The large publisher
Electronic Arts has announced that they have joined Valve’s digital distribution platform Steam, bringing notable titles to the service such as Spore, Warhammer Online, Mass Effect and Need For Speed Undercover.
In the next month the publisher will add Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, Mirror’s Edge, and Dead Space as well.
Steam currently has 15 million active user accounts globally.
“We are pleased to extend our holiday titles to gamers worldwide via Steam — a revolutionary technology that is one of the game industry’s most successful digital distribution services,” added EA COO John Pleasants of the deal.
Also notably, it appears as if Spore will have its DRM removed, according to this post on the Steam forums: Does Spore still have DRM?
Result for: ea game
According to a post on the official Ubisoft forum, it appears the French game publisher is looking to not fall into the same traps that Electronic Arts has with their hit game Spore which has been slammed for using restrictive SecuROM DRM.
For the upcoming expected blockbuster Far Cry 2, Ubisoft has admitted they will be using DRM, but with much less restrictions then Spore or Bioshock.
According to the Ubisoft Manager,
* You have five activations on three separate PCs.
* Uninstalling the game “refunds” an activation. This process is called “revoke”, so as long as you complete proper uninstall you will be able to install the game an unlimited number of times on 3 systems.
* You can upgrade your computer as many times as you want (using our revoke system)
* Ubisoft is committed to the support of our games, and additional activations can be provided.
* Ubisoft is committed to the long-term support of our games: you’ll always be able to play Far Cry 2.
The clear difference is that of the “revoke” feature. For an EA game, you never get any installations back, and you certainly don’t get up to 15 installations. You will lose one if your hard drives crash, but that is not as likely as someone wanting to upgrade, or reformat their OS.
