Wow. He'd get my vote. If I saw him right now, I would punch him in the face. Just on principle.
The music industry has been similarly ravaged by piracy. It's easy enough to avoid any DRM simply by purchasing a CD. But that's not what most people do. The number one retailer of music is none other than Apple's iTunes. That's right – the same iTunes that gives you songs at 128kbps AAC and won't let you burn any song to CD more than five times. Apple has tried to appease the DRM-haters with iTunes plus, but it's a pretty small percentage of iTunes songs that use the "plus" format.
The people who use iTunes are almost universally morons, first of all, and beyond that... uh, the music industry is just a little bigger than the gaming industry, don't you think? With, oh I don't know, maybe a few hundred million more consumers taking part in it? Many of whom are completely technologically inept and wouldn't know what DRM was if you asked them?
Ultimately I feel that those who raise hell about DRM are in a minority. The alleged inconveniences are incredibly trivial, and if DRM can reduce piracy, it's good both for developers and gamers. And those who threaten piracy because of DRM? Well, those schmucks are probably already familiar with getting the five-finger discount. I challenge these irate gamers to offer their own solutions. PC piracy numbers are staggering, and causing many developers to leave the platform. If gamers don't like DRM, what other solutions might there be? What are these gamers accomplishing by throwing a fit and threatening more piracy, aside from egging developers to develop even stricter DRM?
Ultimately nobody gives a shit what you feel. If the inconveniences are so trivial, why are we all so upset? Hmm? And we've already proven, you fucking moron, that DRM CAN'T REDUCE PIRACY. IT DOESN'T AND NEVER HAS. What fucking planet do you live on? And we've already offered our own solutions - stop with the fucking DRM. It worked for Stardock, didn't it? We aren't egging on developers, because it isn't even developers who generally decide what DRM their game will have... but aside from that, all we continue to do is tell them what we don't want, and demonstrate why what they do doesn't even work to the end they intend because we destroy it within weeks or days or hours of a game's release (or, you know, before the fucking game is even on the shelf).
EDIT - This guy makes an interesting point in comments, too:
This isn't about Piracy, EA know full well that a Hack will follow hot on the heels of the release.
This is about attacking the Second Hand Game market, which is far greater source of tangible revenue loss than Piracy (the ESA 'figures' on Piracy assume that everyone who pirated a game would have bought it had it not been pirated, which is complete tosh).
By limiting installs and making the system phone home, it makes it extremely difficult to resell the game once completed, and this is the idea.
So, don't let EA kid you they are 'fighting teh ebil pirates', cos they ain't and they know it, they are simply making sure that anyone who wants a legal copy of the game this time next year will have to give them the money rather than buy it second hand.
I've often wondered about this. It's been talked about before, but it seems like we always, always, always get sidetracked on the piracy issue. I question whether or not this is really their scheme, though, because it isn't like second-hand stuff is a huge market on the PC. That's much bigger on consoles, and there's fuck all they can do about that. Do game stores like EB even take PC games as trade-ins anymore?
Also, wow I swore a lot in this post.
