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Mark Rein: GoW issue caused by expired certificate, not DRM

Epic's Mark Rein has responded to the online outcry over the Gears of War issues on the PC, stating that the problems are not DRM-related, but are due to a certificate with an expiration date that caused the executable file to stop working.

By Ben Kuchera | Last updated February 1, 2009 6:23
Mark Rein: GoW issue caused by expired certificate, not DRM

Ben Kuchera

On Friday we ran a story on the issues PC gamers were having with their version of Gears of War. In short, the game simply stopped working. While the culprit was first assumed to be DRM, Epic Games VP Mark Rein released a statement.

"The problem is not related to DRM. The online cheat detection features in Gears of War for Windows are based on digital signatures. Well, we made an embarrassing mistake: we signed the executable with a certificate that expired in a way that broke the game," he wrote.

"We're working with Microsoft to re-sign the binaries properly, and hope to have this fixed very soon. We know how much this situation sucks, and we apologize for the inconvenience. In the mean time a work-around for this is to set your computer's date back to a date before today."

This is still an unfortunate issue that should have been caught before the game shipped, and we hope a patch comes sooner rather than later, but the issue is not related to any digital rights management included in the game. We apologize for jumping to the conclusion that DRM was to blame, and we hope this clarifies the issue. We have since updated the story.