Maybe Wright can give you a P.O. box to send him a check. Then you can pay him directly and steal it.
Paranoia aside(I run without a firewall in the DMZ and don't use an anti-virus) there are plenty of reasons to not be connected to the internet. Where I'm at, it's a hundred bucks a month for a seriously shitty satellite connection.
When the stars are aligned, I've killed the right people and it's three in the morning, my connection is 1200/180. With a minimum possible latency of 667 milliseconds. When they aren't, I get speeds like these.
May 8th, 10:04PM - 469/137 kbps
April 24th, 11:27PM - 83/47 kbps
April 13th, 09:33PM - 118/126 kbps
January 26th, 12:27AM - 597/173 kbps
Bits, not bytes. My usual ping response times for things are 1k+. My ping response times from the mid afternoon till late in the evening are riddled with time outs. Depending on how it's designed, I could come in to play it in the evenings, and fail the authentication every frigging day and get surprised on day 10 with a deactivated game. Maybe, just maybe, my ISP enables the NOC controlled firewall on my modem for me again and blocks secure transmissions? The last time they did that, it took over a week to be able to do things like check my email. You'd be amazed how much you can't do when encrypted data is blocked.
Everyone not dumb enough to shell out that kind of money gets to use dial-up. That means that they have to tie up a phone line to play a single player game. Just paying for a dial-up connection in this area is like pissing away money. You're paying for a crap connection on crap lines, that's completely worthless for anything real, and lets you very very slowly check your email, and do other trivial tasks.
It's true that it's not a particularly onerous requirement and most people that are playing it will have internet. It's just a stupid one. It removes people from their market, people without connections, people without reliable connections, people that are paranoid, people that want EA to drop dead for calling them pirates, and people that don't do phone home software. It adds nada, they already know the copy protection scheme doesn't work, Bioshock had much the same and was cracked almost immediately.
