Gears of War Digital Cert Fiasco Kills Game

A digital certificate that expired on 1/28 effectively kills the game Gears of War, as users who try to run it receive a "'You cannot run this game with modified executable code, please reinstall" error.



The issue has been traced to the aforementioned expired digital certificate (shown). Obviously since the game was released in Nov. of 2007 for the PC, no one at Epic Games or Microsoft could possibly imagine that anyone would still be playing it 15 months later, right?

It's hard to decided whether to call this hilarious, sad, stupid, or just plain silly.




An Epic Games Super Moderator posted the following on the Epic Games forum:

We have been notified of the issue and are working with Microsoft to get it resolved. Sorry for any problems related to this. I'll post more once we have a resolution.

Fortunately, resetting the clock on the PC seems to work for many. However, it's just plain silly that something like this would take down a game. And considering how hard the gaming divisions at Microsoft were hit by the recent layoffs, they might be waiting for some time (Gears of War is an Epic game but is published by Microsoft Game Studios).