And in a weird sort of way, the behavior we’re starting to see based on sell-through and registration is that we really might have just put out a really good demo.” And we finally concluded that we were very happy that almost a million people downloaded the Fight Night demo in the first couple of days we put it out. We had a lot of telemetry about what the pirates were doing because the launcher was in the version of the disc … There’s a lot of Chinese and Polish among those consumers. “And we were really quite nervous about it. “We got pirated three weeks before the game launched,” Riccitiello said. That’s the nice way of saying what happened to The Sims 3 recently. In an interview with Kotaku (thanks William for sending this in), the CEO of EA tries to put a positive spin on things:Īnd speaking of pirates, no matter what EA charges for a game, there will be people who want to make EA’s games free-to-play on their own terms. However, the biggest change may be (possibly?) in the attitude of execs at the company - who at least appear to be trying to become more accepting of the fact that some people will always download and/or share unauthorized versions of games. More recently, the company went with a much less troubling DRM solution on its latest version of The Sims (though, despite its attempt to call it something other than DRM, it is still DRM - and, I should note, we’ve received a bunch of submissions from people who have found the DRM to be cumbersome).
The company received tons of negative publicity for its aggressive and annoying DRM found in the release of Spore (which did little to nothing in actually slowing the unauthorized spread of the game). Perhaps no video gaming company has had more trouble with the gaming community when it comes to things like DRM than EA. Thu, Jun 11th 2009 09:06am - Mike Masnick