VideoGamer interviewed MJ Chun about a few topics from The Sims 3. One of my biggest concerns is SecuROM and DRM for the game…Not looking good, in my opinion. 🙁
VideoGamer.com: Piracy is still a big issue for PC gaming, so what is the attitude going to be with Sims 3? People tend to get irritated by too much DRM.
MC: Absolutely, and it’s one of those things where… the game development process is messy. I think The Sims 2 and Spore were the number one and two pirated games in Eastern Europe.
VideoGamer.com: Yeah, that’s kind of a back-handed compliment.
MC: I had a conversation with a custom content creator in Korea, and she was referring to people who downloaded the game. I asked if it was hard waiting for things, and she said, “No”. Then I realised that when she was talking about downloading, she didn’t mean from the EA site – she was referring to pirated games. I was like, “nooo!”, and she goes, “oh yeah, that’s right! You guys don’t get paid for that!”.
VideoGamer.com: So what’s the plan for this game?
MC: So because of that we had a strong DRM thing. And then we got such good and such vocal user feedback, so now we’re getting the final pieces together. It’s not going to be the crazy, manage-18-accounts or count-the-number-of-times-you’ve-installed thing. But it is going to have copy-protection.
VideoGamer.com: So will there be limited installs?
MC: Um… [to PR] do you know the answer on that? I used to know that information, and then we changed it. EA subsequently told us there will be a press release about this in the near future. The engineers have been amazing, because to change the DRM strategy this late is something that’s asking a lot of an engineering crew who have already put a lot into it. But they were willing to be flexible, because as gamers themselves they were like, “yeah, it’s a pain in the ass”.
Chances are, if they’re not going to use SecuROM, you’d figure they’d say they have no plans to use that type of DRM. But that doesn’t appear the case…I hope it’s not the same as Spore’s setup…guess we will have to wait for that press release for more information…
“Strong DRM?” They must be smoking some good stuff there at EA. If it was strong DRM it wouldn’t have been cracked two weeks before it hit the states. I don’t know why they don’t just switch to Elicense considering I’ve never seen a game using it cracked successfully. I’m not saying it can’t be cracked but it’s got a much greater success rate that SecuRom.