PC hardware site Guru3D has discovered DRM hidden within Battlefield: Hardline that kicks off if the game detects you changing your hardware multiple times, locking your account.

Site runner Hilbert Hagedoorn discovered the software after testing out Hardline's performance on multiple graphics cards. Understandably, he's not best pleased.

"Here's what EAs DRM is doing," Hagedoorn writes. "They don't just verify the number of PCs you work on slash use, nope .. they dare to monitor hardware changes now, which I am sure is a privacy breach on many levels. So once we insert new hardware (graphics cards) the hardware id # hash changes and if that happes a couple of times they are rendering your activation invalid."

The message reads; "Too many computers have accessed this account's version of Battlefield: Hardline Digital Deluxe Edition recently. Please try again later."

As Hagedoorn points out, this essentially renders the kind of performance testing that he specialises in impossible. At the time of his post Hagedoorn had been locked out of the game for around four hours, and the warning message he was issued with mentioned no set time period for the ban. It's also not clear just how many hardware changes are allowed before the DRM kicks in.

Which is really besides the point. If you buy a game legitimately, surely you should be able to do whatever you want with the PC you're running it on? Hard to see how EA is going to do anything but annoy its PC consumer base with this move. Much like Ubisoft did when it put a similar system in Anno 2070.