DS3 will not start - Licence server

Everything else works fine. Download went fine. install went fine. Then when I try to play,

I get the sync to cloud data and then error that states -  "We could not connect to the EA servers to activate Dead Space 3 on this computer using your account. Please try again later."

I am playing all my other games. This one was free... or maybe just the download was free and that was all... nothing mentioned that I could "play" the game after the download.

Anyway, is there a fix? Or is it an issue?