The Electronic Arts CEO dishes on the Spore DRM controversy, EA's abortive merger attempt with Take-Two, and EA's reputation in the gaming community.
Most noteworthy are Riccitiello's comments on the furor whipped up by Spore's much-maligned copy protection scheme:
I personally hate DRM. I don’t like the whole concept; it can be a little bit cumbersome. But I don’t like locks on my door, and I don’t like to use keys in my car... I’d like to live in a world where there are no passports. Unfortunately, we don’t – and I think the vast majority of people voted with their wallets and went out and bought Spore...
Everyone gets that we need some level of protection, or we’re going to be in business for free... [But it was] a minority of [anti-DRM] people that orchestrated a great PR program. They picked the highest-profile game they could find. I respect them for the success of their movement.
I'm guessing that half of them were pirates, and the other half were people caught up in something that they didn’t understand. If I’d had a chance to have a conversation with them, they’d have gotten it... There are different ways to do DRM; the most successful is what WoW does. They just charge you by the month.
Well, its not like starforce (and similar trojan-like DRM software) hasn't been the main cause of problems in the past, so much trouble in fact that paying customers had to download cracked executables to be able to enjoy the game they paid for.
Installing drivers with high system priority, that are "stealthed" from the system is a big no-no (and a huge hog on system resources). The problem here is simple: the customer pays for the game, and in addition has to pay for the DRM software (albeit indirectly) by buying more powerful PCs (more CPU power and RAM). The DRM software in turn makes his computer run slower and also makes users data subject to high risk.
The panacea for the piracy problem (at least seemingly so) is to design a MMO game and simply charge by the month (and indeed that's the path that many future titles will inevitably take).
On the other hand, some other games (featuring no protection whatsoever) have demonstrated (by their excellent sales results - example: Sins of a Solar Empire) that MAYBE piracy isn't the root issue here.
Indeed the root issue may well be the lack of quality content in today's games. People have an option of downloading a game and testing it out BEFORE they buy it. This usually makes sales go down in a steep spiral into nothingness.
The real panacea to this problem would be - to make high quality software titles - unfortunately this takes a lot more of investment money - prolongs development time - and yields less cash.