Dragon Age 2 PC DRM Detailed

Every time I see these articles it makes me wince. My precious PC games are going to become a thing of the past if piracy gets much worse.

Or at least that's what I'm lead to believe; there's a foggy haze surrounding the known impact of piracy: the piracy numbers are not equal to lost sales on a 1:1 basis. Great games still sell millions of copies, and bad/ under-marketed games still sell poorly.

Take a heavily pirated movie, for instance: Avatar. It made some $3 billion in the box office, yet it was pirated, and probably watched, more than any other movie. Millions of times it was downloaded - if one download equaled one lost movie ticked then, to date, that movie would have made some $20 billion. I'm exaggerating that number but it highlights the ridiculousness of what we're being told.

I know that companies that are managed poorly can lose millions on piracy because they're spending millions on what is ultimately a game that no one wants to buy. These companies then erroneously blame piracy and blur the reality of the situation.

Anyway, the best way to fight piracy is to stop making the same games over and over again and getting the same results. Invest in ingenuity and creativity, because that's ultimately what gets people excited about a new product. And this may seem a bit abstract, but invest in the artists you hire, not simply the intellectual property. Games are only as good as the people that make them, so don't focus on making a good game - focus on making a great team of artists, unleash them and give them creative freedom, and the game will practically make itself. I'm not a game maker, but I'm an artist and I know that other people get excited when I'm excited about what I'm creating.

Its amazing how no one points out that Steam requires you to be online from time to time as well in order to play offline. Unless it's changed since the last time I read about how it works which I admit was a while ago.

Ugh. Not liking that last sentence about requiring you to be online for a login check at yet-undecided intervals. Wow, that sucks. Guess I'll skip this one.

Yeah, most people have Internet access but what if things are tight and you don't have it? :(

Steam edition it is, then!

Sounds awesome to me, quite frankly!

If EA is going to incorporate Steam DRM, I wonder if they'll go the extra mile and integrate Steamworks as well. Probably not. But, the fact that they are allowing for Steam DRM (is it really DRM? I guess so, technically), I wonder if that opens the door to add the retail Key to Steam. That would be a win-win if you just had to have the Signature Edition.

So...what's the DRM on all the other digital editions, like D2D?

Where are the PC DX11 screens its Feb already?

I think the headline was enough for me to mark it off.