Yesterday on the Sims 3 website, development head Rob Humble announced that the next installment of the franchise, one of the most financially successful ones in history, will pass up on employing draconian DRM methods this time around:

Hello everyone I wanted to share news with you regarding our copy protection plans for The Sims 3.

We’ll have more information for you as we get closer to launch about everything we’ll have to offer on TheSims3.com and The Sims 3 Store, but we have heard your requests over the past months and here is our plan for The Sims 3.

The game will have disc-based copy protection - there is a Serial Code just like The Sims 2. To play the game there will not be any online authentication needed.

We feel like this is a good, time-proven solution that makes it easy for you to play the game without DRM methods that feel overly invasive or leave you concerned about authorization server access in the distant future.

Source

The reaction by EA Maxis fans to the release of Spore in September 2008 and its highly restrictive DRM (SecuROM) must have weighed heavily on this decision. Originally, EA had announced plans to require online activation of the game every 10 days in order to guarantee authenticity, however public outcry led the publisher to retreat to a slightly less obnoxious anti-piracy measure: limited installations (3). Though EA did admittedly back off their original plans, fans were not pleased. Thousands of angry gamers stormed Amazon.com and left over 2500 1-star reviews for the game. What’s worse, the game’s DRM was easily cracked within the first few days of its release and Spore quickly became one of the most pirated games of 2008 with over 1,700,000 Bit Torrent downloads recorded.

So, apparently an old dog CAN learn new tricks. EA has learned from the Spore controversy that employing futile methods to curb piracy is not worth pissing off your fans, especially when the game itself sucks. The announcement also comes at the tail end of the 2009 Game Developers Conference, in which DRM has been a hot topic of presentation and debate. Despite rising concerns of piracy, it seems that the industry is finally realizing that DRM is part of the problem, not the solution; even World of Goo developer 2D Boy, which saw its popular title subject to a jaw-dropping 90% piracy rate, agrees that DRM is a complete “waste of time.”

The alternative approach by many studios caters to the philosophy that you’ll catch more flies with honey than you will with vinegar. Developers are slowly coming to the realization that piracy can be fought by offering legitimate owners of games more content and better support if they can validate their ownership. This directly contrasts current methods which force owners to validate their status, automatically casting us in the role of the criminal until we can prove ourselves otherwise. Many critics of this argument like to downplay the practical significance of DRM techniques such as online activiation, but what they fail to realize is that even this simple requirement contributes to an adversarial relationship between the developer/publisher and its customers, and would-be customers who don’t appreciate the subtle insinuation may be more inclined to pirate the software.

The Sims 3 will be released later this year, 6/2/09.

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