing you from playing what you bought: NoCD crack it.
Assuming you can install the product in the first place
This is why I buy my games on GoG.com these days. It drove me mad back in the day when I bought a game and then had to find a crack because my optical drive was incompatible.
StarForce and SecuROM anyone?
Long story short: I got Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. After installation, I got the StarForce prompt stating it had to be installed. I took the gamble (foolish in retrospect) and let it do its thing.
It seemed to work find (a prior Sherlock Holmes game wouldn’t load until I tried with an external drive of a different make) but after a while the game started to glitch, I started getting a hundred prompts per second from ZoneAlarm (this was back when it was good software) and then my PC gave me a BSoD. Something I had not seen since when I used to use Windows 2000.
Don’t forget all the times Securom didn’t even support Securom!
Looks like we need to go back to StarForce!
You first.
Part of the reason I gave up on pc as my main gaming platform was DRM being forced upon us that would break or intrude. Again going to cop crap from the valve fanboys but that pushed me to consoles.
I wanted to be able to buy a game, use it how I wish, play it when I wish without being forced to check in, wait for a patch to fix it which is normally fixed by pirates first.
Windows 10 so far i’ve found more of the same, I want to play a game from 5 years ago that has barebones copy protection, the game physically functions in 10, the copy protection does not, several of these games had this issue in 8.1 as well.
A reloaded crack later game is running fine.
I want to play a recent game thats meant to work on windows 10, DRM (in this case being battlenet) says no. Keeps forcing download after re-download. Ended up having to use files from a pirated copy to get the thing to work my legit serial number, so i’ve had to use piracy to play another legitimate copy.
Pickup a game from 3 years ago using securom, same deal again, have had to use cracked files to make it run on windows 10.
It’s pretty sad, I remember 10 years ago we were all talking about how pc’s would kill of consoles…. last time I checked I can whack any game in an console play it….. a lot of us can’t say that about our pc games.
We get over them and want to sell or give them away later…… and steam is only just now being forced to look into this.
Out of curiosity — what games are you playing that are breaking? It’d be good to compile a list of known stuff that requires patching (like the lists for everything affected by the GameSpy or GWFL shutdowns).
I think someone has already started a list. EA games at the moment are literally hit and miss right now.
How is this any different to console platforms and generations?
Look at upgrading to Win10 like you would upgrading from 360/PS3 to xbone/PS4…. the platform changes, features of the OS change, so games which ran on the old platform are now unsupported on the new platform.
Place a xbox game from 3 years ago in your xbone and see what happens. Pretty sure it won’t play it either.
It’s also unreasonable to expect devs to provide patches for a new platform, too.
The funny thing is, I pretty much pirated and cracked basically everything through that era, and now we’ve gotten past it I buy pretty much everything on Steam/GoG. Good work invasive DRM.
Me too, I remember laughing with school friends about how we got around the ‘unbreakable’ DRM like StarForce.
Now that they aren’t so ridiculously over the top with DRM, my steam library has grown from nothing back in my pirate days to >600 games. Keep this in mind for the future, games industry, k.
it will repeat. just with altered software.