Posted March 07, 2018
MarkoH01: Anti cheating in a game that does not have any working mutlti player? I don't think so. Prevent espionage? Might be but I don't think that would be the reason with such an old game. But no mattter the reason simply calling it "no DRM" just because the reason COULD be one of those above is too easy imo. I understand what you want to say. It's probably quite problematic/costly/inefficient to remove this and I would in fact be be o.k. with this if GOG would adress this openly maybe even offering a refund to those few who aren't o.k. with it since people who are buying here expect their games to be completely[ DRM-free.
hmm, i'm not getting into a discussion about the exact definition of "DRM" in this particular forum ^^ Anybody has made up their minds already anyway. As I said classifying anti-debugging techniques per se as "DRM" does not make sense to me. I guess you will have to analyze the executable of each game you buy and try to get a refund if it doesn't match your "100% clean" vision. And maybe start a list of games who are similarly "dirty", so that nobody who shares your opinion will accidentally buy them.
I wouldn't hold my breath though that GOG (or (game) developers in general) will ever completely satisfy your expectations.
MarkoH01: You have to analyze the history from the beginning. First GOG said it's only dormant DRM DOING NOTHING (that's obviously not the case since dormant DRM would simply do nothing - no matter which third party tool I would use). Then they promised a workaround and did nothing for three years. Now, three years later after contacting support (otherwise they would not even have answered here again) they suddenly tell us that it's "just" an anti-debugging measure and that they don't plan to do anything at all. So why all those different and at least partly wrong explanations?
now hold on. Those are separate issues if my memory of this thread is correct. The first issue, which started the thread, is about the (unused?) FEARMP.exe. If a user accidentally clicks on that exe it will install some (dormant) files and a bunch of registry entries. While that doesn't actively do any harm it isn't particularly nice. Especially since that stuff won't get removed if you uninstall the game from what I understand. Leaving stuff behind is just shitty behavior (regardless of whether it is SecuROM or something else).
GOG said they had a workaround for this "in the works" and since apparently it would be enough to simply delete FEARMP.exe or replace it with a dummy exe it is unclear why that fix is taking so long.
The second issue which was posted just last year is that the two expansions don't launch if you have the ProcessMonitor tool running. It's not clear to me whether that was reported to support at the time or whether they acknowledged the issue here on the forums. Anyway, when someone opened a support ticked about it a few days ago, GOG replied (paraphrasing): "it's just an anti-debugger protection and we won't be removing it since the available workaround of simply closing ProcessMonitor seems acceptable for us."
different explanations for different problems
Post edited March 07, 2018 by immi101