Battlefield fans: Your phony marriage with Electronic Arts is getting more interesting every day.  Two weeks after the release of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the company severed SecuROM from any purchase made through Steam.

STEAM
Change: The STEAM version of Battlefield Bad Company 2 will no longer have SecuROM on the exe file. Instead it will use [sic] Valves own DRM instead.

Naturally, the makers of Spore are getting praise for a change of heart.  You know, proof Battlefield totally owns Call of Duty, a series that was lax on digital rights managament.

Noticing a trend?  Crippling DRM is announced for an upcoming game.  An outcry ensues.  The company charges headlong anyway.  Weeks after the game’s release, “Please Submit a Blood Sample to Continue Playing” is removed.  And people cheer a “victory”.

I hope you don’t believe this isn’t deliberate.

Digital distribution is granting computer games a longer sales life.  In the world of boxed retail, even the great ones eventually cede shelf room to Nancy Drew’s Pro Teen Detective 2010.  And despite the shift in consumer purchasing habits, it remains that your game development overlords are paranoid.

In a cubicle at Ubisoft or Electronic Arts or Activision, somebody hired for their Master’s in Business Administration degree (as opposed to their brain) has discovered the financial success of an upcoming game may determine whether they have a job in six months.  By fiddling through colorful graphs, this person has determined software piracy during the fourteen-day post-release period is the most monstrous and insidious communist plot we have ever had to face.  And because of this, both the company and various employees are prepared to risk their morality to stymie teh piratez…until that fourteen days is up.

Nobody wants to be the guy that makes the next Psychonauts.  And piracy is too easy to blame for that.  Nobody wants to be the guy that let years of hard work ‘fall victim to new-age tape trading’.  So even if a game like Assassin’s Creed 2 can have its “stay connected or we kill you” approach cracked on the first day, Ubisoft reps can play with each other’s cocks and say “Well, we tried our best and failed miserably.”

Know how the employees of Infinity Ward will instantly regain their babyface status when they deatch themselves from Activision?  Right now, removing DRM isn’t seen as a company calling off the dogs.  It’s seen as a company “coming to its senses”.  So there’s an incredible backlash against DRM.  There just isn’t any backlash to the play right after.

Enjoy your patch.  Developers and publishers really do care about you.  Honest.

I’m only following Battlefield: Bad Company 2 because of the “Fuck Activision” subplot, where a shining knight is off to slay Kotick the Dragon.  I have a problem with this perception.

Ars Technica recently sat down with Anders Gyllenberg, the producer of Bad Company 2 for the personal computer.  He explained the netplay model behind their Call of Duty-killer:

The server issue is key here, as Modern Warfare 2’s closed match-making system rubbed many PC gamers the wrong way. Gyllenberg laid out the details. “All servers are dedicated, hosted by some of our partners. If you have a clan or if you are a bunch of friends who want a safe haven where you can meet up, our server partners offer the possibility of controlling your own server,” he told Ars. “Reserved slots is one of the features. As an admin you will also have the option of enabling several features such as friendly fire ratio, Minimap on/off, 3D spotting on/off, etc. You can also password-protect your server if you want to do some serious practice prior to an important game.” Almost all the options you have after renting a server will allow it to continue to be a ranked server, but password-protected servers will be unranked to cut down on cheating and padding stats.

So please, allow me to get this straight: Infinity Ward usurped the consumer’s control of online play in the PC version of Modern Warfare 2, the console-oriented approach to a series that has been annualized by Activision.  To retaliate, PC shooter fans are going to purchase Bad Company 2.  It is the sequel to a console-exclusive shooter.  It is the eighth core game in the eight-year history of the Battlefield series.  And most importantly, you must rent servers directly through the developer and their “partners”.

And people think I’m insane.