EA DRM - At it's finest


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This is not really about piracy, this is about EA, and people like them, realizing that they made absolutely no money from the sale of their titles on the second hand market. In the good ol days, if you bought a game and did not like it (or had enough of it), you sold it to recoup some dosh. Then it would be sold on to someone else at quite a discount. You got some money, the reseller got some money and someone got a cheap game, and the distributor.publisher got nothing. EA would prefer people not get that discount, and instead that person buy a new copy at the going rate. The easiest way to achieve this is by restricting the amount of installations or tying activation to hardware configuration. When people say this is an antipiracy thing, they are lying through their teeth.

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Is there a reason that you didn't manually de-authorize it before reformatting? Too much software to keep track of, testing something, or something like that?

You hit it right on the nail...

1. I have way too much software, not to mention quite a few games to keep track of which needs to be manually deactivated when reformatting.

2. I was reformatting so often because not only was I testing Windows 7, but I also rearrange my hard drive every so often (for dual booting, etc,) and I did move my primary OS from one hard drive to another a few months ago. Not to mention the times I screw something up :\

It's hard to keep track of all the licensing requirements of all the software you own. I often forget to deactivate stuff.

Yep

I hate this kind of DRM. It does nothing useful for the company at all and just angers people. I have bought two games (Bioshock and an earlier Rainbow 6) that I both cannot play because of the DRM (Bioshock just screwed it up and it won't even accept my CD key, never been able to install it, and the Rainbow 6 DRM drivers cause my OS to BSOD because it force installs XP drivers on Vista / Win6). I'm a believer in paying for what you need (unless you have a damned good reason), as I spend hundreds a year on software for personal purposes and hundreds a year for music, but you can be damned sure I'm pirating the next Bioshock and I already have pirated both Rainbow 6 vegas'es.

Steam is a neat idea and how they do DRM, and they got it right. It works pretty much flawlessly with the true steam games and I find it's amazing. The only thing that sucks about it is that you can't resell the games after you are done playing them unlike console games.

I completely agree about the Steam thing... I think they're doing it alright... yeah not being able to resell isn't that great but it's really not that bad. With Steam, I love that I don't have to worry at all about if I am going to still be able to play my game though.

This is just like FairPlay DRM in iTunes, only without the big reset button they let you use once a year. And it sucks.

I know exactly what you mean. The same thing happened to me but with my Zune. I manually backed up all of my downloaded music (knowing licensing weren't being backed up) thinking that the licenses would just be renewed. Eventually, it said that I could no longer download like 25% of my music collection. Needless to say I no longer by DRM'd music from the Zune marketplace, only MP3s... which now means buying some music from Amazon instead of the Zune marketplace.

I think I might be getting the Zune pass though, and I'll try to only use my 10 free song credits on MP3s instead of WMAs.

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