
EA To Use Controversial Internet-Required DRM On New Games (Phones Home Every 10 days) - chaostheory
http://techdirt.com/articles/20080507/1353061058.shtml
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dbreunig
Time to play devil's advocate: can you blame them? On paper, Crysis was a near
flop, but when it comes to actual installs it's close to the game of the year!

Crysis has been on Pirates Bay since last November and still has over 600
seeders. For most of Dec and Jan it was the top game!
(<http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3883491/Crysis-Razor1911>) The stats were
impressive enough to drive Crytek towards console development.

PC gaming is a tricky business. The counter-argument going around today is
that MMO's are a billion+ business. Granted, but they phone home every time
you sign on.

~~~
hobbs
I wonder how many of the downloaders were simply kicking the tires to see how
well it would run on their paltry 2007 vintage hardware.

Seriously though, to play god's advocate: check out this article from the CEO
of Stardock games: [http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080320-pc-game-
develo...](http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080320-pc-game-developer-
has-radical-message-ignore-the-pirates.html) (Ignore the Pirates)

Back to devil's advocate: Stardock has a good reputation among gamers for
being a scrappy independent publisher, so they get some respect from would-be
pirates. I don't know that a faceless megacorp like EA could play the same
hand.

~~~
dbreunig
This just in: EA dropping dial-a-DRM.

[http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/05/09/update-mass-effect-
for-...](http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/05/09/update-mass-effect-for-pc-drops-
dial-a-drm/)

------
henning
DRM and other crap is already common in gaming.

For instance, Valve's Steam service is quite successful (it has major titles
like Team Fortress 2, the Half-Life franchise, Call of Duty 4, etc.) and won't
let you run any games without phoning home to it (and running a packet sniffer
shows that it's sending some kind of packets home once every 15-45 seconds).
You can't even play single-player gamers without it connecting over the
Internet.

Also, the Need for Speed games have advertisements in them, when you've
already bought the game. Like, you crash into an SUV and you see a big car
insurance company logo on the side, and every time you get a call on your
phone from one of the NPCs, you see a Verizon logo. If that isn't enough ammo
to help people rationalize copyright infringement I don't know what is.

~~~
asdflkj
DRM is common, and it never works. Valve's single player games are as easy to
pirate as anything else. Has there ever been a single player game where DRM
succeeded?

~~~
jcl
The game companies know that DRM doesn't work in the long term. But they
believe it can work in the short term. Many games make the bulk of their money
in a few weeks or months. To be effective, DRM only needs to keep the hackers
busy for this period -- or so says the advertising of the DRM creators.

After this period, however, the DRM serves no purpose other than to frustrate
legitimate buyers. Ideally, the game creators would disable the DRM after it
has served its purpose, thereby eliminating problems for their customers as
well as freeing up server resources and support call costs. Unfortunately,
there are few companies willing to do this.

~~~
pmjordan
Given this theory, a recent example makes even less sense: I bought Company of
Heroes shortly after it was released, and it had no copy protection other than
a serial key for playing online.

The expansion pack added a phone-home "feature" or alternatively DVD checks
with a message box you had to click away every time you start a game or return
to the menu. (if you don't have an internet connection or block its attempts
to connect)

A recent patch has made this even more annoying by alternating which disc it
wants and under certain circumstances appears to completely stop working if it
can't phone home. Great when their servers go down.

Ugh. I'm sorry, that kind of user experience just doesn't cut it.

