MEA Patch 1.09 removes DRM

Development time is only a piece of that puzzle.  What you say is "incomparable" is the only method of comparison.  I'm not going to break down how they figure out how to budget a game internally because it's a lot of explanation to prove a point you can't seem to fathom.  When a publisher undergoes a project such as this, they use historical data to fund the project.  So where ME 3 has established the market (the max they have ever earned monetarily), they would take the budget for that game and stretch it out over a 5 year period and likely make cuts to account for market differences.  And that's how you get the budget for ME:A.  You don't just pluck numbers from the sky.  
In the case of Anthem, EA makes an estimate on the revenue Bioware has pulled in from all of their IP's.  Even though it's brand new.  The one thing they all have in common is that they are made by the same studio.  It's a similar concept.
Manpower and development time are factored under the  "budget" piece and therefore are not individually a factor of the profit margin.  IE:  Profit = sales-budget.

Side note: gained ~10 fps after this was removed.

Are they expecting to sell a lot more copies then? DLC could encourage people to buy the game I guess.

Possible logic is that the game isn't worth as much now. The DLC will be worth more. Move the DRM to the DLC. Sure you got the game for free but now you want the DLC and can't have it. Why pay to keep it in the game when you want to sell the DLC? If anything I would say removal of DRM supports DLC is coming as it will very likely be in DLC.

Probably not, generally games will see the majority of their sales in the first three months.  Beyond that is generally only a small portion and rarely at the full retail price that was at launch.

Big deal. Game was cracked a while back anyways for what I recall. May as well remove the stupid thing.

Also, and I won't dive much into this, there's a "system" that was created by the hackers recently to "patch" Denuvo on the fly. So currently Denuvo is as useful as the standard Steam DRM, that is, no very useful.

Why, as a matter of fact, yes. Although, not sure about SP, I only play MP as of now, and I noticed a decent performance increase; I mean before that I was barely able to play the game, it ran at 15 fps after a little while. Then again, most of the issues were introduced by some patch, I think the second patch (no idea what's the name version). So I don't know if the fps boost is related to removing DRM.
BTW, this is on PC, no clue how the situation is/was on consoles.

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also....

Could always be a new policy they decided on with Andromeda. It could always bet he first to do it, rather than the only one.

Even with biotics (as is referred in an Epilogue terminal) they made the mistake of thinking it was the ONLY ONE rather than the FIRST.

Or an experiment. EA wants to see what happens if they do this, and they consider ME:A safe to fool around with.

Titanfall 2 had it temporarily removed for a free weekend and the SP was anyway locked, you could only play MP.

I did. These are the biggest things I've noticed from patch so far, in returning to an early (Eos) NG+ and deciding to scrap that and go from start NG+ again.


The Good:
-Frame rate increase, even on tweaking settings up from before, on my laptop. Where earlier I struggled to get 30s to happen, and maybe 40s, I now get almost always 30s on tweaked upwards settings (still turning down resolution a little bit and a lot kept at Medium since I'm on a laptop view anyway) and it often can sit in the 40s. AKA a roughly '5 fps' upgrade and much more stable, albeit still not as good as many recent games.
-Animation improvements. Its now, at least for these first few hours, at least at the status that it need to release with (DAI reminiscent; which is good in being, well, good, but bad in that its been a few years since that game).

The Bad:
-A bug that others have had, where sound cuts completely out until restart of game, has started to happen to me. Twice.
-On the Eos landing scene (previous NG+), talking to Liam, Ryder's head snapped around. This was ironic after just reading the patch notes. Ruined all immersion. Hope it doesn't happen again this time.
-A save file bug(?) where on two occasions - the first time naturally and the second time in trying to replicate the problem - manual saves on Eos wouldn't load. It would have been all lost without auto saves. I didn't try a third time, as I figured I wanted to try out from scratch anyway. I'm not on Eos again yet, so I don't have anything to say other than if this bug persists, I will be very disappointed.