I don't buy pc games with piracy protection like that for my pc out of principle. I hate being punished for doing the right thing.

I liked the civ 4 approach. No piracy protection at all. Yes it got pirated but at least the legal owners weren't treated like criminals and it still sold extremely well.

I *was* planning on getting this, but not so much now. -_-;;

it's tough for PC game makers these days. you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't.

i'm beginning to see the reason why publishers are willing to pay a premium (licence fees) to have their games on consoles instead of PCs. with consoles this powerful, PC games really could become a niche market, if not already.

Why are you damned if you don't? I don't see anyone pounding on games without draconian DRM.

Pc gaming is hardly a niche market. Digital distribution is booming and it has the largest casual market by far (yes larger then the wii's look up games like bejeweled).

I'll probably be doing the crack thing myself (I have constant internet I just don't like BS anti-piracy crap and thwart it out of principle), but I will be waiting a week or two to find out how bad of job they did before I even purchase it...and yeah if my copy gets bricked because of their stupidity I'm going to be downloading another one.

@topic,

All in all this is one of the worst anti-piracy ideas ever. All this does is get the warez groups excited for a new challenge. The very fact that people want to pirate the game to piss in EA's cheerios means all the warez groups are going to be lined up and salivating to crack this thing ASAP.

It boggles my mind how GD clueless they are. This is not a software or methodology battle they are fighting, they will always lose that battle. All they can do with software is provide a minor deterence, their real battle is hearts and minds and convincing people its wrong....and as long as they keep doing stuff like this they might as well just pack it in.

Its easy to bitch about piracy but nobody expects that to change on its own, EA needs to approach this intelligently and quite honestly what their doing now is akin to pulling out a sledge hammer to make the square peg fit through the round hole. And so long as they use this strategy I have zero sympathy, particularly since it inconveniences legitimate customers like myself (referring to the past of securom on this one).

Jesus christ is that even legal.

You know, I know for a damn fact that if my copy got bricked because my internet went down(and it does all the time with satellite internet, just takes rain storm) then they would give me a new key over the phone, because I would verbally murder them with my adult voice if they tried not to give it to me.

I would also sue them.

I would also put that story in as many periodicles as possible, internet, newspaper, and television, and believe me, I could get that story on Kotaku, my local newspaper, and my local affiliate if I actually sued their ass. 

A pirated copy won't need to be authenticated as it will have the copy-protection removed in the first place, dumb@ss.

The whole point is that DRM only affects legitimate users, not pirates, so piracy becomes the preferable option.

DRM will never succeed because anything that can be engineered can be reverse-engineered.

PC gaming is not dying, and the impact of piracy on game sales is grossly over-estimated by fear-mongering industry executives. If piracy was really crippling the industry, how come sales continue to increase year-on-year (just like they do in the music industry)?

People see the number of seeders/leechers on torrent sites and imagine that those numbers represent lost sales. They don't.