'Gears of War' maker: Bug caused by anti-cheat technology

03.02.2009
The bug in Gears of Warthat locked out players starting last Thursday was caused by flaws in the game's anti-cheating software, not anti-piracy technology, said an executive at maker Epic Games.

The bug had only locked out players with legitimate versions of Gears, not the many users with pirated copies of the popular game, say multiple reports.

With no official word from Epic or , the game's publisher, or TryMedia, the maker of the SafeDisc DRM used to stop illegal copying, gamers quickly assumed that digital rights management (DRM) technology was at fault.

But Epic founder and vice-president Mark Rein said in an e-mail on Monday that "the problem is not related to DRM."

"The online cheat detection features in Gears of War for Windows are based on digital signatures," wrote Rein in a message that was also posted to the game's players forum. "Well, we made an embarrassing mistake: we signed the executable with a certificate that expired in a way that broke the game."

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