EA's troubles around Battlefield 3 and Origin

[Mini-Me 24]

Yesterday I've seen a TV report about EA being in trouble due to the EULA of the Origin digital distribution and digital rights management (DRM) software. Battlefield 3 has been released on 25th October 2011 in USA/27th October 2011 in Europe and at least in Germany receives many negative criticism for the fact that the game requires you to use EA's Origin client.

As an example the EULA of it reads the following lines in section 1.C:

[...] You acknowledge and agree that the Application can automatically validate license rights for some or all EA products without separate notice to you. This means that in order to use the Application and certain

EA products, you must leave the Application installed on your computer.

You acknowledge and agree that the Application may use information regarding your computer, hardware, media, software and your use of the Application to validate your license rights and to update the Application.

In easy words this means that you allow Origin to completely scan your computer for other EA products that are installed and check if you own a valid license. If you don't they could just block access to that game and require you to enter a valid product key, or even ban your account and the games affiliated with it. Further, they also want to use nearly all information your computer offers, including your music, videos and other programs, to improve the Application (usage statistics: what do you like to play, watch, or listen to?) and to validate the copy of your game. This means they could e.g. check on how many computers you try to run the game and then take further actions.

Due to legal reasons I don't want to examine here (it would take me ages to write all that and I might probably not have enough knowledge of the English language) parts of the EULA are invalid and if EA does take the actions mentioned there they'd violate against existing German laws.

As a result Gamers answered with negative criticism against the game, for example the Amazon.de customer review are very bad for the PC version of the game:

The Amazon.com reviews for the game are generally less, but still the majority is bad ones:

Further there's an online petition with already around 10,000 signers to forbid the sale of the PC version of the game in Germany until EA worked fixed the issues in the EULA.

Finally the big two electronic and computer shops in Germany (Media Markt and Saturn) showed warnings about the games in the markets saying "For given cause we want to indicate you that you have to accept a legally unsettled EULA during the installation of the PC game Battlefield 3." and even accepted returns of the game even if the packaging was already opened, which is very unusual.

[RG 1]

The .com version's reviews are far better

[Mini-Me 24]

Dude, you are looking at the Xbox Version .

[RG 1]

Oh well

EDIT: The PC version shows 3 stars for me, so still not as bad

Edited November 2, 2011 by RG

[Mini-Me 24]

I got my second screenshot from Amazon.com (like I said) and can clearly only see two stars. Maybe the results also differ per locations, and not only on the different domains.

[uokka 117]

I believe the info piracy of the game industry just pushes us paranoid customers further into copy piracy.. which is no good.