Andrei Dumitrescu writes:
''Last week, Electronic Arts dropped what might have been a bombshell in the gaming world, by announcing that both the PC version of Mass Effect and Spore would have a new kind of protection (I'll call it DRM) that would require the game to once activate through the Internet when it's installed and then to try again and activate every 10 days. If the activation check failed, the game would not run again until the time when it could again activate through the Net. Of course, the beautiful system came courtesy of SecuROM. And just so everything is clear, it was not just going to check after the first 10 days, but each and every other 10-day period for as long as the game was installed.
Electronic Arts justified the move by pointing out the rate of piracy
on the PC as a gaming platform and using a bit of the old "PC gaming is dying" mantra to get its point across. Of course, the forums and blogs were quickly alight with a very varied array of responses from the usual "Electronic Arts is a bad juggernaut", to pleas to "boycott" and to some mild name-calling between those that think such a measure will clean out piracy, while others believe that the rights of the consumer, of the gamer, are thrashed when such limitations are introduced in games.''
