InfiniteSims spotted a new interview via GamerZine (Part 1, supposedly) with the producer of The Sims 3 Ambitions, Grant Rodiek. The topic of DRM (Digital Rights Media) came up, something in which we haven’t heard about in awhile. Grant had much to say about it:
GZ: How does Sims 3: Ambitions tackle the problem of piracy and DRM?
GR: I remember reading the boards the other day and one guy was talking about the stylist career and how much he enjoyed playing it in Indonesia. Whether he was full of crap or serious, this was weeks ago and the game is only just coming out. I thought that was kind of funny and sad at the same time. People do pirate our games, it’s a reality. Our approach with this game is lets back off the DRM (Digital Rights Management), we have a disc check and that’s it.
Basically we want to reward our paying customers with light DRM, a good price and we’ll give you great stuff. You have Riverview if you register the game, and you get free updates which you can only get via registering, it takes months of our time to build this exclusive content. For World Adventures we had extra decorative items for your home and you have a bunch of new objects for this game as well. Hopefully this philosophy of nurture not punish will pay off and if players help us out and support our game then we’ll do our best to support them. We can’t stop the piracy, it’s maddening to me. It’s theft and that is all it is, but we’ll still try to support players.
GZ: DRM is something that will never go away, are you ever tempted to slap the hardest, most limited solution onto the game as possible?
GR: It always tempting. I know that on Sims 2 around the fifth expansion we added SecuRom and that made a lot of people really angry. That was a huge discussion point for The Sims 3 from top to bottom, junior engineers were writing emails to senior staff members arguing why we shouldn’t use specific forms of DRM and from there throughout the company we all decided we would only do a disc check and cross our fingers that the community would support us. I like to think that more people bought it because of the way we have acted, by respecting the consumer.
While yes, is a pain in the rear to deal with, I do believe EA should have some way to protect their game that doesn’t screw legitimate buyers much like SecuROM did. Their approach with the Disc Check is nice, along with their incentives on rewards for registering. Problem is, the free rewards were on file-sharing sites before Ambitions was even released, thus hindering the whole purpose 🙁
I personally believe there is only one true way to handle the problem known as DRM, and I call it the Jay and Silent Bob method: Kick the crap out of all those that pirate (again, CAUTION – FOUL LANGUAGE):
They have the money to do this and it’ll definitely get its point across. I fully support this decision if they decide to opt in for this method.
Back when I was a kid and had no money, I used to pirate games to enjoy something that was pricey.
Nowadays, I still don’t have that much money, but I save em up and got myself original copies of games, and I have never obtained a pirated copy of The Sims as I see that they deserve it (even with the dumb bugs).
I am very pleased that EA realize that draconian anti-piracy measures are hindrance to legitimate customers and no barriers to pirates, who will continue to exist regardless of the DRM. I just want to let EA know that their protection in terms of a mere disc check (and downloadable registered content) is very much appreciated, and thank you for listening to your paying customers.
I still hate draconian DRM measures. I actually downloaded a pirated copy of Assasin’s Creed 2 and then deleted it just so that I can contribute to the statistic of its stupidity (my computer can’t run the game anyway)
I stopped buying TS2 EPs after I bought Bon Voyage and SecuROM broke my DVD burner and made a general mess of my PC. I ended up having to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows to get rid of it. Up until that point, I had purchased every single EP and SP for TS1 and TS2. I think it was smart for EA to get rid of SecuROM. That’s the only reason I bought TS3 when it came out. I love the Sims, but I wasn’t about to go through issues like I had with SecuROM again.
Ironically, it seemed Securom only INCREASED pirating… simply because it was less hazardous to download a torrent of the game w/o the DRM than have the legal version that would probably mess up your DVD drive.