Spore and Mass Effect PC forces players to stay online

BioWare’s technical producer Derek French has announced a surprising new copy protection scheme that requires the user to be online at regular intervals while playing both Mass Effect and Spore on the PC. If you are not online to validate your copy of either game every ten days, your product will stop working. Wait … what?

After the first activation, SecuROM requires that [Mass Effect PC] re-check with the server within ten days (in case the CD Key has become public/warez’d and gets banned)

… After 10 days a re-check is required before the game can run.

I’m not really a PC gamer, but my gut instinct on this is that it’s a stupid idea and I can see something going wrong. People are already reacting pretty badly to the news online, and I can see the backlash escalating, along with any number of problems that can arise from expecting paying customers to continually prove that they’re not pirates. 

This just doesn’t sound like a great idea to me.

[Cheers to John Berger]