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EA Won't Use DRM For The Sims 3
After taking heavy criticism for the use of SecuROM in Spore and other games, EA has made the decision to go back to simple serial code authentication for The Sims 3. EA's Rod Humble said simply, "We feel like this is a good, time-proven solution that makes it easy for you to play the game without DRM methods that feel overly invasive or leave you concerned about authorization server access in the distant future."
EA's track record isn't the greatest, but if they go through with it, it's a step in the right direction. Getting everyone pissed off with DRM then suddenly reversing your stance is good PR too.
Perhaps they realize that DRM is almost entirely useless and that they shouldn't piss off the people who actually do pay for video games.
I agree with you on a theoretical level. But the reality of the situation is much different. The fact that EA has realized that treating their customers like criminals is not good business practice is a vast improvement and I can only hope that other developers follow suit.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
Serial keys aren't all that bad. Are there any activation server overloads you have to worry about (ala: Half-Life 2)? Can you install the game in 10 years? 20 years? Heck, even 250 years if the media lasts that long?
It only inconveniences casual copiers. Pirates will, of course, have it cracked, but what does it matter to you?
After the Mrs. got stung with the various SecureROM trojans fubaring her system, she made the hard decision not to buy any more EA titles.
I was excited about Spore, but refused to buy either it or the creature creator pack.
Apparently there were quite enough people (who also spammed Amazon.com feedback, perhaps?) who made the same decisions that EA felt a bit of monetary sting.
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Depends on the system.
(semi)Oldschool games like Soldier of Fortune, with PunkBuster etc, is sort of a self-serializing system, where you can toss in any key you want (thats legit) for offline play, but online play may not work if there are multiples of the same serial found.
Expanding on that, you could have it sort of like DHT or the Kad networks etc, where the serials get checked against found game servers online (player connects, serial is registered, and propagated to other users on the server, through them to a "known list" of servers, etc). It's not perfect since it uses resources/bandwidth in the background, but basically as long as there is at least one server online, it can continue after the "Official" servers disappear.
On the plus side, you can have subnets with cloned/illegal serials running in a tournament, because to that network they are all legitimate serials.
On the downside, resource usage, and also sort of (anti)idealistically, it makes the DRM viral, sort of feeding off the user-bases computers like a fungus or something. And also, someone can connect with a stolen serial while you are offline, and you wont be able to play online, which leads back into tying it to hardware, or an offshoot of Kad, a sort of GPS location based on ping times, neither really works unless no one abuses it, ie: almost impossible.
Although somewhere in the middle-ground, if it only applied to the servers you were currently playing on, not all known servers, it might be enough of a pain for the devs/dists to consider it viable DRM, and still be quite usable from the users perspective because the servers can take care of their own sort of CAPTCHA to see if it's the user they are familiar with, if not, then boot the cloner etc... and at the same time, really popular servers might make more people buy the game so they can play on those servers.
I'm not really trying to promote the idea, but it is possible, but i've already babbled on too long... all in all DRM sucks, but "simple serials" including it's problems, is far preferable to shit like SecuROM, serials can (usually) be bypassed just as easily as SecuROM nonsense, except it iliminates the the (direct) fascist shit that SecuROM and the likes do to your hardware and software.