Dragon Age: Origins

[philmophlegm]

EA have announced that there will be no DRM on Dragon Age: Origins.

Yay! I can buy it without sacrificing my principles.

Comments

[chris-maslen.livejournal.com]

They have also announced Sims 3 will ship securerom free.

PC Gamer suggested in an article last month that if EA are dropping intrusive DRM like SecureRom there is a good chance other publishers may follow.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

...or maybe switch to Steam, which is a good form of DRM.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

How does Steam work?

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

The crucial difference with Steam DRM is that if you buy a Steam game (whether by downloading it of by buying it in a shop), the licence attaches to your Steam account rather than a particular computer.

This means that were I, for example, to come to your house and I wanted to play Half-Life 2, I could download the free Steam client, log in as me and then download to your machine the Half-Life 2 game from a list of games that I own. I wouldn't be able to play Half-Life 2 on my own PC under my account while I was doing this - and crucially you wouldn't be able to play Half-Life 2 after I left unless I gave you my Steam login details. And if I did that, then every time you logged into Steam, I would be logged off.

The DRM that EA have used in the past means that the licence stays with the PC, not the user. This would be ok up to a point, but they tend to limit the number of times you can install it or change the configuration of your PC.

The SecuROM that Chris mentions is another system, often used in conjunction with machine-based DRM. This checks that an original version disc is in the drive (which is sort of fair enough, if a little tedious if you have to keep swapping discs) but for as long as I can remember it has had technical issues like not working with certain DVD-ROM drives or with the 64-bit version of Windows XP. It works by secretly installing software on your hard disk, which is highly dubious in legal terms (at least in certain countries) and because of this has been the subject of a class action suit in the US.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that.