Too few hours in the day //Jafoca.com

EA is beginning to cave.  In a series of responses over the past week, EA has been addressing the demands of consumers. Apparantly they will be loosening the DRM restrictions.

The head of the EA games division, Frank Gibeau, was quoted as saying something to the effect of  “The consumers don’t understand that we need drm to secure our economic structure,” and also, “If games are just going to be stolen on the day that they are released, developers will have no incentive in investing 4 years of development time into them”.

Frank has apparently missed the gravy train – by a long shot.  While I understand that they don’t want their games stolen, the simple fact is that they can NOT accomplish this in the current digitized economy.  Proof of this was seen with Spore itself, which was cracked and pirated DAYS BEFORE IT’S LAUNCH!!!

I can understand the necessity for people to be paid for what they create, after all I have a rudimentary understanding of economics, however disenfranchising paying customers with overly restrictive digital malware technology is NOT the way to nix this problem.

EA has decided to allow 5 installs of Spore per account key, but what is more important is that they are allowing users to authorize and de-authorize computers to use the game, in the same way that Apple does with its itunes music tracks.  This is a much more acceptable solution as opposed to the original predicament.

Overall however, I would say that the Steam platform has the best overall solution.  Not only does steam allow installation on any computer system, it encourages social gaming.  Steam does this by allowing me to have steam installed on two or three of my computer systems, and then friends who come over can log into their accounts and play any steam games with me that they also own.  Purely brilliant for Team Fortress Two.