Electronic Arts (EA) and its subdivisions sure have been saying interesting things lately. First The Sims 3ditched SecuROM and online activation (at retail) in favour of the EA Download Manager, to mostly applause from the community, then they release de-authorization tools for most of their games from May onwards, and now we hear from Spore & Sims creator Will Wright at the Web 2.0 Expo the publisher was forced to listen to the community following the Spore digital rights management (DRM) backlash, and were "surprised" by it, but seem to consider it a lesson:
“That goes in the category of corporate learning,” Wright said. “People are playing a lot of money for a game. You don’t want to treat them as criminals because of the piracy issue.”
This echoes the sentiments gamers have been expressing for what must be ages now; Wright has previously stated on the matter, "It was something I probably should have tuned into more. It was a corporate decision to go with DRM on Spore. They had a plan and the parameters..."
A spokesperson for EA, Tiffany Steckler, said to the BBC recently the future of DRM for the company remains to be seen:
"There is always going to be a level of protection for games and this solution [DRM free] is right for The Sims 3. How these things roll out in the future will be down to the developers and we will make announcements in due course."
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Electronic Arts “learning” with DRM
