I don’t want to beat this point to death. But, as long as game industry executives continue to give me evidence to support my previous claim, I’m going to report on it.
The following is excerpted from Yahoo! Media & Money’s coverage of EA CEO John Riccitiello’s while at the Dow Jones/Nielsen Media and Money Conference.
– On DRM: In September, EA lifted some of the DRM protections on its popular release Spore after players began posting complaints on Amazon (NasdaqGS: AMZN – News) and other sites. Riccitiello said he felt the controversy was blown out of proportion, but he does acknowledge the inconvenience to users that DRM creates. “We’re still working out the kinks. We implemented a form of DRM and it’s something that 99.8 percent of users wouldn’t notice. But for the other .2 percent, it became an issue and a number of them launched a cabal online to protest against it. I personally don’t like DRM. It interrupts the user experience. We would like to get around that. But there is this problem called piracy out there.”
Translation: “If you guys would just stop pirating software and stealing money from us, we wouldn’t have to use DRM. It’s all your fault we have to resort to this.” It’s almost like the “we only hit ya ’cause we love ya,” defense.
Once again, we have the industry rationalizing its use of stringent DRM that hurts ONLY legitimate consumers by pointing the finger at the ever-present threat of piracy. I’d love to see some solid numbers on how much money EA lost due to piracy, explicitly because people who were stoked about Spore refused to subject themselves to its overbearing DRM. To boot, you tell us that only a small number of people were upset at all. Which doesn’t do much to explain the Amazon rating of the game…
It’s been said before, and far more eloquently, but go f-ck yourself EA.
Yahoo! Finance | via Kotaku
