Anti-Cheat Software Continues to be the New DRM in Pissing Off Legit Customers

upstart writes:

Anti-Cheat Software Continues To Be The New DRM In Pissing Off Legit Customers:

Long-time readers here will know that one of the consistent themes over the years when it comes to video game DRM has been the absolute plethora of anecdotal stories you get about how DRM screwed up the playing experience for legitimate customers. Performance issues, inability to play online or single-player campaigns due to DRM failures, intrusive kernel-level access issues; the list goes on and on.

Well, if you've been paying attention over the last couple of years, anti-cheat software is quickly becoming the new DRM. Access to root layers of the computer complaints, complaints about performance effects, complaints about how the software tracks customer behavior, and now finally we have the good old "software isn't letting me play my game" type of complaint. This revolves around Kotaku's Luke Plunkett, whose writing I've always found valuable, attempting to review EA's latest FIFA game.

I have reviewed FIFA in some capacity on this website for well over a decade, but regular readers who are also football fans may have noticed I haven't said a word about it this year. That's because, over a month after the PC version's release, I am still locked out of it thanks to a broken, over-zealous example of anti-cheat protection.

Publisher EA uses Easy Anti-Cheat, which has given me an error preventing me from even launching the game that every published workaround-from running the program as an administrator to disabling overlays (?) to editing my PC's bios (??!!)-hasn't solved. And so for one whole month, a game that I own and have never cheated at in my life, remains unplayable. I've never even made it to the main menu.

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