EA is betting that this is a temporary concern from a small minority of their customers. And as statistically accurate as that may be, they are a very vocal bunch: presently still outraged on the forums, still encouraging a whole new population of pirates (who otherwise would have been paying customers) and even using user created content to protest in-game. The company also stated that less than 1% of users would ever meet or wish to exceed the three install limit, but gamers read that statement to say that all of this trouble that paying customers were going through was for less than 1%.
It's also worth noting that the game was cracked several days prior to street and widely available on the P2P sites. It's just that it didn't gain the visibility and subsequent popularity until it shipped and the DRM became such an issue.
One morsel of good news for EA's consumers came in the announcement that the next game to ship with SecuROM, Red Alert 3, will have a more permissive five installs – news that didn't have the desired effect of placating gamers.
It seems that the Mexican standoff only has one of several ways to end, with the two most obvious being gamers backing down and accepting their newly marginalized rights or EA backing down and releasing a patch which increases the number of installs. If it's the latter, it really only serves as a Band-Aid on a bullet hole. The damage is done and the delay in responding has been significant.
The debate here isn't, assuredly, about piracy. This DRM did nothing to combat the cracking of the game. In fact, it essentially helped in training legions of customers how to become pirates and legitimized their rationalization in the process. With each additional negative story – which seem to be released hourly – you can almost hear the collective cringing of anti-piracy executives who know that they have all been forced to take a giant leap backwards due to this fiasco.
While we haven't yet heard of any formal class action lawsuits or investigations into bait-and-switch, it really can't be too far off. Here's hoping that EA does the right thing and makes amends with their customers before it gets much worse.
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Hal Halpin is the president of the Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA).
Reader Comments (3)
This article is exactly correct that agressive DRM's just train pirates. I've been seeing such a trend in the Sims community for the last year, as a result of Securom 7 being on the Sims games. People who wouldn't have dreamed of pirating anything started doing so when they introduced Securom with Bon Voyage. Even people like me who don't Pirate, know where to find the NoCD hacks (not illegal in Australia where I live). I spend a small fortune on games every year, and I will keep spending that money on the games I enjoy. I just don't spend money on EA games anymore, they don't deserve my hard earned money. However the issue of piracy keeps masking a bigger issue for people. What we want from game developers are games that perform as advertised, have realistic specs and don't mess with our pcs. The fact that EA is happy to use something like Securom that messes up people's CD drives and dials home to Sony using encrypted transmissions, is disrespect towards the people who pay for their games. If the game companies started talking to their customers and treating them with some kind of respect, they wouldn't be in this mess now. Stardock has that relationship and large numbers of people go out of their way to pay for their product as soon as they publish it. Saraswati http://reclaimyourgame.com/
Here's another $100 they won't be seeing unless they remove that **** from the install. That's a shame too, because I was looking forward to Spore. --- Oh, and Red Faction 3 as well? Make that $200...
The limit on the number of installs is only part of the problem with the SecuROM DRM system. There's also the fact that SecuROM is known to have prevent legitimate software, such as Process Explorer, from running on a system it's installed on due to concerns that it might be used to hack the DRM. Some legit CD/DVD burning software has also been affected not to mention some CD/DVD drives won't work properly with SecuROM. Even if SecuROM works properly with your current hardware and software the SecuROM software updates itself, without your knowledge or consent, on a regular basis and a future update could cause problems that weren't present previously. Not to mention that it regularly sends off information about your system and how you use it without informing you of what data is captured or giving you the option to opt out. The fact that it's being used to limit how many installs you can have is just the icing on the cake in terms of why I'll never buy a game that uses SecuROM. It's not even an issue of wanting to install it on more than three systems as much as being able to install it after a system crash or restage without having to call EA and beg for a new license. There are three of us in my family that were looking forward to playing Spore and we were willing to plunk down $150 for three copies so we could all play it at once, but not if SecuROM is part of the package. That's $150 EA won't be seeing anytime soon. The fact that the game was cracked and on the net five days before it was released shows that there's no valid justification to include SecuROM to "stop" piracy. There's obviously some other ulterior motive in mind.