Dragon Age 2 PC DRM Detailed
The Steam edition will use only Steam for DRM. However, as EA did not start selling Dragon Age 2 through Steam until after it had stopped offering a free upgrade to the bonus-packed 'BioWare Signature Edition,' even Steam aficionados might have gone for a retail copy.
DRM on the retail edition is a different affair, with a combination of two different systems. 'Release Control' will be used to ensure that should you receive a copy before the game officially launches in your territory, you won't be allowed to play it until the powers that be say so. Release Control will remove itself once the game has launched.
The other, more persistent layer of DRM on retail copies has no disc check and does not limit the number of PCs you can install the game on. After verifying ownership by logging into your EA account when installing, you'll be able to play the game on five different PCs within any given 24-hour period. While you can play offline, it'll periodically require you be online for a login check, at yet-undecided intervals.
Dragon Age 2 launches for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on March 8.
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Rice-Rocketeer
replySounds awesome to me, quite frankly!
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[deleted]
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From what it sounds like, this is the least obtrusive form of DRM that is available. Online authentications? Sure, I'm good with that - I'm persistently online anyway.
Whether you like it or not, DRM is here to stay. If developers are going to use it, they should use stuff that doesn't harm the end user. I honestly don't see how this is going to hurt the end user.-
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Or a point where there might no longer exist a service to authenticate to?
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With Steam, some people do that sort of thing. A few minutes on break at work on the workstation, a few minutes on the laptop while riding home on public transportation, switch to the HTPC on hitting home, oops family wants the TV, hop to the desktop, decide to play in bed from the netbook after that...
Not even at the same time, just in sequence. Binding software to one machine makes less and less sense as people get more mobile and use different devices for different tasks. That's one of the things Steam has gotten very right.-
While your example is valid, I would count myself extremely lucky if I had 4 different computers capable of playing Dragon Age 2 (one of them a netbook no less!), in addition to a workplace where it was cool to install games onto their hardware.
Perhaps I should've said "more than 5 different computers". Perhaps I could've played it for a few minutes on the can with my phone? -
Holy shit this is such a ridiculous example.
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