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A Message On Football Manager 2012 Activation


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Thanks for your insight. I certainly hadn't considered the idea that SI and Sega might have looked into this before going ahead with it.

The way that it will affect this customer (note: not "player") who doesn't use Steam is that he'll cease to be a customer.

From your reply it didnt seem like you had considered it tho..

I think your the one who cant see this from their point of view

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I think I'm right in saying one can still digitially download the game and not have to use Steam?

I'm not keen on digital download- I've only ever digitally downloaded one album, which has cost me about £50, and that was because I didn't have a choice, so I'm willing to go to some hardship to get a physical copy- but frankly it's better than having to use Steam.

You can buy the game from other sites, but they will just give you a CD Key* which you activate in steam and add it to your games library.

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I think I'm right in saying one can still digitially download the game and not have to use Steam?

I'm not keen on digital download- I've only ever digitally downloaded one album, which has cost me about £50, and that was because I didn't have a choice, so I'm willing to go to some hardship to get a physical copy- but frankly it's better than having to use Steam.

It looks like you would still need to activate the download via Steam.

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We've never once said that we believe Steam will stop piracy altogether just that it's believed that, of all the options available, it offers the best possible service for activation/DRM this year and that it will dramatically help reduce the number of people who pirate the game. Not stop it completely, of course - we're not naive, but that it would reduce piracy more than any alternative investigated would.

We also believe that with the improvements that Steam have made over recent months and years it offers a really good customer experience and only improves the experience of playing Football Manager for those that wish to play it in online mode. We wouldn't have done it otherwise. Those who don't wish to use Steam after activation only have to activate once and leave it in offline mode from then on. It doesn't use much resources and quietly sits there minding it's own business until you want to use it online.

We've also never said that we think a pirated game equals a lost sale. What we've said is IF 25% of those who pirated the game bought it, we believe our world wide sales figures would double. We're not saying that's going to happen (although it would be great if it did) all we're trying to do is highlight the problem that piracy brings to Football Manager and tell you the reasons why we're trying to battle it.

1 pirated game might not equal 1 lost sale, but surely you must accept that IF the game wasn't piratable (is that a word?) the game would sell more? Of course it would, that's just common sense.

More sales = more more money invested into SI as a studio which = a better game for the honest people who buy the game legally each year. That is our honest motivation behind all of this, if you can't believe or accept that then I'm sorry, there's not much more I can say.

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For you guys who think a online activation is bad your lucky you don't play Settlers 7, that needs a constant internet connection (always-online DRM system) even for single player games and if UBI servers are down you simply can't play the game. And for the first few months after release it was quite common.

For those of you who have not used or dont like Steam, well I think that will change becouse it is taking over in every way shape and form. I have been using it for about 7 years now and wouldn't want it any other way.

That said I still think there is a 50/50 chance you will see FM12 on torrent even before it hits stores...... sadly.

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*Opens Steam*.... *Opens task manager*

a) Steam ISN'T resource hungry. 13,004kb on my machine.

b) 5 years using it and I've never been hacked.

c) Their customer service is actually quite good.

d) The game will auto patch

e) Achievements (Take 'em or leave 'em)

What, please tell me is wrong with any of the above? I don't get it.

a) But its 13,004kb that could go towards FM.

b) I want to play FM without having to load up and leave background programs running.

c) I wouldn't need customer service if I just installed the game from the CD like in previous years.

d) I'm not that lazy, can quite easily download the patch and update it myself.

e) I'll take the in game achievements of winning the league etc over Steam achievements that mean nothing to me at all.

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Oh no this is totally unacceptable...i think...

I use the library for internet like now. I don't have it at home. Does that mean there is no point in me purchasing FM12?

Surely this is going to lead more people to getting the pirated version. There are already many Steam only games that are pirated. I just dont understand this reasoning.

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From your reply it didnt seem like you had considered it tho..

