Piracy has almost always been a threat to the game industry. With so much new tech out there now, companies will go to great lengths to protect their rights through protocols known as DRM . Sometimes however, this need to secure can easily get the best of the developers behind its creation. We'll be talking SimCity, but that's just the beginning!

SimCity - EA Games / Maxis

As the news about this mess continues to pour in, there's no denying that SimCity has been one of the most covered DRM foibles in the history of this business. For those that don't follow us every single day though, let's make sure we have our facts straight. When the developer known as EA created their latest SimCity effort, they had grand multiplayer plans for its gameplay. These features included having the ability to not just create your own city, but also to work in a vast network alongside other users to both rival and support their accomplishments. The real fishy news about all of these social aspects though were that participation in them was mandatory. This means that all players must be online to play.

If you've got any knowledge of these things, that's when a lot of consumers began to smell a rat. Sure the multiplayer stuff is cool, but its far from mandatory when you consider how the game has worked for decades. To battle this, EA also made claims that the game's engine needed the internet to render such large scale cities. However we all knew what this was: it was a case of "always-on" DRM that forced the user to connect to the internet to prevent piracy of the game. On day one, when gamers were all forced to log in to the title's servers, apparently they couldn't handle the load. This meant legal buyers of the game literally could not play the game they just purchased. Worse yet, there were no refunds either. Even as I write, EA has had to disable many game features to get their connections up to snuff, and some are still locked out. SimCity is a pretty great game, but only if you're able to play it.

This isn't the only time DRM has caused issues in the past few months though. Blizzard Entertainment also probably feels a lot of EA's pain.

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