I wish that was the only purpose. In all likelihood they're also laying the foundation for pay-per-play. Once a DRM platform is solidified, it's not difficult to add time/date or play credits (OMG AWESUM JUST LIKE ARCADE!) as just another deactivation criterion right alongside "system changes". I expect to also see this sort of thing eventually used to implement fine-grained regional pricing differences and maybe even regional in-game advertising. These latter two are mostly under the assumption that online distribution becomes the norm.BryanM wrote:Only scanned the thread, didn't see if someone already mentioned this..
DRM doesn't have a damn thing to do with piracy. There is one and only one purpose that it exists: The secondary market of used games.
As for EA, I won't be surprised if they use DRM to just explicitly turn Madden into a subscription-based monstrosity so that you have to pay every year to keep playing.