I think your the one who cant see this from their point of view

(I used to work for SI, btw)

Of course I can see it from their point of view. They get:

- a game that's more difficult to pirate

- a game that it's easier to distribute worldwide

- patches that only need building and testing for one delivery method

- the ability to see exactly how a huge proportion of their users play the game (the majority won't bother to turn data collection off)

So how do I, the customer, benefit?

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Oh no this is totally unacceptable...i think...

I use the library for internet like now. I don't have it at home. Does that mean there is no point in me purchasing FM12?

Surely this is going to lead more people to getting the pirated version. There are already many Steam only games that are pirated. I just dont understand this reasoning.

if you have access to the net even in the library you can still set the game up to play, buy the disk, install steam whilst in the library, it is a tiny programme, install the game, activate through steam and then set steam to offline mode, you can then play the game anywhere you want without internet access.

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Steam clunky?

You open the icon, it loads automatically, and then you can play your game with at most three clicks. How on earth is that clunky?

Resource hungry? Steam only uses about 60mb of memory. It uses less than firefox, internet explorer and around the same or less as programs like msn messenger, mozilla thunderbird and windows media player.

And that is my point, it works like that for you but for many this is about our ageing pcs and laptops with average build quality who just don't do that well with software such as steam running as well as fm as well as music or browser, its fact and this decision excludes many that keep their pc precisely for fm.

as with the claim from si that the game is pirated to a ridiculous factor (which clearly it is) and people say 'no its not' the claim I am making is that this decision EXCLUDES the many that are not really bothered for their pc and especially not third party software; many do not have the pc power or the inclination to want steam, they just play FM!

They have been left in the wayside (and there are a lot more of them than you think) because some morons (pirates) decided to not be part of the community and team FM think they should have Rockstar games finances.....oh wait as I understand it they do, Everton certainly think so.

if I can launch it from the desktop without steam being part of it i am in, if not well its a matter for the pc competition gods.

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I cannot belive how many people do not have the net!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I personally cannot afford the monthly payments. I always bought FM as I knew it would keep me occupied. I use hotspots or the library for internet browsing. This is such bad news now knowing I wont beable to get the game from the shops.

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We've never once said that we believe Steam will stop piracy altogether just that it's believed that, of all the options available, it offers the best possible service for activation/DRM this year and that it will dramatically help reduce the number of people who pirate the game. Not stop it completely, of course - we're not naive, but that it would reduce piracy more than any alternative investigated would.

We also believe that with the improvements that Steam have made over recent months and years it offers a really good customer experience and only improves the experience of playing Football Manager for those that wish to play it in online mode. We wouldn't have done it otherwise. Those who don't wish to use Steam after activation only have to activate once and leave it in offline mode from then on. It doesn't use much resources and quietly sits there minding it's own business until you want to use it online.

We've also never said that we think a pirated game equals a lost sale. What we've said is IF 25% of those who pirated the game bought it, we believe our world wide sales figures would double. We're not saying that's going to happen (although it would be great if it did) all we're trying to do is highlight the problem that piracy brings to Football Manager and tell you the reasons why we're trying to battle it.

1 pirated game might not equal 1 lost sale, but surely you must accept that IF the game wasn't piratable (is that a word?) the game would sell more? Of course it would, that's just common sense.

More sales = more more money invested into SI as a studio which = a better game for the honest people who buy the game legally each year. That is our honest motivation behind all of this, if you can't believe or accept that then I'm sorry, there's not much more I can say.

If the main aim is to prevent piracy, then why have you chosen the platform through which piracy has actually been streamlined? With no need to crack individual games anymore, as soon as the game is out, it's playable through illegal steam clients.

Serious question, surely someone in your office must be aware there are more secure methods of piracy protection. Nobody is disputing that if a game is harder to crack then the likelihood is that the people who want to play the game will need to buy it, but going through steam is easier than having to get a NO-CD executable back in the day.

For the record i use steam a lot for online games, it's a good program for online games, but as previously stated, the games which have less piracy are the ones with verification and anti-piracy methods in addition to getting through the steam login.

