SecuROM?

[Golem]

Maybe some of you have had EA's allegedly ridiculous copy-protection installed on your PCs after Spore or Warhead or other titles from the company. I was looking about trying to find out what this thing is before actually buying Warhead and it's intrusive enough to have caused a major uproar, causing technical issues for legitimate users, etc.

I came across this site:
http://reclaimyourgame.com/

Which explains how intrusive this latest version of SecuROM can be:
http://reclaimyourgame.com/index.php?op ... &Itemid=13

And specifically, how you can actually remove it without reformatting:
http://reclaimyourgame.com/index.php?op ... &Itemid=40

I've never installed any SecuROM games and so haven't tried these removal instructions. I cannot guarantee that following these instructions will not destroy your computer!

[Kanonfodda]

I avoid securerom and similar on pricinple these days. They want to include that, screw em I'll rip the game off and become the criminal they seem to think I am.

[YaZoR]

Yea same thinking here KF. In fact I avoid and refuse anything from EA these days due to their politics that I fully disagree with.

[Golem]

I'm not interested in stirring things, but one of the most intriguing pages on that site are concerning John Riccitiello himself. It points to an interview with the EA CEO, which begins "John Riccitiello has been driving a lot of change at Electronic Arts."

It quotes this section as the actual reason EA want to restrict game installs to just three (which it did until a serious backlash forced them to increase the max installs to five.)

There is a longer-term transition from a disk-based model for retail sales to an “average revenue per user” model. Five to seven years from now, investors will look at EA as how we have 100 million customers where we have an ARPU (that's "average revenue per user") relationship that amounts to so many dollars a month. It’s different from selling so many disks a month at wholesale prices. It’s a gradual evolution. But we need the tools to be able to do that. The ARPU model is a better margin business for us. It’s less cyclical. It’s a better business. Some of our businesses have characteristics like that: EA Mobile, Pogo.com, and The Sims. We want to move in that direction. People predicted the demise of the DVD rental model for Blockbuster a long time ago. I don’t want to be the guy with a retail store renting DVDs in a world that has moved to Netflix and pay-per-view. We want to innovate and drive along that front, whether it’s with FIFA Online or Pogo or The Sims. Nucleus is a positive step in that direction. Spore has a download model. We could wait for someone else to eat our lunch or we could do it ourselves.

Really it sounds like they want to produce more stuff that charges for continual use online, making money of each user all the time - but it's worth noting that the ARPU model isn't to complement the disc-based sales, but a progression from it - a 'longer-term transition.'

Something else I noticed is that he does mention their investors a lot, justifying the requirement for an average revenue per user model by stating investors will be looking at how much dosh they make from users (rather than from sales) in five to seven years. He also says this earlier:

I don’t think the investors give a s*** about our quality. They care about our earnings per share.

[Kanonfodda]

Lovely, they better be a damn site cheaper if they want to be paid continually.