UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

We’ve already written about how Digital Rights Management (DRM) software in the computer game “Spore” caused consumer outrage. Instead of preventing piracy as intended, quite the opposite happened. Customers who legally purchased the game were often locked out of the game by mistake while those who pirated the game did not face those problems. In fact, Spore ended up as the most pirated game of 2008.

Now customers who legally purchased the Microsoft published PC version of “Gears of War” are facing even worse problems:

It seems that the DRM on Gears of War came with a built-in shut off date: the digital certificate for the game was only good until January 28, 2009. Now that the game fails to work unless you adjust your system’s clock, what’s Epic’s response? “We’re working on it.”

Gears of War DRM screwup makes PC version unplayable at Ars Technica

In fact, the only way to play Gears of War on the PC right now is to manually set your computer to a previous date to fool the game or…. to pirate the game. Great job, Microsoft!