14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, Electronic Arts dropped what might have been a bombshell in the gaming world, by announcing that both the PC version of Mass Effect and Spore would have a new kind of protection (I'll call it DRM) that would require the game to once activate through the Internet when it's installed and then to try again and activate every 10 days. If the activation check failed, the game would not run again until the time when it could again activate through the Net. Of course, the beautiful system came courtesy of SecuROM. And just so everything is clear, it was not just going to check after the first 10 days, but each and every other 10-day period for as long as the game was installed.
Electronic Arts justified the move by pointing out the rate of piracy on the PC as a gaming platform and using a bit of the old "PC gaming is dying" mantra to get its point across. Of course, the forums and blogs were quickly alight with a very varied array of responses from the usual "Electronic Arts is a bad juggernaut", to pleas to "boycott" and to some mild name-calling between those that think such a measure will clean out piracy, while others believe that the rights of the consumer, of the gamer, are thrashed when such limitations are introduced in games.
After just a little while, word came that Electronic Arts had backtracked on this issue and removed the one time every 10 days protection, settling for a new approach, where the game checks online to see whether the serial number has been leaked, only when patch and/or content is downloaded. Which, to all reasonable minds, is a much more rational approach.
Whether such measures will or will not have any impact on the piracy rate on the PC and on the general market for PC gaming is not the subject of my column. Personally, I believe that most DRM measures taken lately have only had the side-effect of alienating longtime PC gamers, while the piracy rate is holding steady. The main issue I have with Electronic Arts' initial announcement and then backtracking is that it seems to perform field testing of ideas on the gaming public.
Electronic Arts, as a publisher, does not have the courage to hold up its conviction. If the company really believes that the measures initially proposed were a good idea, it would have enacted them. But, instead, it chose to make them public and then endure the clearly coming public backlash, just so that they could get a feel for the reaction of the gamers and then react accordingly.
This just shows how disconnected big game companies, in this case Electronic Arts, are from the way regular gamers, the same guys that buy their games, think. And this is a bad thing. If game companies do not know simple things like the reaction of gamers to extra copy protection, then it's more and more unlikely that they gain significant insight into the way they think about the gameplay or the stories of the games they make.
I would like to see less field tests like this one and more communication between gamers and companies, regarding all issues that can impact the videogame industry. John Riccitiello repeatedly declared that he wanted to take Electronic Arts in a new direction. He might want to look into the direction of gamers.