Bioware "Gets It"

I don't often make a lot of commentary about Gaming Industry News, but one of the big and ugly problems currently in the industry is DRM. I won't write my own article about why DRM is useless, stupid, and annoying, I'll just point you to Shamus Young's article. He has the additional benefit of actually knowing something about the programming difficulties involved in DRM.

To make myself clear, though, I'm in agreement with Shamus, although I won't go to the lengths he does of eschewing games that I really want to play solely based on their DRM. I don't consider boycotting to be an effective means of combating a *single issue* in the same way that I don't consider voting for the other guy to be an effective statement. A different sort of communication is necessary.

That being said, I am so happy that I ran across this announcement on the Bioware Dragon Age forums:

"[Bioware is] happy to announce that the boxed/retail PC version of Dragon Age: Origins will use only a basic disk check and it will not require online authentication. In other words, the retail PC version of the game won’t require you to go online to authenticate the game for offline play. We have chosen not to use SecuROM in any version of Dragon Age that is distributed by EA or BioWare."

I am SO excited about this game--more than I have been about any game in years and years. I even applied for the beta test of the toolset and am busily propitiating the computer spirit in the hopes it will bestow favor upon me. It's nice to see that I can continue to love Bioware wholly and without reservation because they have done the right thing about this DRM fiasco. If they stand firm and are successful with it, they may even begin to coax EA away from their psychotic DRM policies.

Awesome.