EDIT: To make it clearer, i'm sure people wouldn't complain if it was a viable method of stopping piracy, but it isn't.

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if you have access to the net even in the library you can still set the game up to play, buy the disk, install steam whilst in the library, it is a tiny programme, install the game, activate through steam and then set steam to offline mode, you can then play the game anywhere you want without internet access.

You cant install programs on library computers. They only let you surf the net.

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Bertie, I really do appreciate that you're still on here posting on a Friday evening, to be honest I do think you should get down the pub & sink a few.

To address your post I do hope that the numbers that you (SI/SEGA) came up with Cleary showed that the use of Steam would offer significant advantages over other authentication methods but as I've eluded to I fear your efforts will be for nought. We've already seen people freely admit to exploiting the last authentication system to allow a 2nd person to play the game without purchase which in my mind indicates that the fight against piracy will never be won & TBH you will not significantly reduce the number of illegal copies in use or conversely significantly increase your unit sales.

I sincerely hope that an alternative method will be considered for future version or that SEGA would consider investing some of its vast resources into researching improved security measures that can be included in the game code that renders non-authentic copies unplayable therefore eliminating the need for the support of a third party who themselves could become a target for the publicity junkies that have plagued countless firms over recent years.

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We've never once said that we believe Steam will stop piracy altogether just that it's believed that, of all the options available, it offers the best possible service for activation/DRM this year and that it will dramatically help reduce the number of people who pirate the game.

Steam games are pirated on day 0.

Pirates will be able to play on day of release.

How will steam, a platform that has its copy protection cracked on a regular basis DRAMATICALLY reduce piracy ?

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How so ? care to elaborate

Just done the whole post then deleted by mistake. :mad:

Anyway, i said earlier but i'll say it again. There's actually 3 main reasons for me.

1) Steam loads the game faster,ime.

2) Patching the game is ALOT easier, all you have to do is click a button not go to some link and hope it works, i remember being frustrated by this in the past and stuff not working properly.

3) My games no longer get corrupted AT ALL. Only had one problem recently with a game getting (almost)corrupted and got it sorted. My games were never this secure without steam, so can only put it down to that.

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We've never once said that we believe Steam will stop piracy altogether just that it's believed that, of all the options available, it offers the best possible service for activation/DRM this year and that it will dramatically help reduce the number of people who pirate the game. Not stop it completely, of course - we're not naive, but that it would reduce piracy more than any alternative investigated would.

We also believe that with the improvements that Steam have made over recent months and years it offers a really good customer experience and only improves the experience of playing Football Manager for those that wish to play it in online mode. We wouldn't have done it otherwise. Those who don't wish to use Steam after activation only have to activate once and leave it in offline mode from then on. It doesn't use much resources and quietly sits there minding it's own business until you want to use it online.

We've also never said that we think a pirated game equals a lost sale. What we've said is IF 25% of those who pirated the game bought it, we believe our world wide sales figures would double. We're not saying that's going to happen (although it would be great if it did) all we're trying to do is highlight the problem that piracy brings to Football Manager and tell you the reasons why we're trying to battle it.

1 pirated game might not equal 1 lost sale, but surely you must accept that IF the game wasn't piratable (is that a word?) the game would sell more? Of course it would, that's just common sense.

More sales = more more money invested into SI as a studio which = a better game for the honest people who buy the game legally each year. That is our honest motivation behind all of this, if you can't believe or accept that then I'm sorry, there's not much more I can say.

What you haven't explained is why Steam is the only way to battle it? If I accept that it's the "best" method, why are there no other options available to me?

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thanks for the response, I certainly agree that several downloads can be equated to a lost sale.

Are you going to address the notorious unreliability of Steam's 'offline mode'. It's fairly disingenous to repeatedly say "you can just pop it in offline mode straight after activating if you want", because someone playing in offline mode is far more likely to experience technical problems than someone playing in 'normal' steam, and mixing and matching the two frequently makes things worse.

