Yesterday, EA CEO John Riccitiello commented that the Spore DRM controversy was "something that 99.8 percent of users wouldn't notice." Speaking to Gamasutra, he further qualified his position on DRM.

"I personally hate DRM," said Riccitiello. "I don't like the whole concept; it can be a little bit cumbersome. But I don't like locks on my door, and I don't like to use keys in my car... I'd like to live in a world where there are no passports. Unfortunately, we don't – and I think the vast majority of people voted with their wallets and went out and bought Spore."

"They picked the highest-profile game they could find. I respect them for the success of their movement," he added. "I'm guessing that half of them were pirates, and the other half were people caught up in something that they didn't understand. If I'd had a chance to have a conversation with them, they'd have gotten it. We're going to see an evolution of these things. I wish we didn't live in a world where we had to do these types of things. I want it to be seamless and easy - but I also don't want to have a bonfire of money."

Shifting gears to the recently high-profile cancellation of Tiberium, Riccitiello commented, "If you want to put good food on the table and you've got chefs in the back, you give them better ingredients, better training -- and when you burn the omelet, you don't serve it. This is a perfect example of EA investing in quality."

"It's a perverse notion – beyond perverse, bizarre, upside down, illogical, stupid to state that we've killed a project that wasn't going to yield what we thought wasn't a high enough quality product as indicative of problems," he continued. "When something's not meeting expectations... you can course correct by giving it more time, more money, changing the concept or killing the game. If you're committed to quality, you take one of those paths. If you preclude any one of those paths, quality will suffer."

"EA will kill a game or two a year. Forever," Riccitiello noted.