Gears of War PC Patch Restores Playability
The 6.29 MB download resolves an issue with the game's digital certificate, which expired on January 28 and prevented players from booting the game thereafter.
"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," Epic VP Mark Rein had explained.
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disposition
replyLOL, that only took how many days?
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it would have been absolutely unacceptable had Gears been a PC exclusive release. However, it wasn't (in fact it was flogged pretty damn hard on the 360), so there wasn't as much of a customer demand to justify Epic and Microsoft dropping everything and fixing it on day one.
I don't mean to belittle any of the Gears PC fans here, but business is business. And yes, it is very very sad to see this situation play out, knowing that it could very well play out again for anyone else who didn't get the code signing 100% correct to account for gamers being able to start the game after the code signing certificate expires.
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Almost two weeks to re-sign a binary. That's absolutely fucking pathetic. You don't need to change any code, you literally take the exe and run a tool on it. (Even if they somehow didn't have a current cert to use there would've been others they could borrow, surely. MS have a few...)
I wonder who is to blame.
I'm guessing it's MS's GfW certification stuff that would rather leave people unable to play the game at all than push out a very low-risk patch.
(This is on top of the original screw-up where the exe cert wasn't timestamped meaning it expired with the signing cert. That I can forgive as it's easy not to realise you need to do that, I guess.)
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I hope that the words "TIMESTAMP YOUR CERTS" appears in huge huge letters in section 2.3 of the Games for Windows Technical Requirements document ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb173456(VS.85).aspx#_2.3 ). This whole 11-day-long snafu could have been avoided had the person who signed the gold master's executable followed instructions.
And to add insult to injury, the UT3 demo is affected by the exact same issue, though it's also a blessing in disguise as it will effectively prevent anyone from playing the pre-release code of UT3 (let's just hope that Epic is busy putting together a completely new demo with levels that exhibit the best traits of UT3, and not simply the easiest-to-package-in-a-1-GB-file trats).
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