The president of EA Labels, Frank Gibeau, has stated that Digital Right Management (DRM) is a failed and dead-end strategy. He also states that DRM was not the reason to make SimCity an always-online game. Gibeau made this statement in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz.
According to him, DRM was never mentioned during meetings about the development of the game. He states that the reason that Simcity needs to connect to the internet is because it's designed as a MMOG (Massive Multiplayer Online Game). Gibeau also added that EA has not properly made clear to users that the new SimCity is more a MMOG than previous versions.
There was are lot of criticism from fans after the launch of Simcity because not enough server capacity was available. Because gamers had no access to the servers they could not start to play the game. EA responded the issue by upgrading its server capacity.
EA's Gibeau is not the first one in the game industry who publicly acknowledges that DRM is a dead end. In September last year Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said that DRM is effective against piracy but results in a bad gaming experience. The French game developer has therefor decided to not use 'always-on' DRM anymore in its games.
