2. Digital Right Management
What's worse than DLC, high costs, lack of creativity, online passes and treating your employees like scum? Invasion of privacy when a company decides to install software without telling you. Back in 2008 EA released a fun little game called Spore; with it came a new DRM scheme that installed a program that limited the amount of times you could install the game. EA claimed this was to in order to hinder pirates from creating illegal copies of the game (how's the going actually EA? In fact how's that going for ANY publisher/developer? The pirates are releasing close to EVERY new release for free on or before the day of release and the only people suffering seem to be the paying customers) however it only seemed to affect people who had purchased the game legitimately as within a week of its release, Spore became the most pirated game ever. To make matters worse, not only was EA hindering its customers but there was no mention of the program, SecuROM whatsoever in the game's manual. After a few class-action lawsuits and public out-cry EA decided to release a program that de-atuhorised whichever computer the game was installed on an essentially remove the DRM program. In 2009 they annoucned that they would be removing DRM from their games and introducing a new option that involved downloading content that was not present on the disc from the internet. Seems like a good idea right? Well, it was until EA released Sim"I wish I was a real game like SimCity 4"City in 2013. Putting aside the bungling of the servers and how terrible the game weas, EA decided that the new way to combat game piracy (because pirates can't connect to the internet or mosey their way into game servers easily) was to ensure that you were constantly connected to the internet and their servers whilst playing a, and here comes the shocker.....SINGLE-player game. Still, they offered their customers a free game as an apology for the mess they caused with SimCity, so at least i have 4 games on Origin now and not 3.