Football Manager 2009, Broken DRM & You

With all the problems that DRM has caused over the last few years it’s a real wonder why companies even incorporate it into their games. Recently Spore was the debatable topic due to it’s ludicrous DRM issues were you would have to phone up to activate your game. Speaking of EA they also have a download limit with their EA Download Manager which makes no sense when you consider how often windows has to be re-installed or formatted.

Unfortunately it’s happened again and to a game that personally I enjoy probably too much. Football Manager 2009 was released today to audience suffering from DRM and activation issues. When you install it on the PC you are asked to activate through Steam which makes perfect sense but then once it’s loaded into Steam you have to activate through SoftAnchor which seems to be the cause of the problem.

The first time I launched the game I was greeted with yet another enter-your-serial-key screen. It took a good ten attempts to get SoftAnchor to actually activate my copy of the game and I was away or at least I thought so. After a while I decided that my busted pc couldn’t really handle the 3d engine and if I had to play the game with the old engine I’d opt to play it on a faster MacBook.

It works fine on OS/X except the day in date patch that they released is yet to get a OS/X release. So after deciding to ignore it and play it anyway I launched the game up on the original disk version. Problem is that the disk has an old database. Normally I wouldn’t mind but personally I manage Tottenham and pre-patch it’s the old staff set up while post-patch it’s the setup that’s working and importantly winning games. So I think I’ve got a valid version for hanging out for the mac patch.

After switching back to PC version I was greeted with the same screen that I saw eariler. After entering the same code I got a ‘This unlock key is already active. To purchase an unlock key, please visit” http://www.sigames.com’. After a quick look on Sports Interactive’s forums I found I’m not the only one experiencing these problems and it appears that some people have been locked out of the game from the beginning.

I’m going to carry on refreshing the forums for any updates although that’s becoming a problem because their forums are slowing down. Presumably because of the DRM issues they are having and partly due to some misprinted characters in serial numbers that make it hard to differ between o & 0 and i & 1.

My real point is, well apart from ranting until it gets fixed, is why do companies include DRM in their games. It makes sense to make measures to keep pirates out and I’m sure we all want to see our favourite game companies get the money they deserve but at what cost is DRM causing them. The truth is that if you wanted to play Football Manager 2009 right now, the only way would be by easily downloading it illegally. DRM really just seems to keep people who bought the game out meanwhile pirates can be managing who ever they want.

We are currently contacting SI and Sega regarding an ETA on the OS/X patch and the PC activation problems.