A few months back I bought the Oblivion Game of the Year Edition. I know I'm a little behind the times, but I didn't have time to play Oblivion when it first came out. I've always been a huge Elder Scrolls fan, and I was having a lot of fun catching up.
When I first bought the game, I had a Windows machine laying around to play it on. Sadly, the machine developed some problems and had to be cannibalized.
Everything I'd read made it seem like I should be good getting it running in Ubuntu under Wine.
A few frustrating hours later, I learned that the newer Game of the Year (GOTY) editions of Oblivion, like the one I had purchased, used a version of SecuROM not yet supported by Wine.
This really angers me for two reasons. Firstly, SecuROM is evil borderline-malware, and I'm disappointed that Bethesda (a company I -- used to? -- like) decided to use it at all to begin with.
Secondly, the non-GOTY editions that already exist don't use this type of DRM. Since, to the best of my knowledge, no difference exists between gameplay in the GOTY and regular versions of Oblivion, it seems to me this new DRM actually weakens the security of the game. If you're a pirate, you get to pick one of two DRM systems to break in order to redistribute the game -- before, you were just locked into the one.
The new DRM hurts people like me who actually bought the game (no surprise), but I would argue it actually helps software pirates at the same time.
It's ridiculous.
Since Linux isn't officially supported by Bethesda, I don't really have an argument to bring to the company. But it really sucks that buying a newer version of the game has severely limited my ability to play it.
Can we get a law or something that requires DRM-ed products to be clearly labeled with the DRM they ship with? I'm tired of being caught by surprise with this junk.
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