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if you have access to the net even in the library you can still set the game up to play, buy the disk, install steam whilst in the library, it is a tiny programme, install the game, activate through steam and then set steam to offline mode, you can then play the game anywhere you want without internet access.

mp, you do realise that the computers in libraries are either part of a network with a central server or give users very limited rights and those will almost certainly include the inability to run .exe files. How does he install steam then?

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I've had my say about Steam already - and I'm not going to add to that.

Some of the methods used to activate the game in the past have not gone down too well. San Marino in the European Championship final on pirated versions (and some non-pirated it seemed), activation servers being hacked etc.

It is inevitable that pirating is here to stay and I doubt it will ever disappear.

Perhaps what SI could do is try their best to persuade those who are not using a legitimate version of the game to purchase it through the game itself. It should be easy to program this in if Steam has not run the game.

Not everyone will pay but there are those out there who will take the decision to do so if they think it's a good enough game to warrant the money.

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mp, you do realise that the computers in libraries are either part of a network with a central server or give users very limited rights and those will almost certainly include the inability to run .exe files. How does he install steam then?

You'd need to take a laptop in and use their wifi, which I think is what he's alluding to.

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Just done the whole post then deleted by mistake. :mad:

Anyway, i said earlier but i'll say it again. There's actually 3 main reasons for me.

1) Steam loads the game faster,ime.

2) Patching the game is ALOT easier, all you have to do is click a button not go to some link and hope it works, i remember being frustrated by this in the past and stuff not working properly.

3) My games no longer get corrupted AT ALL. Only had one problem recently with a game getting (almost)corrupted and got it sorted. My games were never this secure without steam, so can only put it down to that.

what a load of nonsense.

1- steam doesnt load the game faster. it takes 5-10 seconds for steam to start even when offline.

2-patching the game with steam is not easier, you have to go online mode, which takes more time than just coming here and Dling a torrent

3- the chance of a game getting corrupted is the same if you use steam or not. there is no magical guardians watching over the files in the stream folder.

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My biggest criticism of Steam is that I keep people saying they lost access to their games, then others countering with "I lost access to my games but it was sorted within a few hours. Great customer service from Steam" (obviously paraphrased) - to lose access to a game I've purchased due to third party for ANY length of time is completely unacceptable! Steam users seem grateful that Steam resolves issues reasonably quickly where they're issues completely generated by Steam itself. I find it bizarre.

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What you haven't explained is why Steam is the only way to battle it? If I accept that it's the "best" method, why are there no other options available to me?

I believe Unilock went out of business earlier this year, which has removed the main alternative.

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i play exclusively on a laptop. When you download steam and then activate your FM game, you can turn off the steam and play in offline mode and the game plays the same. I dont have to turn on Steam to play the game. It will automatically turn on when you start the game. The Steam application will recognize that it cant connect to the internet but cause you have played a game connected to the intenet and saved previously, you dont have to be connected to Steam to continue playing the game. I travel alot and sometimes dont have Internet access where i am and play just fine!!!!

Stop worrying about Steam all of you!!!!!

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Just done the whole post then deleted by mistake. :mad:

Anyway, i said earlier but i'll say it again. There's actually 3 main reasons for me.

1) Steam loads the game faster,ime.

2) Patching the game is ALOT easier, all you have to do is click a button not go to some link and hope it works, i remember being frustrated by this in the past and stuff not working properly.

3) My games no longer get corrupted AT ALL. Only had one problem recently with a game getting corrupted and got it sorted. My games were never this secure without steam, so can only put it down to that.

1) Never been an issue for me personally.

2) Why are you so willing to accept poor programming? For the amount of resources Saga have all of the major bugs should be ironed out . Yes i work as a developer and know that patches are necessary, but wouldnt you hope for a playable game out of a box (digital download)

3) The game has never corrupted for me? Do you use 3rd party application to modify saves ?

I really hate that its being forced on a user this way. If there are enough valid reasons to use it will, but if we go down this route. I might as well send my pc to Saga, let them install all the crap they want to play the game. First its steam, next is itunes to play sounds, google search to search for players in the game etc..

