EA Games on Steam WITHOUT SecuRom

gordon-creAtive · Cyborg Soldier **Joined**: 14 Jun 2007

I just read on the german Half-Life site www.hlportal.de that EA-Games are available on Steam or will become available in the next few weeks without SecuRom. Good news in my opinion. The bad news is that the games are (in Germany) more expensive than in store or as import version. Valve said they're fixing it were possible.

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Banshee · Posted: Mon Dec 22, 2008 10:21 pm Post subject:

The announcement said that they were only selling these games there for north america. I really can't understand this local limitation at a global online service. It doesn't make any sense at all.

Team SomeGuy · General **Joined**: 18 Aug 2006

It's called regional copy-protection Banshee.

It's why pirated videos out of China don't usually work well on devices built in the US or Europe. (Or even out of Japan!)

Instead of being too intrusive such as methods like SecuROM, they instead limit the version to region. (Because like how you can't plug a US appliance into a German power outlet, things limited to one region won't really work on another's technology. Needless to say, it's a half assed attempt and turns off more customers than the pirates it supposedly prevents)

Also, the technology in those regions assists in doing the copy protection. DVD drives, OS, various media players all have firmware (or in the case of some devices/OS, software) that tells the disc which region it is in. If the regions don't match up enough (Such as a UK DVD playing in Canada) the program/movie/disc/whatever won't work.

gufu · Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2008 7:47 pm Post subject:

Yes. But if I bought a legal version of HL in Russia, can I recieve my CD key for English version, then? That was highly annoying (and thus I wasted around 15 dollars).

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Banshee · Posted: Tue Dec 23, 2008 8:49 pm Post subject:

Regional protections have some limitations on computers, buddy. The only thing that would prevent me (I'm in Brazil, south america) from buying it would be the IP. If I use a proxy, I can run anything here. My windows is a US english one instead of portuguese. Every hardware I buy here is imported from the US or from China, Japan, Taiwan, or whatever...