Star Wars Battlefront DRM Limits Install to 5 Hardware Changes

During CPU and GPU benchmarking for Star Wars Battlefront, a DICE game published by EA, we encountered an additional layer of DRM beyond the EA Origin requirement. Steam, Origin, uPlay, and other proprietary game distribution applications utilize various means of digital rights management, often tied to online user accounts in the modern day, but some games go further.

In the case of Star Wars Battlefront, the game is limited to five hardware changes until it locks users out, stating: “Too many computers have tried accessing this account's version of Star Wars Battlefront. Please try again later.”

Not very helpful of a message, as no quantification of “later” is provided.

Each of our GPU tests exhausted one of five activations to the game, so we ended up using three codes for full test saturation. In a real-world environment, this will assuredly never be an issue – no sane person is going to sit there and change video cards, RAM, or other components in such a short period of time.

For anyone encountering the “too many computers have tried accessing this account's version of [game],” error message, it appears – from our own experience – that the lock-out expires after somewhere between 12 and 24 hours (for one more hardware configuration). We attempted a few solutions to unlock sooner, but ultimately determined that waiting is the only sure-fire means to unlock the account.

Hopefully this helps anyone who's encountered the same error message. You're not permanently locked-out -- but it does seem a little unnecessary.

- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.