Wow. EA Labels President Frank Gilbeau had what would seem to be heretical words with regards to Digital Rights Management, the thing that tells you how and when you can play the game you purchased in an order to try to stop people from playing the game without paying for it.
"DRM is a failed dead-end strategy; it's not a viable strategy for the gaming business. So what we tried to do creatively is build an online service in the SimCity universe and that's what we sought to achieve."
Well, I like the words that acknowledge a very valid issue, after a certain point of restriction, DRM doesn't restrict pirates as much as it annoys your customer base.
But what he doesn't say is that SimCity deliberately made itself a game that didn't use DRM per se because they wanted it so tied in to online that the always on nature of the internet was de-facto DRM.. and that, quite frankly, failed horribly.
If there was two modes, an offline mode and an online mode, then you wouldn't see these issues, but for a lot of folks, the fact that this game could certainly played offline if not for the deliberate design decisions to make it online only, and the fact that EA did not adequately plot out the launch demand.. So it's good to see that a major company realizes DRM is dead, but the way to fix it is not making it DRM under another guise.
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