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Y2K9 Bug Strikes: Gears of War PC Disabled by Date
by Nick Breckon, Jan 29, 2009 12:01pm PST
Many users are reporting that the PC version of Gears of War was entirely disabled yesterday when the game's digital certificate expired.
The expiration date on the certificate was apparently set for yesterday, January 28. When the date switched over, the game became unplayable.
"This was a surprise to us too," said Epic programmer Joe Graf on the company's official forum. "We have been notified of the issue and are working with Microsoft to get it resolved."
A similar issue recently disabled Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online. As in that situation, users have found a simple workaround for the Gears problem: setting the system clock back to a date prior to the expiration.
Comments
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Are people who bought the game secretly agreeing to a term stating how long they are allowed to play their purchased copy? I am so sick of all the hidden spyware shit.
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it's a bug in the anti-cheat software. it's checking to see if the executable is modified. it does that by verifying the built-in certificate, which is a cryptographic signature that says that Epic vouches for the content of the EXE.
the bug is that the certificate check is deciding that the certificate is a forgery because it has expired. this is a mistake, the certificate cannot be renewed or re-issued, and so it should not have any expiration checks at all.
Again, nothing to do with DRM. It's not a license check. It's not online activation. It's just a dumb mistake/oversight by whoever designed the EXE validity check.
I bought this game late last year and honestly didn't think it had a DRM, because it requires I put the DVD in the drive to launch it. I guess I was being naive...
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CliffyB and company haven't done shit to fix it, showing once again how much they care about PC players, so this is no surprise. Just more proof of how low Epic has fallen.
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Bioshock 1.1: 5/10/2007 to 5/10/2008
Fallout 3 (RTM): 9/16/2008 to 9/17/2010 (launcher and game executable)
Bioshock probably isn't a problem since it doesn't connect to GfWL. However, Fallout 3 does. I'm guessing that they'll update the executable with a renewed cert in a future patch, lest they follow the same fate as Epic.
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According to a poster called Archdude, however, "The Digital Certificate for Startup.exe in Gears of War expires on 2/22/2009 as well, any fix will have to address this file as well. I don't want to deal with this again in a month."
No, that's not me. I never bought Chest High Walls PC.
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If it does can someone please explain, I don't recall the dvd version having any online activation, maybe I am wrong.
Half arsed product from Microsoft, so predictable and laughable.
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