Earlier this week Guru3D discovered that Battlefield: Hardline‘s DRM locks you out after it checks your PC for hardware changes. Guru3D is a site that reviews and benchmarks games on different setups and after a few changes Battlefield: Hardline completely locked the reviewer out for 24 hours. With DRM warning saying: “Too many computers have accessed this account’s version of Battlefield: Hardline recently. Please try again later.”
This is EA’s way to discourage cheaters to switch PCs once they get banned and other cheating methods. This isnt really a problem to the majority of Battlefield: Hardline‘s players but is to people who demo or constantly change hardaware. It may seem to be breaching privacy but it states on Origin’s License Agreement that: “You acknowledge and agree that the Application may use information regarding your computer, hardware and operating system to create an anonymous machine identifier for purposes of validating your license rights and updating the Application. Information accessed for this purpose is not stored in retrievable form.”
DRM has been something Developers use to prevent privacy but due to how wonky developers turn them out to be, makes people to resort to piracy. DRM can be done right, somewhat like how Valve’s Steam does it but until then its not the best way to treat your customers who actually pay for the game.