99.8% of gamers don’t care about DRM, says EA

Posted at: 4:01pm 15th October 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

John Riccitiello claims that DRM is only a concern for 0.2% of gamers

If you thought that EA might have been humbled by the massive Internet backlash against its use of SecuROM in its recent games, then you’d be wrong. Speaking at the Dow Jones/Nielsen Media and Money Conference, EA’s CEO John Riccitiello claimed that the whole issue had been blown out of all proportion.

‘We implemented a form of DRM and it's something that 99.8 per cent of users wouldn't notice,’ claimed Riccitiello, ‘but for the other 0.2 percent, it became an issue and a number of them launched a cabal online to protest against it.’ The use of SecuROM in EA’s recent PC games, including Spore, Mass Effect and Crysis Warhead, has caused a lot of controversy on the Internet, resulting in hundreds of one-star reviews on Amazon.

Originally, Spore only allowed you to activate the game three times before you had to call EA, but this was later relaxed to five activations. However, the limit on the number of installations is just a part of the controversy. The latest version of SecuROM installs a service in Windows that allows it to shutdown emulation software, preventing you from using some disc-copying software such as Alcohol 120% and Nero.

This low-level access to the operating system has led to an accusation that SecuROM has access to Ring 0, providing direct access to the kernel. EA is currently being taken to court over the use of this DRM system in Spore. However, officially SecuROM only has access to Ring 3 of Windows, which contains normal applications.

Riccitiello admitted that he personally doesn’t like DRM, as it ‘interrupts the user experience.’ He also added that ‘We would like to get around that. But there is this problem called piracy out there.’

Via Yahoo!