It seems that the gaming industry is moving away from DRM in reaction to what happened with Spore and its DRM fiasco.  Now it seems that EA is releasing the Sims 3 with no DRM, only the CD-key for copy protection.

Personally, I see this as a good move because so much money is wasted on piracy protection that proves ineffective.  However, my hope is that this does not embolden more blatant theft because of how much easier it will be to pirate software.

While I believe that smaller indie studios such as 2D Boy shouldn’t have DRM, the big studios suffer from the “stick it to the man” mentality that many pirates espouse.  So a piece of me thinks that this may be a bad move.

While draconian measures of DRM are a bit much, some level of copy protection should be in place.  As a consumer, this gives me a good feeling that the big corporation out there is protecting the money I spent on investing in their product rather than feeling like a fool because everyone else got it for free.  As an indie, I believe that DRM is a bad idea.  But as a big publisher, I think that some DRM is a good idea, because it gives me, the consumer, a feeling of due diligence put in by the publisher.

Also, I believe that DRM is good against having the product being resold on the market by GameStop.  I believe that the creative minds behind the game should get the money due to them, rather than the middleman who is good at recycling used games.  But hey, it’s still a free market and people are willing to shell out their money “gently used” games.

The key, I believe is that the price is too high for most AAA games.  Once that price is brought down for a new game, revenues will go up and there will be more new games bought than used games at a discount.