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what a load of nonsense.

1- steam doesnt load the game faster. it takes 5-10 seconds for steam to start even when offline.

2-patching the game with steam is not easier, you have to go online mode, which takes more time than just coming here and Dling a torrent

3- the chance of a game getting corrupted is the same if you use steam or not. there is no magical guardians watching over the files in the stream folder.

Keep on moaning. Patching the game is easier and it does run better. I know from my own experience, thank you.

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I really hope that the one time steam activation will combat piracy, but do you have any figures that prove that steam activated games are less pirated? To me the decision seems to be more based on nudging us towards the use of steam. I would not at all be surprised if Steam pays you guys for the extra signed up members,

Hi, as I've already said STEAM do not pay SEGA or SI for doing this, it's not done to push people to Steam, it's just that Steam provides the best anti piracy solution at the moment that is relatively unobtrusive to the consumer. The financial gain here, as we've been transparent about is that we think there not being pirated versions out there before the game is available to buy, and for the period we believe we can keep it protected after will increase sales.

We release the game on a disk to give consumers a choice of how to purchase it. You may not have a credit card for example. You may be not old enough to have a credit card, so you can go to the shop and pay in cash, rather than force you to buy online.

We believe that the vast vast majority of people will be able to connect to the internet to activate the game. They don;t have to after that.

And it is a fact that more people play a pirated version of FM every year than buy it. I've seen the stats. It's a far worse situation than many think. Please believe us when we say we've looked into whether we need to protect the game, what the benefits of each system are, how much they **** off the genuine buyer, and whether we should do this or not. It's been a process thats taken a few years, as I posted this time last year. We think we have a system now that will help protect the game and won't be unacceptable to the vast majority of our players. There are hoops to jump through, but we believe they are small and give some benefit as well. Some people will not want Steam, end of story. I respect that decision, and I'm sorry if you then don't get to play FM12. We think that most people, the vast majority, will find Steam no problem at all and will enjoy playing FM12 with it.

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I'm really not happy about this either. I've used Steam once before, I didn't like it and I deleted it. Now I have to use it if I want to play FM12.

I'm still basing my opinion on the game on the demo (assuming there still is one). If I like the game, I'll buy it. If not, I won't. But if I end up buying it and have any problems with Steam, I definitely won't be buying any more in the future as long as this remains the only method.

Also, sorry if it's already been addressed, but how will patches work with Steam? In the past, there have been some patches I've downloaded and felt made the game worse, so I went back to a previous patch. Will I still be able to do this?

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1) Never been an issue for me personally.

2) Why are you so willing to accept poor programming? For the amount of resources Saga have all of the major bugs should be ironed out . Yes i work as a developer and know that patches are necessary, but wouldnt you hope for a playable game out of a box (digital download)

3) The game has never corrupted for me? Do you use 3rd party application to modify saves ?

I really hate that its being forced on a user this way. If there are enough valid reasons to use it will, but if we go down this route. I might as well send my pc to Saga, let them install all the crap they want to play the game. First its steam, next is itunes to play sounds, google search to search for players in the game etc..

Nope, no 3rd parties. And its not poor to me.

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i play exclusively on a laptop. When you download steam and then activate your FM game, you can turn off the steam and play in offline mode and the game plays the same. I dont have to turn on Steam to play the game. It will automatically turn on when you start the game. The Steam application will recognize that it cant connect to the internet but cause you have played a game connected to the intenet and saved previously, you dont have to be connected to Steam to continue playing the game. I travel alot and sometimes dont have Internet access where i am and play just fine!!!!

Stop worrying about Steam all of you!!!!!

"it works fine for me, therefore it works fine for everyone"

if only pc gaming worked this way we'd all be happier :D

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Also, sorry if it's already been addressed, but how will patches work with Steam? In the past, there have been some patches I've downloaded and felt made the game worse, so I went back to a previous patch. Will I still be able to do this?

You can turn off auto-patching. I think you can re-install the game without patches if need be, but I'm not sure.

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