Posted on Monday, October 20 2008 @ 9:18 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
EA had a PR nightmare on its hands with Spore but the firm claims DRM isn't really such a big deal. EA CEO John Riccitiello
said at a conference that the whole issue was blown out of all proportion and that 99.8 percent of all users don't care about DRM:
‘We implemented a form of DRM and it's something that 99.8 per cent of users wouldn't notice,’ claimed Riccitiello, ‘but for the other 0.2 percent, it became an issue and a number of them launched a cabal online to protest against it.’ The use of SecuROM in EA’s recent PC games, including Spore, Mass Effect and Crysis Warhead, has caused a lot of controversy on the Internet, resulting in hundreds of one-star reviews on Amazon.
Originally, Spore only allowed you to activate the game three times before you had to call EA, but this was later relaxed to five activations. However, the limit on the number of installations is just a part of the controversy. The latest version of SecuROM installs a service in Windows that allows it to shutdown emulation software, preventing you from using some disc-copying software such as Alcohol 120% and Nero.
This low-level access to the operating system has led to an accusation that SecuROM has access to Ring 0, providing direct access to the kernel. EA is currently being taken to court over the use of this DRM system in Spore. However, officially SecuROM only has access to Ring 3 of Windows, which contains normal Funnily enough, Riccitiello added he doesn't like DRM as it interrupts the user experience, but he does think it's necessary to prevent piracy.
