EA use a product called Cider to power many of their Mac games. Cider basically adds a wrapper around the original PC game, and translates it on-the-fly to Mac. The recent release of ‘The Sims 3′, for example, works on OS X and Windows due to Cider.

Cider is likely to become more wide-spread. It saves game developers from having to develop ports, allows Mac and PC games to be released at the same time and ultimately little extra work must be put in to reach a larger market.

But Cider also allows certain Windows cracks to be implemented on Macs.

On OS X, Applications are actually just packages. If you have The Sims 3, for example, and go to the App and right click on ‘Show Package Contents’, and then choose ‘transgaming’, you will see a Windows folder structure. In there, all the files you’d expect to see are there. Basically, there’s a ‘The Sims 3.app>Contents>Resources>transgaming>c_drive>program files>Electronic Arts>The Sims 3′ folder.

The benefit of there being a hidden Windows folder structure in these apps are simple. If there’s a No-CD crack where you just have to replace a .exe, you find that .exe inside the Package and replace it. And then it works just like it does under Windows.

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Companies seem to cling to those schemes although it has been proven that they are not helping fight software piracy. Games are usually available without copy protection on the Internet before or soon after they are released. This essentially means that someone downloading those games does not have to cope with installation limits and other copy protection schemes like CD checks while the people who bought the game do.

It was common in the past that customers had to call the game company or publisher if they reached their installation limit in order to have it reset so that they could install the game again.

EA, a company that made and is making heavy use of such copy protection schemes, has released a portable tool for Windows systems called EA De-Authorization Management Tool which will automatically scan a computer system for selected EA games and notify the user about the number of authorizations available.

The computer software program will recognize many of the latest games that have been released by EA. Among them Crysis Warhead, Read Alert 3, Fifa Manager 09, Fifa Soccer 09 and Mass Effect. A website will be loaded after the scan informing the user about the results of the scan.

The results will include links to de-authorization tools for supported EA games if they have been found on the computer system. Downloading those tools will then make it possible to free up a slot so that the game can be installed again.

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This first plans were watered down after the Internet community noticed the plans and the regular checks on the Internet were canceled. Gamers were still not pleased with several other aspects of the protection such as forcing them to have the game DVD in drive and only allowing them to reinstall the game three times before they had to contact EA to be able to install the game again.

The release of Spore saw some heavy protests which concentrated on pushing bad ratings of Spore on the Amazon.com website. The game has currently been reviewed by nearly 2400 customers of whom 2133 have rated it with the worst possible rating.

This protest seemed to have an effect on Electronic Art’s decision – according to online gaming portal IGN – to ease up on the DRM of the upcoming Red Alert 3 game.

The maximum amount of installations before having to contact EA was raised to five and the DVD is no longer required to be in the drive to play the game. While that does not meet the demands of gamers worldwide who want the games that they purchase to be on pair with the games that can be downloaded from P2P sources.

Buying the game would mean to pay money for it, to be restricted in the number of installations and face the hassle of contacting EA whenever the maximum number is reached, to have a resident program on the computer that wont play the game if certain software is installed on the PC, that might stop working in the future because of closed activation servers. It does on the other hand come with a manual (most game manuals cannot be really called that these days), a box and the knowledge that the developers and publishers have been paid for their work.

The guys who download the game from the Internet do not pay a dime for it, get the manual as a PDF as well, get a game that they do not have to activate online, a game that they can install as often as they want and a game that does not install the resident software. It is however illegal to do that.

The problem that arises for gamers who know about DRM is that they feel cheated. They pay money for the game but get the “bad” version while the downloaders can enjoy a hassle free game.

The whole story feels more like a “Oh god they are protesting so much, let us throw a bone at them and maybe they stop protesting”. Is that bone enough? Definitely not. Will the DRM stop the game from being pirated? Definitely not.

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Well Spore was destined to be different. If you look at the Amazon ratings of the game you currently see 723 reviews. 22 five star reviews, 13 four star reviews, 5 three star reviews, 18 two star reviews and 673 one star reviews. One star reviews are the lowest ratings possible for products at Amazon.

One could think that reviewers did not like the game and decided to give it a low rating at Amazon. This is apparently not the case. The majority of the reviewers are giving it a one star rating because of its DRM protection.

Spore has to be activated over the Internet so that the user can play the game. Electronic Arts first wanted to implement a DRM system that required regular authentications but removed that after huge protests broke out.

So every user has to activate the game over the Internet which is strange for a single player game. The number of activations are limited to three and users have to call (!) support for additional activations. Uninstallation won’t give an activation back. If the user installs the operating system anew and the game afterwards that’s another activation, even if it’s the same computer.

We have also seen what happens if a company that sold DRM media turns off the servers that are responsible for the authentication. It happened to giants like Google Microsoft and Yahoo before so who can say that the EA game will authenticate in ten years?

I think it is interesting to see that a dedicated base of users can control the rating system of such a big company like Amazon. Amazon will probably remove most of the ratings as they have done in the past but it should keep a few users from buying the game.

Is it a good game? I honestly do not know and since I’m still on an EA games boycott I could care less.

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Technical Producer Derek French replied to a user thread on the Mass Effect Forum about the copy protection and activation the game would be using. I have several objections to this kind of protection although I understand that game makers and publishers want to make sure that they earn money from their games while keeping piracy to a minimum.

Users who do not have a permanent Internet connection will not be able to enjoy the game. The game has to be activated after installation giving the user nine days after installation to do so. It will stop working if it is not activated by then. A game will stop working if it cannot perform a check every ten days. If that does not happen the game will not run until the check has been made.

Am I the only one thinking about DRM and services that have been taken from the net ? It happened before, just recently to customers of the MSN Music store. What happens if EA decides to turn off the servers that check the activation. Will they be able to provide the check ten years after the game has been released ? What if the EA server is down or the Internet connection of the user ? He won’t be able to play the game until then if he is over the ten day period.

Let us take a look at the users who grab a copy of the game from P2P networks. Will they even realize the game has such a protection ? I bet they won’t. They install the game, copy a crack over and are done and can play the game for as long as they want without fearing that the game will be unplayable because of activation issues.

This is the exact reason why DRM fails. It is punishing the wrong people. Honest buyers are punished by it, not the ones who copy the game without paying for it. It’s like those stupid anti piracy trailers that can be skipped when loading a retail DVD. What’s your take on this issue ?

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