Max Frustration —

DRM glitch leaves new Max Payne 3 buyers temporarily in the lurch

Rockstar Social Club hiccup meant no new installs for Steam Sale buyers.

"Couldn't log on. Nothing but errors. 'Join the social club,' they said. I'd show them a club—a club filled with blood and the souls of the damned."
Enlarge / "Couldn't log on. Nothing but errors. 'Join the social club,' they said. I'd show them a club—a club filled with blood and the souls of the damned."

Rockstar’s Max Payne 3 is 70% off right now as part of the 2014 Steam Holiday Sale, but would-be neo-noir crime story aficionados were denied entry into the cynical world of the drug-dependent detective yesterday by a failure in the game’s third-party authentication and matchmaking system. Starting early on Friday, December 19, the Rockstar Social Club component of the game would respond only with "Error contacting activation server" when players tried to start up the game for the first time.

Though Max Payne 3 players only use the Rockstar Social Club for multiplayer games, the Social Club is also a DRM system, functioning as an activation gate and validating new users’ product keys. PC users who buy the game through Steam must still log on to the Social Club before they can play multi- or single player.

The problem popped up at a particularly bad time, since Max Payne 3 was being featured as a Steam sale item. It sparked a vitriolic Reddit post and numerous threads on the game’s Steam discussion subforum, with frustrated customers immediately jumping to the conclusion that Rockstar had disabled or shut down the Social Club service for the game. Max Payne 3 was released on PC in June 2012, and disabling activation services of a 2.5-year-old title would indeed have been an extraordinarily customer-hostile move.

Fortunately, that’s not what had happened. Ars reached out to Rockstar for comment on Saturday evening, and the company quickly responded and assured us that the issue was a temporary one and that it was working on a fix. A few hours later, at about 10:35pm, Rockstar notified Ars that the problem had been resolved and the Social Club servers were once again accepting connections.

Although this was a temporary issue and not an actual shutdown, it does once again raise the question of what customers are supposed to do when companies decide to take down their mandatory DRM authentication and match-making services. Several other companies have yanked the proverbial rug out from underneath paying customers, denying them the ability to play "unsupported" older games. In many cases, customers have no legal recourse, since reverse-engineering workarounds runs afoul of the anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The original Max Payne title was released in July 2001 and remains perfectly playable more than thirteen years later (with a bit of tweaking for modern versions of Windows). Its first sequel, released near the end of 2003, is also still playable. It’s impossible to predict whether Max Payne 3 with its Rockstar Social Club dependency will be as playable when it’s the same age as its predecessors are today.

Channel Ars Technica