EA Infects Battlefield Hardline with new DRM

Yesterday, reports emerged suggesting that Battlefield Hardline contained an activation limit. Guru3D was the source of the story, who, in benchmarking Battlefield Hardline’s graphics and performance, encountered this error message:

battlefield hardline activation limit

Here is the story from Guru3d:

So currently I am working on a graphics performance review for Battlefield Hardline, and guess what ? Do you guys remember the DRM introduced in Ubisofts Anno 2070 ? Well, EA just did pretty much the same thing. I am so irritated right now.

So I started working on a performance review. And after testing merely a handful of graphics cards I noticed EA will now lock your game with the following message:

battlefield hardline activation limit

Interesting huh? Especially considering it is just one PC that we are using ?

Here’s what EAs DRM is doing, EA don’t just verify the number of PCs you work on slash use, nope .. they dare to monitor hardware changes inside your PC now, which I am sure is a privacy breach on many levels. So once we insert new hardware (CPU / mobo or graphics cards) the hardware id # hash changes and if that happens a couple of times they are rendering your activation invalid. From what we now have learned, you get to have 5 hardware changes per license. Use them up and access to the game will be blocked for 24 hours per activation.

What a bunch of rubbish ….

If this is the future for EA titles then you guys can forget about VGA performance reviews as EA is rendering that pretty much impossible now. I’ve now been waiting for like 3 or 4 hours and we are still locked out of the game. The only way to solve this would be purchasing another key and setup a secondary account. This means that if we’d like to make a VGA performance review on Battelfield Hardline with a card or 20 we’d need to purchase the game three times.

EA – guys we understand your piracy and cheating/hacking concerns, but STOP pissing off your user-base with this STUPID DRM non-sense. Christ almighty, at what point will the industry realize they are killing the PC game market themselves ?