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EA: 99.8% of gamers don't care about DRM

If even a single customer is mad at your company then you haven't done your job well.

I am sure that EA CEO didn't mean to sound this callous in a recent Q&A, but someone should remind him that everything he says will likely end-up somewhere online. The Spore launch was seriously broken and took away a great deal of customer goodwill.

Case in point, some comments from the Dow Jones/Nielsen Media and Money Conference (originally reported at PaidContent.org)

Riccitiello said he felt the controversy was blown out of proportion, but he does acknowledge the inconvenience to users that DRM creates. "We're still working out the kinks. We implemented a form of DRM and it's something that 99.8 percent of users wouldn't notice. But for the other .2 percent, it became an issue and a number of them launched a cabal online to protest against it. I personally don't like DRM. It interrupts the user experience. We would like to get around that. But there is this problem called piracy out there."

What he should have said was "we didn't do a great job at the launch, but thanks to feedback from our users we made the correction and now we're all moving forward."

And if he really doesn't like DRM then they should figure out another way to solve the piracy problem. A community/enterprise version approach akin to open source might be one way to get things started.