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Earlier this week, a games blogger was locked out of Battlefield Hardline on Origin after benchmarking a number of graphics cards. At the time, people pointed the finger at some form of ‘ghastly DRM’.
People were convinced that Battlefield Hardline contained some form of DRM, that would lock you out of the game following several hardware changes to your system.
However, EA has since clarified (Via Eurogamer) that the reason games blogger, Hillbert Hagedoorn was locked out of Battlefield Hardline was due to the Origin client itself, rather than the game.
Origin’s authentication system allows users to install a game on up to five separate PCs in one 24 hour time period, which wouldn’t really affect normal users but can be a pain for benchmarkers testing multiple system configurations.
However, EA did state that it wouldn’t leave users out in the cold if they ran in to this issue, players looking to benchmark more than five different system configurations can contact Origin customer support, who will help sort everything out.
So really, this ‘DRM scare’ isn’t a big deal. If you are looking to benchmark more than five GPUs, let Origin know and they will sort you out. Other than that one specific scenario, you aren’t going to run in to this problem.
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KitGuru Says: It is easy to rile up PC gamers when it comes to EA and its business practises. However, in this case there really wasn’t much to get upset about. So if you were worried about bad DRM in Battlefield, don’t be, you aren’t going to be locked out of your game any time soon.
Yeah I remember that happening to Luke from LTT after Dragon Age: Inquisition was released. Apparently EA sorted it quick though.
Every news outlet is scurrying to the defence of EA, when actually nothing’s got better – if anything, this news is worse.
Previously we had two concerns: i) this limit restricts reviewers, and ii) privacy; i.e. that EA would be monitoring your hardware. These concerns have not been allayed by the new revelation that it’s Origin-wide and not BFH, but have been massively amplified. Now we know that they’re invading everyone’s privacy, not just potential BFH players, and we also know that reviewers are potentially going to be restricted on any Origin game. This gives EA more potential power to control reviewers, in the way that they review and who is doing the reviewing.
I just don’t understand why the news outlets seem to think that this is actually contradicting the earlier report, as opposed to expanding its concerns.
origin, steam, uplay etc they all look at what hardware you have. its part of their way of finding out what sort of graphics level etc is reasonable to make a game on and im certain they tell you this in the “accept this to install software” button you clicked. this possibly cant be a surprise to you…
There’s a huge difference between an initial hardware check, or a check on demand, done with the permission and at the command of the user, and real-time constant background hardware monitoring. There’s also a huge difference between a locally stored hardware specs page and data being sent and stored in their servers. Steam doesn’t do anything of the sort – it stores locally a version of dxdiag from your PC which is *never* sent out to Valve – and as far as I’m aware uplay doesn’t either.
This is also beside the point. Even if it were common practice, which it isn’t, then my point was that the ‘new information’, the ‘explanation’ by EA is nothing of the sort. If anything it’s clarification and admission that the problem is much larger than we originally thought. If you were initially annoyed about this then you’ll be just as (or more) annoyed after the new info. The only reason you’d believe that ‘there really wasn’t much to get upset about’ after this new article was released is if you either weren’t bothered in the first place or you didn’t read the content of the new article as evidently Matthew did not.
Its a way to protect their product. I work for an Antivirus company, both consumer and enterprise, and they do the same thing in the background to 1) make sure this is a legitimate install 2) It follows their licensing, and 3) to make sure the program isn’t stolen or a victim of key generating.
Origin does the same thing. It installs a game and gets a hardware ID for the computer. If that hardware ID changes, then this counts as install 2, 3, 4, etc. Its done all around you for most programs with limited licensing. You are either too ignorant to notice, or you’re yet another person white knighting for pirate-friendly companies.
Not to mention EA fixes this within an hour if you contact them, with no charge and no fuss other than that initial contact. This is a non-issue. FYI steam constantly sends your hardware specs to Valve. Read the TOS.
if you are a user of steam you must have had one of those send hardware infos to steam popups im sure.
I don’t understand why people denounce this as “new ghastly DRM”, it’s been in place since BF4 launch. And at start there was no option for the Origin customer support to sort this out, I remember they gave five keys to Tom’s Hardware so they could benchmark the game after they got locked out.
Simply use origin-less copy of that game using 3rd party tools , and you are good to go.
Why are you so hurt about basic information about your machine being sent to EA. Windows does the same things to authenticate. It’s pretty obvious, and EA have been reasonable and said they can help people reviewing titles on lots of different hardware. I’d understand if it was monitoring all the software running on your machine like steam does… But you don’t seem to care about that.
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i have looked at my games on origin and yes there some good ones but i will come down to it delete my account and stay with steam as where i get most of my games so origin go and sit on a roll of grade one sandpaper