Gears of War grinds to a halt... thanks to DRM snarl

The record industry has figured out that DRM doesn't work. The movie business is finally catching on to the idea. The gaming industry? No clue whatsoever.

Following the crush of grassroots vitriol that erupted when the highly-anticipated (and ultimately lackluster) game Spore shipped with a full mountain of DRM, one would have thought that other publishers might have learned from that game's mistakes. Nope. The latest flub comes from Epic and Microsoft, which loaded up the PC version of Gears of War with a supersized helping of digital rights management. (Though, in reality, the GoW DRM probably predates Spore's.)

And in keeping with Microsoft's recent track record (cough Zune New Year's bug cough) it all blew up in their face. This time the bug involves a digital certificate that lets you play the game. No problem... except the certificate expired on January 28, 2009, meaning that players that fired up the game on Thursday or later were abruptly locked out.

The gaming community is of course up in arms about the issue, and Epic has yet to release a fix. Oh, but there's one way around the problem: Change the time and date on your computer to an earlier day, then the game will run normally. Of course that begs the question of what protective value this digital certificate ever had in the first place if it can be bypassed by simply changing the date on your PC. Once again, DRM proves to do nothing but cause headaches for the people who paid legitimate money for a product, while hackers running illegal copies of GoW certainly remain unencumbered by such issues.

The good news for Epic is that it won't have to worry about the same problem for the PC version of Gears of War 2, since there won't be one. Why? Because Epic says there's just too much piracy. Wonder why that is...