I've been looking forward to the PC version of Mass Effect but after hearing the ridiculous anti-piracy methods used by the game's producers, I don't think it's worth spending the money. The game allows only THREE activations - ever. After that, the CD will be useless. What kind of crazy shit is this? What's even more unbelievable is that Bioware initially planned on having buyers of the game to authenticate the software online every ten days. So if you're away from your computer for 11 days, Bioware would terminate the license. But they were kind enough to remove that particular SecuROM gimmick, but the maximum 3 activation rule remains. I know piracy is an issue but to use this sort of tactic against legitimate buyers of the game is nothing short of disgraceful.
You'd think these companies would realize that they're just encouraging piracy at this point. The fact is that many of the copy protection schemes in use today are extreme enough to make pirated versions lacking the copy protection significantly more valuable. Pirates will always pirate, but consumers just become more likely to download pirated versions of games as the copy protection schemes get more and more aggravating to deal with. People don't want to have to play with disks in the drive, and they really don't want to have to worry about how many times they've reinstalled a game.
If it's the same SecuROM methodology as BioShock, it simply means that you can only have it concurrently installed three times, not that you can only install it three times. Unfortunately, it sounds like this one is a little more stringent. No big deal - from what I saw of Mass Effect on the console, I've got to say, I wasn't really impressed. Didn't think it was nearly worthy of the hype it got. C'est la vie.
DRM only burdens legitimate users. I've yet to see a game/movie/song that hasn't been cracked and swapped illegally in a matter of days. It's a fuckin joke. Begin scene: Management comes down and says "WTF are we gonna do about the piracy?!" Developers say: "Oh uh... we have this new crazy DRM scheme! let me explain how it works: <meaningless technological mumbo jumbo here>" Management: "Hmm, that sequence of words sounded like it was pretty complicated! Good job guys! I'm sure we will stop the pirates with this one!" Pirates crack the new stuff within the week. For next product, go back to "begin scene". Bottom line is this: if it is usable by legit consumers, it can be cracked, and quite easily.
Knights of the old Republic II, the patched version. Took a year or so for that to be cracked. I download NOCD cracks for all my games, and I remember waiting a really long time for that one to appear. But generally, yeah, cracks and illegal copies appear pretty quickly.
They did it with Bioshock too....but IIRC, they changed it later on. Its not like people aren't going to be able to hack it anyways.
I heard the Mass Effect hacking efforts actually worked out pretty well. They basically had the game "check" before critical story points, and if it failed, the game exited, and the crack makers had to rush to fix it. Not only did it keep them on their toes, a lot of people were so invested in it by that point that they went out and legitimately bought the game so that they could continue playing without waiting for the crack. Interesting strategy, especially if it was intentional.
