Previous people have said this, but I will reitterate it, the only people being really effected by this are the paying customers. The people who hack games always find some way around this either through bypassing the check completely or through generated serial keys once they crack the algorithm. If you have enough people hacking the game you could potentially have people with generated keys registering authentic keys. So a person just coming from a store could potentially get a game that is already dead off the shelve. I forsee a great many customer complaints over this soon to come. People who hate EA could also potentially activate serial after serial in an attempt to completely block this product.