Mirror's Edge Catalyst DRM Locks You Out If You Upgrade Your Computer Too Many Times

One of the nice things about PC gaming is the fact that over time you can upgrade your system piece-by-piece, in order to achieve better performance. This means faster load times, better graphics, and higher resolutions. Unfortunately, it also means heavy-handed DRM that can lock you out of your favorite games.

With services like Steam, Origin, and others, you would think that additional DRM would become unnecessary. After all, once a game is in your library, you have to login in order to play it. So having additional hurdles would only serve as a hindrance to the customer, right? Well, if you have already, or are planning to pick up a copy of Mirror's Edge Catalyst, then you might want to get an system upgrades out of the way before you do it.

EA is shipping the PC version of the game with a particularly nasty piece of DRM that can render the game unplayable, even if you only ever install it on a single computer. Our friends at Gamers Nexus found this out the hard way when conducting benchmarks of the game on a variety of different graphics cards.

It turns out that every time you change a major piece of hardware in the system (CPU/GPU/Motherboard/etc.) the game wants you to reactivate it. While that might not seem like too much of a hassle, the game is only able to be activated a total of five times. So if you install it on a computer, then buy a new GPU, you've already used two of your five activations. If you swap out more parts down the road, you may find yourself unable to play the game at all.

There is simply no need for this kind of DRM in today's world. Computers are designed to be upgraded, and being penalized for doing so by a publisher is simply absurd.