EA has closed the chapter on a turbulent feud with its target market by announcing that the next instalment of The Sims will relinquish DRM.

In a public statement posted on the official Sims 3 website, studio head Rod Humble described DRM as “overly invasive”. He said that the Sims 3 would include disc-based copy-protection – a simple serial code – and the game would not need any online authentication.

“We have heard your requests over the past months,” said the newly-promoted Humble, who in a matter of sentences has spun EA’s general policy on the contentious copy-protection technology.

The DRM debacle surrounding EA’s last major PC title, Spore, had in many cases overshadowed the merits of the game itself. When the title launched in September last year, its Amazon.com catalogue listing was awash with one-star user-reviews complaining about its copy-protection system.

Shortly after, Maryland resident Melissa Thomas filed a class action lawsuit against EA over alleged issues encountered with Spore's DRM software, SecuROM. “Whenever it downloads, installs or runs, SecuROM uses resources belonging to the computer owner, which by definition, makes those resources unavailable for other tasks,” read Thomas’s complaint.

EA chief John Riccitiello’s response to the issue seemed to be an attempt in trivialising the complaints, stating that DRM is “something that 99.8 percent of users wouldn't notice. But for the other .2 percent, it became an issue and a number of them launched a cabal online to protest against it.”

“I personally don't like DRM,” he added. “It interrupts the user experience. We would like to get around that. But there is this problem called piracy out there.”

SecuROM or not, Spore’s piracy levels appear to be inordinarily high. Though it was only available for the last three months of 2008, Spore had been illegally downloaded 1.7 million times; more than Crysis and Fallout 3 combined. Those illicit-download figures, provided by TorrentFreak, were amassed by sourcing download data via the popular peer-to-peer file sharing protocol, BitTorrent.

And, adding salt into EA’s manifestly spacious wound, the editors at TorentFreak claim that the vast number of illegitimate Spore downloads were “inflated”, due to the DRM that was put into the game.

Humble’s announcement of the standard disc-based copy-protection may effectively bury the hatchet between publisher and its anti-DRM audience. “We feel like this is a good, time-proven solution that makes it easy for you to play the game without DRM methods that feel overly invasive or leave you concerned about authorization server access in the distant future,” he said.

Click here for Edge’s DRM reportage.

And here for the Ten Most Annoying DRM Methods.