The Sims 3 to be DRM free

PC News | Rhyming is fun.

EA has revealed that The Sims 3 will not use digital rights management in order to prevent piracy.

Instead, the game will simply rely on a good old fashioned CD key, just like The Sims 2. None of that complicated online authentication nonsense, apparently.

"To play the game there will not be any online authentication needed," Rod Humble, Sims Executive Producer, wrote on the game's official website. "We feel like this is a good, time-proven solution that makes it easy for you to play the game without DRM methods that feel overly invasive or leave you concerned about authorization server access in the distant future."

This is no doubt a response to the Spore fiasco last year, which saw many punters angry about the incredibly harsh DRM measures in place, such as limited installs, online authentication, and an instruction manual misprint that only allowed one online character per copy of the game.

The Sims 3 is due for a release in June, with expansions set to follow every three days afterward.

Related The Sims 3 Content

A Sims 3 version of the Royal Wedding
28 Apr, 2011 The appeal really depends whether you care about the Royal Wedding or not.

E3 2010: The Sims 3 coming to consoles
15 Jun, 2010 Playing people who are playing people in games.

The Sims 3 Review
08 Jul, 2009 It's a beautiful day in the neighbourhood.

12 Comments

heatseeker

3 years ago

PALGN wrote

with expansions set to follow every three days afterward.

This cant be right.
3 weeks perhaps?

G3ck0

3 years ago

It's making fun of the all the expansion packs other Sims games get, how they release them regularly. Although Stuff Packs shouldn't be classified as expansion packs really.

Passa

3 years ago

FINALLY! Publishers are starting to realise DRM schemes are expensive, complicated, harmful to the quality of the product and, most ridiculously, do not work.

Now I just have to wait for people to stop loving Steam so we can fix that too.

Eyce

3 years ago

Passa wrote

FINALLY! Publishers are starting to realise DRM schemes are expensive, complicated, harmful to the quality of the product and, most ridiculously, do not work.

I remember reading an article on Gamasutra about the developers of Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon.

They went in for copy protection knowing that it was going to be cracked, they wanted to at least stall the crackers from uploading a usable copy to the internet for at least 2 weeks- The major selling period of any game.

It ended up taking them a month to get a fully cracked copy working.

If Developers want to do Non-Copy DRM, I'm all for it, but as soon as they start limiting installs, then that's just s**t.

el_rezzo

3 years ago

The system works. Finally.

Mr Waffle

3 years ago

Excellent, nice one EA. Treating customers like customers and not like criminals-in-waiting is definitely preferable.

sploggers

3 years ago

literal LOL at the expansion comment

Jellyfish

3 years ago

Pfft are DRM free. That doesn't really bother me, get it CIDER free and there will be celebrations in the streets >.>

bleach1st

3 years ago

I love the expansion comment

ahh it's why I finally gave up on the Sims 2... I couldn't afford to keep buying all the expansions so in the end I just gave up and never brought/played another :S I did buy all the Sims 1 expansion though (sad I know

)

good to see they gave up on the whole DRM rubbish, I was going to buy Spore until I heard about the whole DRM thing, really made me think twice about buying it

and I'm OK with serial numbers, sure I hate putting them in everytime but I can live with that

Nic_231

3 years ago

Passa wrote

Now I just have to wait for people to stop loving Steam so we can fix that too.

What on earth is wrong with Steam? It is an excellent content delivery service. It is well maintained and has great deals on games.
Your comment reeks of somebody who does not think he should have to pay for his games...

Island_Wolf

3 years ago

For Passa. Hope this is for every game in steam...

In http://blog.seattletimes.nwsource.com/brierdudley/2009/03/24/valve_boosts_steam_matchmaking.html

Quote

Valve also announced a new "customer friendly" copy protection system for games developed with Steam. Called Custom Executable Generation, it "makes unique copies of games for each user allowing them to access the application on multiple machines without install limits and without having to install root kits on their PC,'' the release said.

Skiller

3 years ago

Island_Wolf wrote

For Passa. Hope this is for every game in steam...

Unfortunatally although it's available for all games to use the publishers/devs can still have their own DRM (usually securom) ontop of steam which really sucks

View as forum topic

Add Comment

Like this news?

Share it with this tiny url: http://palg.nu/da

| More

The Sims 3

Pre-order or buy:
PALGN recommends: www.Play-Asia.com

Australian Release Date:
  4/06/2009 (Confirmed)
Publisher:
  Electronic Arts
Genre:
  Simulation
Year Made:
  2008
System Requirements:
- Windows XP (Service Pack 2)
- 2.0 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
- 1 GB RAM
- At least 6.5 GB of hard drive space with at least 1 GB additional space for custom content
- 128 MB Video Card with support for Pixel Shader 2.0

Read more...