In the tradition of such financial windfalls as VideoCD and EPSN Baseball, EA and Bioware are now using "copy protection" as a means to ensure that at some future point, every game they make will be able to be forcibly obsolesced in order to manage their own "classics" channel, much like Sony and Nintendo are now selling all their old titles again, which also ensures that their copyrights on these titles never really expire. Ever.

Basically, the deal is this: For both Spore and Mass Effect, which both are primarily single-player games, you will now be required to do an online authorization for the machine you install it on. It's a near certainty that at some point in the future, they're simply going to declare it not worth their time to continue authorizing installs of these games. It probably won't even be a terribly long time before this happens, as EA has a particularly miserable track record for this... How long exactly was it that SSX3 actually retained it's online multiplayer ability?

Me, I'm probably buying them both (didn't have time to finish Mass Effect on the XBox 360 before I realized I should have gotten a PS3) but I'm going to crack the holy thunderfsck out of them. So much for being sure your grandkids might be able to play a game you enjoyed if you hang onto it long enough.

Note, I say "probably" not because I'm hinting at some other method of obtaining them. I say this because depending on how things turn out, I might just skip dealing with either of them at all just because of this online authentication bullshit. If it isn't worth me paying money to support the people who wrote the game, then screw playing it.

Update: Also, let's not forget what this does to the ability of resellers (or, god forbid, game rental companies) to handle these titles. That's right, you can forget about renting these from Gamefly or picking them up used anywhere.