Sims 3 : Ambitions producer Grant Rodiek recently sat down for an interview with Gamerzines. After a few paragraphs spent pimping the game’s new features and such, the discussion shifted to talking about the DRM used on the expansion and the core game, and Rodiek’s feelings about copy protection and piracy.
GZ: How does Sims 3: Ambitions tackle the problem of piracy and DRM?
GR: I remember reading the boards the other day and one guy was talking about the stylist career and how much he enjoyed playing it in Indonesia. Whether he was full of crap or serious, this was weeks ago and the game is only just coming out. I thought that was kind of funny and sad at the same time. People do pirate our games, it’s a reality. Our approach with this game is lets back off the DRM (Digital Rights Management), we have a disc check and that’s it.
Basically we want to reward our paying customers with light DRM, a good price and we’ll give you great stuff. You have Riverview if you register the game, and you get free updates which you can only get via registering, it takes months of our time to build this exclusive content. For World Adventures we had extra decorative items for your home and you have a bunch of new objects for this game as well. Hopefully this philosophy of nurture not punish will pay off and if players help us out and support our game then we’ll do our best to support them. We can’t stop the piracy, it’s maddening to me. It’s theft and that is all it is, but we’ll still try to support players.
Always nice to see a developer talking about focusing time and energy on supporting the player who bought the product. As for some of his own feelings on the subject, and how the original game’s DRM choice was arrived at…
GZ: DRM is something that will never go away, are you ever tempted to slap the hardest, most limited solution onto the game as possible?
GR: It always tempting. I know that on Sims 2 around the fifth expansion we added SecuRom and that made a lot of people really angry. That was a huge discussion point for The Sims 3 from top to bottom, junior engineers were writing emails to senior staff members arguing why we shouldn’t use specific forms of DRM and from there throughout the company we all decided we would only do a disc check and cross our fingers that the community would support us. I like to think that more people bought it because of the way we have acted, by respecting the consumer.
With strong sales of the game and the first expansion, I’d say that the community has. Perhaps more developers would like to pay attention to that?
June 15th, 2010 
Cliff Riseborough 
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