Gameloft was recently in the limelight and for not a good reason. Their DRM policy, if you remember, stated that once you bought a game from their website that you could not get another copy of it should you lose the original, for any reason. naturally angered pretty much everyone. Gameloft then announced they would change their DRM policy and now we have the details about it.
Thanks to Dave Loft who has a name fitting for this story, sent in the tip to us about the changes taking effect and that are now in place. Previously Gameloft announced that they would be changing the terrible DRM policy they had in place to allow customers the ability to re-download purchased games but no date was mentioned as to when this would be in place.
Well it seems Gameloft has been busy working on exactly that. According to Dave Loft, he received and email from Dumitru at Gameloft who told him that users could now re-download purchased games should they lose their copy for whatever reason. There was no specific details though as to how this would happen. A second email follow after another inquiry by Dave which spoke about how this all works.
“I had asked him what would happen if I gave my wife my Nexus One and I got the Samsung Galaxy S for myself. He explained that each copy of the game has a unique ID which is sent to Gameloft’s servers and is tied to a specific device. Since the user account doesn’t matter technically my wife could use the games after the switch but I could not.
On the plus side he said in case I want to run the game on another phone, he would send me a new link to download. As soon as I was sent the APK files I installed, than removed and tested the ability to reinstall. It all worked perfectly without issue and it’s definitely a requirement.” – Dave Loft
While we here at Droid Gamers along with pretty much everyone else gave Gameloft a lot of crap for their original DRM policy, it is great to see that they have listened to their customers and are making the changes, rather quickly, to keep everyone happy. It is pretty rare these days when you see a company actually fess up to their mistakes and quickly make the changes needed.
Once again thanks to Dave Loft for being on top of all of this and sending us the updates as well. To read his full post about it head over to his blog, Letters From Dave. Also thank you Gameloft for listening to the Android users and making the changes, it shows you actually care about us. If you want to read up on our previous articles about this from the beginning you can find them Here and Here.
Has this changed anyone’s mind about Gameloft and buying games from them via their website? Or are you like a lot of people and refuse to buy them because they are not available on the Android market?
Sidenote: Gameloft games you purchase still don’t receive updates when one comes out, hopefully this will be addressed as well as adding Apps2SD support.
Website Referenced: Letters From Dave
