{"id":133,"date":"2008-05-11T21:28:09","date_gmt":"2008-05-12T02:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/2008\/05\/ea-doesnt-get-piracy\/"},"modified":"2008-05-13T00:34:53","modified_gmt":"2008-05-13T05:34:53","slug":"ea-doesnt-get-piracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/2008\/05\/ea-doesnt-get-piracy\/","title":{"rendered":"EA doesn&#8217;t get piracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you haven&rsquo;t noticed, EA has decided to put some particularly burdensome restrictions on their big pair of games due out later this year on the PC: Spore and Mass Effect.&nbsp; Essentially the game itself registers with EA, and then checks every 10 days to make sure EA still lets you run the game on your PC.&nbsp; Not only that, but you only get 3 activations on different machines and it&rsquo;s completely unclear if you can actually uninstall to get an activation back.&nbsp; To summarize, here&rsquo;s how it all works for a legitimate customer:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Buy the game at the store.<\/li>\n<li>Install the game.<\/li>\n<li>Run the game.<\/li>\n<li>The game asks for your &ldquo;Activation code&rdquo;.<\/li>\n<li>The game sends this activation code, along with an identifier based on your computer to EA.<\/li>\n<li>EA marks off the activation with the identifier and returns &ldquo;ok&rdquo;, if it hasn&rsquo;t seen more than 2 other identifiers.<\/li>\n<li>At least every&nbsp;10 days, the game sends the activation code and identifier back to EA and if EA sees the activation and code in its database then it sends back &ldquo;ok&rdquo;.<\/li>\n<li>If the game hasn&rsquo;t had an &ldquo;ok&rdquo; in the last 10 days then it refuses to run.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>The problem is this has a lot of potential failure modes for the end user that will limit their experience and sour their opinion of EA:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The end user may legitimately not have access to the internet for 10 days and will be locked out of their single player game through no fault of their own.<\/li>\n<li>The end user may upgrade their machine, or legitimately install it on different machines they own thus using up their 3 activations (this happened a <strong>lot<\/strong> to people that bought Bioshock).<\/li>\n<li>There is no apparent way to remove an activation once you&rsquo;ve used it.<\/li>\n<li>Despite assurances from Bioware that they will release a patch to disable this check if they turn off the activation servers, it means we have to trust them when they are making it very, very clear that they don&rsquo;t trust us.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>What&rsquo;s a bigger issue is EA&rsquo;s bought into Macrovision&rsquo;s lies that schemes like this will limit their &ldquo;losses&rdquo; to piracy (which is a debateable point anyway given everyone I know that pirates games would never buy the game if it wasn&rsquo;t available to download in the first place).&nbsp; The sum effect is it will increase the support costs of EA in dealing with this activation stupidity while doing nothing to combat the pirates who will end up with a better product.&nbsp; Here&rsquo;s the same timeline for a pirate:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Download the game.<\/li>\n<li>Install the game.<\/li>\n<li>Run the game.<\/li>\n<li>There is no 4.&nbsp; The game just runs and doesn&rsquo;t bug you any more.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Get it now?&nbsp; The pirated product has more to offer the end user because it doesn&rsquo;t hinder their enjoyment of the product or have the same sort of failure modes that the legitimate version has.&nbsp; Putting restrictions into a product that only hinder the legitimate users isn&rsquo;t the way to stop piracy &ndash; put in online stuff that rewards people for buying the game and you&rsquo;ll go a LOT further.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Update: EA has backed down on both Spore and Mass Effect and removed the &ldquo;every 10 days&rdquo; thing after the large number of complaints that came through.&nbsp; The new policy requires you to have the CD in the drive when you activate.&nbsp; The down side is that you are still limited to 3 activations, but EA says that getting more is just a matter of a phone call (much like&nbsp;XP or Vista).<\/p>\n<p>EA still doesn&rsquo;t get piracy, but it seems they sure do get public opinion on invasive DRM.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you haven&rsquo;t noticed, EA has decided to put some particularly burdensome restrictions on their big pair of games due out later this year on the PC: Spore and Mass Effect.&nbsp; Essentially the game itself registers with EA, and then checks every 10 days to make sure EA still lets you run the game on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.chase.net.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}