Mass Effect, Spore DRM Are a Step In the Right Direction

By Joe Haygood | May 7, 2008

Electronic Arts let loose their new attempts at DRM (digital rights management), on the upcoming version of Mass Effect and Spore. And while the Internet community immediately castigated Electronic Arts for DRM, for once, I can at least see a positive step in the right direction, albeit with some caveats.

Basically, when you buy Mass Effect or Spore, they will initially want to validate your serial number at the time of install. They will again check the serial number by every 10th day via the Internet. This allows them to build a list of serial numbers that are posted to warez sites, or Usenet forums and ban them. The repeat serial checks, will validate against a constantly updating list. This will also allow for the games to be played without a disc in the drive, which is where protection schemes like SecuROM and Star Force have been known to cause problems.

Of course, everyone was up in arms discussing how this would be another dagger in the heart of PC gaming. But the best arguement was the one that stated how people without Internet connections would be doomed, which I find really funny that all the people complaining about Internet validation, seem to have found a way to get online and post. And while it does not have huge penetration into the hardcore gaming marketplace, Microsoft Vista does the exact same thing in 14 day intervals, so somehow, their OS can validate, but their game cannot…strange indeed. And if you have an outage in your Internet connection, how long are you really down, one day at the most? Talk to a 360 owner about their RROD experience, and a day without Mass Effect or Spore pales in comparison.

While DRM can be an albatross for honest gamers, the ones that complain normally are the ones that are going to try and pirate the game. Not a scientific fact, but if you go to a lot of sites, they immediately talk about how the protection will be cracked and they will not stop the game from being pirated. But when you think about it, this version of DRM is not as bad as having it directly on the disc. Talk to Bioshock owners about how bad their experience was if they forgot to uninstall the game before putting it on another computer, or the same computer, but formatted.

One thing I would suggest to Electronic Arts is setting up a way to call in and validate via the phone, or a way to delay the validation once. This way if you did have a delay in your Internet connection, you could extend your play time by one pass, or call and validate, similar to the way Microsoft does for Vista and XP. Yes, there is an inflated support cost, but it would alleviate most of the complaints against the Internet validation.

So, while the DRM solution is not perfect, I commend Electronic Arts for trying something different. At least they can build off of this and find out what works and what can be tweaked.