All I have to say is that I am impressed and gladdened by the recent news that Bioware is not going to use any DRM beyond a disk check in their upcoming game Dragon Age: Origins.
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/dragon-age/979591p1.html
According to Community Coordinater Chris Priestly, the only type of anti-piracy that's being put on to any version of the game distributed by EA or
BioWare is a disc check. Moreover, it won't even require that the disk be checked online for authenticity.
There seems to be hope for EA yet! Now lets hope that they start releasing on Impulse and help these awesome Stardock guys out. I may actually buy this title so long as its digitally available (I still dont like hunting for CDs on a laptop). So long as EA continues this trend of not trying to squash the pirate bugs like cockroaches and puts their efforts toward the games themselves (this includes increasing the quality levels of the games as well), they may become favorable in my eyes.
The formula is simple, make a high quality game with low maintainance to the user and release it at a reasonable price that reflects the quality of the game. Then people will part with their hard earned money (at least reasonable and logical people will... guess pirates dont fit either of those categories). I suppose I should add quality support to the mix because when something goes wrong (and even the best titles have plenty of problems), you want to know that the problem will be acknowledged and fixed (while listening to the actually users and not some tech guy on level 2 who knows very little about how the game functions).
Stardock and GPG are leading the way, but I am pleased EA is following the trend as well, because their products are fairly decent, but DRM will almost always kill them off. It will be interesting to see if Activision/Blizzard follows this trend as well. I for one have no interest in D3 or SC2 if they impose activations and installation restrictions beyond loading up steam or impulse to play.
What are other thoughts on this development?