Sony is at it again! PC Gamers will get the short end of the stick with the new Sony-owned SecuROM protection system that will be deployed on upcoming PC titles such as Mass Effect and Spore. While many have been unhappy with SecuROM’s shenanigans in the past in the name software piracy protection, the all-new intrusive system will, in effect, treat everyone as a pirate.

With the new SecuROM, when it is deployed on a software product it basically has to be connected to the Internet to phone home every ten days or so to reauthorize the use of the game. This allows the publisher to blacklist keys and verify the game is installed where a user says that it is installed. If verification across the Internet is unable to be completed, it will try again for the next ten days; after which time if it is still unable to validate the key, the software will stop working.

Besides this DRM being inconvenient and intrusive, it will present potential problems for those who are at a LAN party, for example, and don’t have Internet access. And what about users that are traveling on the road with laptops and are away from Internet access?

Gamers got the first taste of the latest Sony-owned SecuROM protection with the PC release of Bioshock, and the results were not pretty; many users reporting a wide variety of problems that were directly associated with SecuROM. While publishers are saying that they are going to provide comprehensive support for users having problems getting their game to verify, it is difficult to believe that they will not have a lot of problems getting this to work seamlessly.

While it is understandable that game publishers for the PC want to be paid for their work, imposing such heavy-handed DRM schemes and forcing people to accept this as the norm is not something that will go over well, from past experience.

PC users will simply not buy the title if word gets out that the protection system is a pain to deal with. In the past, issues with copy protection have affected more than one title; and if users think that they are being spied upon with copy protection they will not support it or the titles. It would be so much easer if PC Gamers just purchased the titles that they are playing, rather than trying to find a way to get something for nothing.

Sony can call it what they want, but with their ongoing behavior it continues to appear that they are penalizing all of us because its Betamax lost the video format war so many years ago. After all they need to make a few more bucks to help offset the up front cost of winning the HD format war with Blu-ray and what better way to do it than sell copy protection that will make people mad and looking for something else to do.