Last week, Green Man Gaming was launched and the world of digital distribution changed forever. I’m not just saying that because I’m one of the founders, I’m saying that because it really has done this.
There was a lot of people that doubted that it could be done from a technical point of view – and even why would publishers put games on the service? There was also a lot of SecuROM hating. In fact, I’ll briefly cover that now:
GMG doesn’t actually use any of the restrictive options of SecuROM bar one. The license reactivation of ‘x’ days. The value of x changes game to game depending on a number of different factors but all it really means is that the game just has to connect to the internet every few days. This is not the kind of constant internet connection that a certain publisher has been doing recently – but more the Spotify approach. That is, you can happy use the game offline – you just have to connect every now and again.
No Spyware is installed, nothing is actively hidden and tools are available from Sony DADC to remove any traces. I hate restrictive DRM, but since implementing SecuROM for Green Man Gaming, I can happily say that it got a bad name for reasons beyond Sony’s control. I’ve had no problems using it in VMWare/Parallels and in normal versions of Windows too. There’s been no tickets raised by customers on this topic either, which is great. Must be doing something right!
