Unfortunately it’s getting much more common these days that you require an internet connection to register many PC games these days. It’s not just EA games, who produce the FIFA series, either.
Many of the manufacturers have DRM built into their software, allowing up to five installs maximum and requiring online registration. They say it’s to prevent piracy, but unfortunately the only ones that suffer are the genuine punters. If you look on the internet for “DRM”, you’ll see all the problems and anger this is causing.
I’m currently beta testing Football Manager 2010 for SI Games/SEGA. I’m also a moderator at their website. I’ve chatted with their developers regularly about various issues, including DRM. The actual programmers agree that DRM hasn’t stopped piracy, just slowed it down a little. For example, with the release of Football Manager 2009, it took the pirates a month longer to “crack” the game after first release than previous releases, but they still managed to do it. You only need to look on any of the torrent sites to see that none of the anti-piracy steps the developers take is working. With Football Manager, the programmers have purposely built “bugs” into the game that the pirates cannot fix. When a game is pirated, certain functions in the game won’t work and thus, every day on the forums, we get posts from people saying “why doesn’t this do this”... bingo… because it’s a pirate copy.
Pirates will always manage manage to crack games and software. At present, the software manufacturers simply don’t know the best way to combat this problem, hence the problematic DRM and SecureRom software that’s been used.
