Well, you can’t totally claim that Bioware wouldn’t do the whole Insanity unlock mode, because Mass Effect required you to play the game twice on harder difficulty levels each time before you could unlock it (and there was an achievement associated with beating it all three times). They do seem to have learned their lesson with Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2.

I think that you’re right about that, especially because EA has enacted new measures to keep piracy down and recoup profits. For example, they keep having Day 1 DLC that requires you to have purchased a new copy of the game to get for free. You can still get it with a used copy, you’ve just got to buy it. Mass Effect 2 even has a system that will give gamers free DLC provided they bought the game and got the system free or they buy the system. I like this method better.

As fars as Insane mode being unlocked from the beginning I think that:
a) they know that the video gamers that are into Bioware RPGs would probably throw a fit if they had to unlock this kind of stuff and
b) it’s impossible to return a Steam game

The latter is important, I will explain to any of your readers who aren’t familiar with this, because the biggest reason video game designers pad out their games is to keep people from trading them in. I think once games are primarily digitally distributed we will see this trend peter out. It’ll take a while since they’re so used to doing it, but eventually they’ll realize there’s no point and make tighter games