14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that The Sims 3, the life simulation game that will arrive at the beginning of June for the PC, will not be using any Digital Rights Management. The announcement was made by Rod Humble, the executive producer on the Sims series.
Writing on the official website that Electronic Arts has dedicated to the game, Humble stated that “To play the game there will not be any online authentication needed. We feel like this is a good, time-proven solution that makes it easy for you to play the game without DRM methods that feel overly invasive or leave you concerned about authorisation server access in the distant future.”
The Sims 3 is being published by Electronic Arts, which attracted the ire of gamers last fall, when it released Spore, another sim everything title from Maxis, overburdened with heavy DRM features that only allowed a limited number of installs before having to contact the publisher in order to get permission for more of them.
The Sims 3 will only use a CD key to authenticate the game. You will need to input it once as you install the game and you will be the only one to play it. The use of a CD key also means that re-selling The Sims 3 would be very easy. This might actually turn out to be a great strategy on EA's part, considering that a game like The Sims 3 is likely to get a whole lot of expansions. If games are re-sold, rather than left to die somewhere in an old closet, then their inevitable expansions will move much more copies, bringing in more revenue for Electronic Arts.
It would be interesting to see if the game uses Steam to authenticate itself, considering that both Dawn of War II and Empire: Total War went down that route successfully in the last few months.