okay, so the sims games sell well. However, what would they sell like if they didn't have any anti piracy on them? Plus, EA would not be facing lawsuits from the securom being on there if it had never been on there in the first place. You have to factor in the cost of the anti piracy software itself, the cost to them in lawsuits, and the hidden cost of lost sales.

If they lowered the cost of the product by the amount it costs them to take care of all of the above, more people would be willing to pay for it anyway.

The truth is, there are always going to be people who pirate. But when the anti piracy software only hurts legitimate customers, and the pirates still get by it with relative ease, the only one truly hurt is the company in the long run. Bite the hand that feeds you long enough, and eventually the hand (ie the customers) will stop feeding you...

Anyway, the point is, you are saying that sims sells well, so therefore EA isnt losing anything by putting in anti piracy software that hurts legitimate customers.

That is like saying a man who lived until he was in his nineties that smoked wasn't hurt by the smoking. In actuality, he may very well have lived till he was a hundred if it wasn't for the smoke. We will never know of course, but we can take an educated guess that his life would have been of higher quality/longer without the smoking.

So in actuality we don't know if EA's sales were hurt by securom or not, but we can take an educated guess that higher numbers of people pirated the games because of securom that would have otherwise legitimately bought it because Spore's pirate numbers indicated that.

There will always be a core number that pirate, just because they like the challenge or whatever, but when you lose legitimate customers to pirating, you are doing something wrong.

gdayars: The small minority that care about anti-piracy software that come with games...is so small EA doesn't care. To them stopping the small minority of people who don't download cracked games from burning there games and giving them to others...outweighs the extremely small loss of sales from having anti-piracy software come with a game.

And the lawsuits are a load of crap. Securom's bad effects are a myth just like the Loch Ness Monster. There is only an extremely small minority of people that Securom has caused problems for. And of this small minority there is another small minority where the effects weren't even from Securom. People like to blame things without proof, like, for example, it is perfectly viable that your cd/dvd rom drive could break after installing a game (as it was used to install the game, as the game was on a cd/dvd). Just because it was after the game was installed that it broke, does not mean the game did it. A small amount of cases apply to this.

The only result from the court case is likely to be that EA will have to state on all packaging what anti-piracy software is used.

I ask everyone to read up on Securom, to read every morsel of information on it...and you will see that some of the negative effects contradict themselves, that there are so many reported effects that couldn't of been caused of Securom etc. Or even some of the supposedly 'negative effects' are just stopping the pirating of the game that Securom came with.

And you will then see that a very very small number of people have genuinely had a bad Securom experience. I would say 0.001% of consumers. OR LESS.

This is one of those things where the negative effects only SEEM widespread...when in actual fact a very small % of people have had a problem...and an even smaller % have had a genuine problem. The small % just seems so big, cause thats all we hear from. Hardly anyone sets up a website saying how Securom didn't cause them any problems. Think about it.

My new CD/DVD rewritable drive no longer plays music CDs. And every now and then I get pop-up messages telling me that the Sims2 CD I am using is not legal when they all are. I am not so sure of Securom's efficiency, especially if it detects legal copies of the game as legal only half the time. Who knows what else it messes up in the computer if it can't get right event the things it was programmed to do. Useless to say that I never had such issues with the previous antipiracy method EA used for the games before SecuRom.

the securom tells me that many times that my m&g disk is not the orginal i just take out cd and put it back in and it works. My sound is messed up now since i have installed m&g before i used a no cd crack and securom was silent till m&g came along and i forgot to get the no cd crack again

For me, the issue with securom isn't that "HOMG it could mess up my computer". It's that I didn't have ANY say so on whether or not it was installed. There wasn't anything to prompt me to accept or deny it and, I'm sorry, but I don't care if they're getting ripped off by pirates. That doesn't give them the right to force a program on us. Even if it stopped piracy of their games (which it hasn't...a quick google search will show you that) it's still not right. Especially when they make it difficult to remove.

Sure, we can choose not to buy games that have it, but I didn't even know about securom until after I already installed every ep down to Apartment Life.

They do have the right, but I think it should be stated on the box (or during installation at the very least) that it is going to be installed along with the game.

Not without the user's permission they don't.

I think it should be on the box. Not just installation though. By the time you're installing it it's too late. You've opened it so the store won't take it back.

Well, they do have the permission, because there is a clause that covers it in the EULA. It doesn't make it any less sneaky though. And yes, it needs to be on the box.

I don't count that. As soon as you open the box, before you even take the disk(s) out...it's not going back to the store. The bit in the EULA is too late for you to give permission because you've already paid for it. You've paid for the game, they have your money, and they're forcing you to either not use the product they sold you, use it and take a program you didn't want, or to resell it for a piece of what it's worth.
Those are your choices and no matter what you do, they already have your money and you're not getting it back from them.
Sneaky doesn't even cover it.

For myself, I don't read the EULA. Not on single-player games. So, I didn't know. I always expect COMMERCIAL software to prompt me before installing anything but what's on the box. And they usually prompt you even with things that are on the box. Directx anyone? Even though a game needs it to run, there's always a choice to install it or skip it.

xoxSugah, you put things into right perspective. Thank you! These are my reasons too for being so pissed with SuckaRom and EAxis. In the end of the day it's us, the legitimate players, who have paid money to buy the game, who are treated like potential pirates, and not the pirates" themselves, who have already ripped the game without giving a single cent. Stupid EAxis!

As I said, it should be on the box. But incidentally, it's common practice that if you do not agree with the EULA, you are entitled to a refund from the publisher (not the store, but the EA Games itself).

While I also don't read EULAs with any regularity, at the same time, if you don't read them, then to a certain extent it's sort of stupid to complain.