TRON: Evolution was originally delisted from Steam back in April of this year, but beginning in early October players who owned the game found that it was now unplayable if it wasn’t previously installed. After doing some digging, Steam user SillyWalk discovered that the culprit was the SecuROM DRM that Disney used to stave off piracy of the PC game since its release in 2010.
The support staff at SecuROM confirmed that “we can’t run this service anymore for Disney titles, therefore all activations are denied”. By this point other owners had also reached out to Disney about the issue, several of which received the same email explanation:
Our team is aware that the activation site for this game is no longer live and has since been shut down. At this time, if the game was not already previously installed it will no longer be able to be launched. We are looking into this hiccup and hoping to patch this in the future. However, at this time we do not have any current estimated time on when this will be.
So Disney stopped paying the maintenance fee for DRM and now their already-delisted game is even more unplayable. I’d label it as outright Unbelievable but now that it’s happened, I’m only surprised that I didn’t think of it as a delisting factor sooner. Studios incur an untold amount of fees to keep their games online, even after they’ve been removed from sale, and unfortunately, ‘DRM provider’ is just another one we are now painfully aware of.
Thanks again to The Everyday Otacon for pointing out this news.