After royally pissing off many of their loyal fans, Electronic Arts may just finally be listening to consumers.

Over the past several years, the company has released several games with DRM that proved to be a hassle for consumers. The big three that really drew a lot of scrutiny where Bioshock, Mass Effect, and Spore.

All three games utilized the SecurROM DRM protection, which limits the number of times the game can be installed and requires activation online. After having both Bioshock and Mass Effect blow up in EA's face from the DRM, EA tried it a third time with Spore.

Spore's implementation of SecuROM turned out to be even more of a nightmare. Consumers were fed up with EA and not only was Spore the most pirated game of 2008 due to SecuROM, EA also met with a class-action lawsuit on the issue.

It appears that EA is finally taking a hint and might just be rethinking their stance on copyright protection with their software. There have been a couple of steps taken by the company lately that show EA might be doing just that.

First up is the SecuROM de-authorization management tool. The tool will search your computer for games and let you free up some of your activations available for games should you need to reinstall more than allowed. While its not a perfect solution by any means, its much better than absolutely nothing at all.

Furthermore, EA has announced that The Sims 3 will not have any online authentication. It will however still feature disc-based copy protection and a serial key.

EA already offers many games available via Steam that come without the DRM infections. Hopefully EA will keep up the good work before its too late.

"The game will have disc-based copy protection - there is a Serial Code just like The Sims 2. To play the game there will not be any online authentication needed.

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."