<html>
<body>
<br>
DRM is a strange route for EA to go isn't it? I mean they have
"been there done that" with the dongles in days of old as you
say. The other thing that they used to do was that annoying
"type in the 7th word from line 8 on page 24 of your manual"
-thing. I mean even the music industry is getting out of the DRM
business in large part. As DRM did with the music industry this is
likely to cause EA nothing but trouble with customers. It seems
doubly weird given the usual sales window for games as the Captain
says. They must be concerned about people lending discs or burns of
discs to friends to install. The online checking system moves them closer
to be like Steam. I'm sure EA would love to be out of the business
of distributing physical media someday. Now that I'm thinking about
it this is very likely a step towards doing online distribution on their
own. (Then what do we do for archival purposes?) <br><br>
If publishers lose control of their distribution then they have to do
nasty things like compete on pricing. (See music industry again
re:WalMart and iTunes.) The last thing EA would want would be for Steam
to become the gamers iTunes. Or iTunes to be iGames, if you know
what I mean?<br><br>
-SP<br><br>
At 11:34 AM 5/11/2008, you wrote:<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">This sounds like the dongle
problem all over again. Unless companies like EA wise up to archival (or
we find out what they themselves will be doing to preserve the game in
their personal archive) we'll have to get permission to DRM crack when
the time comes. At least the console versions of the game are likely to
not have this sort of protection (just the PC).<br><br>
Personally, I never liked the idea of only being able to install the game
three times. ESPECIALLY if you consider how many times Windoze crashes on
you. I don't think it's fair to ask someone to have an internet
connection to install a game, either. Why not just make it account-based
rather than instance-based?<br><br>
The other thing we have to remember is that the developers and publishers
don't really care about long-term - nobody is thinking in that fashion as
far as I can tell (possible exception being Nintendo). The industry is
very much about what's hot now due to technological obsolescence (planned
and otherwise) and the blockbuster-of-the-now mentality (basically, that
something is only hot for a short period of time before somebody else
makes another hit - this and the fact that a game's aesthetics do not age
well, even if we can't imagine games looking much prettier than something
like Gears of War). As a result, the developer doesn't have to care about
the long tail because they don't expect the game to sell much outside six
months (unless it's a big title). Which makes it pretty darn impossible
to find something you're looking for sometimes even a few months after
its release - a dilemma you would rarely find in the film industry (it
took them over 10 years to re-release Blues Brothers on DVD, for
instance). This might change with online distribution, but even then I
think developers are going to be stuck in the blockbuster-of-the-now
paradigm that is yet another of the industry's holdovers from the arcade
era.<br><br>
-DM<br><br>
On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 8:50 AM, Andrew Armstrong
<<a href="mailto:andrew@aarmstrong.org">andrew@aarmstrong.org</a>>
wrote:
<dl>
<dd>So, I am sure most of us on this list know of EA's plans for DRM on
Mass Effect and Spore. It's basically now (since it changed a bit) like
this:<br>
<dd>* Installation requires an internet connection to validate the CD key
(bad enough in itself)
<dd>* Installation will work a maximum of 3 times, although I am unsure
if uninstalling will allow it to "reuse" installations it won't
help with people owning more then 3 computers/laptops/VM's, or if one
fails with an installation on it<br>
<dd>Now there are some serious problems to archivists or historians with
this, right? We have these problems I thought of, for a valid copy of the
game:<br>
<dd>* What if the activation server goes down? (and frankly, EA isn't
known for keeping up multiplayer servers after a time, or new game
release...)
<dd>* What if EA itself implodes? The servers will go down obviously, but
more so there will be no support to then get it sorted (eg; via a
patch...)
<dd>* Since it does a internet check at installation time, no patch will
be able to remove this requirement easily. I suppose a new installation
exe would work, which didn't have the check in it. The question remains
if there would ever be this kind of patch however, especially when it
comes down to internal EA studios' work which in some cases are poorly
patched (or not patched at all).<br>
<dd>This isn't including consumer rights, which are not really part of
this groups aims :)<br>
<dd>So I at least wanted to have a record of this event, since once the
first whitepaper is done, the second might well have to deal with DRM as
part of it's "best practices" to archival work. The main
question is "what if the ability to install the game is
removed?", would it be actually a good idea to use the same methods
the DRM-crackers do to retain access to the game for archival copies?
Legally, I am sure it's a bit tough to answer.<br>
<dd>Anyone got any other forebodings over this kind of DRM? (I fully
expect consoles will go a similar route over time, making them require
internet connections and whatnot, and I don't see it helping anyone play
games much).<br>
<dd>Andrew
<dd>_______________________________________________
<dd>game_preservation mailing list
<dd><a href="mailto:game_preservation@igda.org">
game_preservation@igda.org</a>
<dd>
<a href="http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/game_preservation" eudora="autourl">
http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/game_preservation</a><br><br>
</dl><br><br>
<br>
-- <br>
The sleep of Reason produces monsters.<br><br>
"Until next time..."<br>
Captain Commando <br>
_______________________________________________<br>
game_preservation mailing list<br>
game_preservation@igda.org<br>
<a href="http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/game_preservation" eudora="autourl">
http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/game_preservation</a>
</blockquote></body>
</html>