If you’re a Gears of War fan and it happens that you own the PC version of the game, we have some really bad news for you: the game can no longer be played! You’ll receive a “This certificate has expired or is not yet valid” error when you try to start Gears of War and your only solution to be able to still play the game would be that of changing your system’s date (since if it’s after January 28th, you can’t play).

Epic’s forums are being flooded by complaints from angry gamers who rightfully blame the developers for ruining their experience. There is unclear at the moment why on earth did Epic decide to do such a stupid thing and limit the play time to the 28th January, but at least they’re doing their best to fix the problem, as a forum mod said: “We have been notified of the issue and are working with Microsoft to get it resolved”

However, this frustrating expired certificate error has turned quite some PC owners against Epic. User drowningsmoke wrote: “I had this problem this evening, I had to change the date and time (from PM to AM) and I am able to get in just fine. I also changed it back to the current date and time and it didn’t work. Change it baack to yesterday AM and it works fine… EPIC games won’t be on my list anytime soon….”

But we can say that now publishers have yet another reason to think twice when “DRM” comes to their mind. Until then, have in mind that the only way to fix the expired certificate error for Gears of War is to change your system’s date: anything before January 28 works!