Okay, so maybe it wasn’t an out-and-out lie, but it was definitely a case of “truthiness”, at best. You see, a while ago EA announced that two of their major PC titles, Mass Effect and Spore were going to have some sort of horrendous copyright protection that would force owners of said games to re-authenticate their games every ten days. If you didn’t re-authenticate, or didn’t have internet access, you missed out.

Thankfully, after the internet (ironic, really) rose up and shouted at the top of their lungs “THIS IS BULLSHIT!”, EA and BioWare both saw the error of their ways and promised to remove the terrible program.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. Instead, they’ve removed the “re-authenticate every ten days” program, and replaced it with a “three installs” program. In short, EA and BioWare removed one terrible idea, and somehow thought it wise to replace it with an even worse idea! Instead of alienating one group of people (those without steady internet access), you’ve now gone and alienated the entire PC gaming community, treating said community like a bunch of criminals because you’re afraid that a small percentage will find a way to pirate the game.

Which they’ve already done, anyways. (don’t illegally download, kids)

This leads to a problem that the industry as a whole has failed to acknowledge, that no matter what they do these pirates are still going to find a way to get their game. To try to combat the pirates, these publishers go to more and more extreme lengths to try and protect their games which still wind up on ThePirateBay, TorrentReactor, etc., and in the end the only people who get screwed are the honest consumers.

via Joystiq

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