An old friend of mine contacted me today asking if I liked DRM. My answer was “haha, not much Do you?”.

Apparently he had purchased the game “Far Cry 2” from Ubisoft which ships with the SecuROM rootkit, whoops, DRM-software. During installation from DVD his free AVG antivirus protection blocked something leaving a log that looks like this:

“Trojan horse Generic11.BIAK”;”C:\Users\[CENSORED]\AppData\Local\Temp\mtka_tmp\matroschka_launcher.exe”;”Deleted”;”2008-10-27, 20:24:46″;

Edited the above line to fit, view a screenshot here.

Remember that this is a game purchased in a store. With money. Hard earned, double-taxed, money. He however ignored the warning thinking that it probably didn’t matter too much and continued on with the installation.

When the game was fully installed he tried to run it and was met by an error sign saying that Daemon Tools was installed and that the game wouldn’t run as long as it was. Disabling the Daemon Tools services did not remedy this problem and he was forced to uninstall his legitimate image opening software.

Alright, now the game should run right? “No more hassle!” like the signs say in the Turkish tourist site Marmaris.

But no. The game still would not run and a generic warning sign is shown. The sign instructs him to download a fix from Ubisoft, and he follows all instructions to the point. No luck, the game still won’t run.

So he figures it’s time for some creative troubleshooting and visits TPB and downloads a crack for the game.

This solves all of his problems. Once again DRM software has failed to secure applications and once again has the legitimate users been punished for actually paying for the game.

The real reason to all of his problems was that the SecuROM application matroschka_launcher.exe (what kind of name is that anyways?) looks so weird that the generic trojan detection in AVG triggers a “false positive” (or possibly an intentional detection by AVG?).

This is however not an excuse for Ubisoft as there are threads on gaming forums all over the internet, even on their own user forum, about similar problems with the same application. SecuROM is a really badly built rootkit, whoops, DRM-tool and should not be used for any serious applications. I feel the same for all DRM crap though, so nothing special with this one.

For me it feels very strange that major game vendors such as Ubisoft (which makes a lot of kick-ass games) can fail this hard. Why not put the money spent on DRM into marketing instead, and generate a hype surrounding the launch.

To actually alienate users to the stage where they have to visit piracy sites just to get their purchased games to work.

This is the wrong way to do it people…