I guess we are facing a cultural issue here. No system will ever be good enough. Games are more sensitive because they are targeted to a market segment that is highly subversive in nature.
Perhaps they should opensource these kind of games and dedicate themselves to enterprise / collaboration BI simulation software ( which is not a bad idea at all ).

Opensource the platform! create open, distributed games meshed with social applications!
And make money from enterprise software built on top.

Humm.. probably not a new idea.

good news :)

If they fixed this issue then I might buy it :)

On a more idealogical note, I strongly recommend that anyone interested in DRM and copyright issues to read "Free Culture" by law professor Lawrence Lessig.

Nevertheless I feel betrayed because DRM is only penalizing those that go legal and may have to change computerr in a few years time (MB goes down... new processor, etc).

Why should I have to phone EA to give me additional install permission after the 3?

I would like to know who are the braniacs in EA that planned this, because they should be fired for extreme incompetence and for being completely acephalous on this and wasting the company money in stupid things instead of better sites and games(EA Forums look like crap and EA page does not have a single notion of usability and Spore can do way better, for instance, taking into account climate and the way the being is designed to survive it).

Sure, there are legitimate reasons to oppose DRM. But your recent spate of articles have the tone of a mafioso threatening a victim who is trying to stand up for their rights.

"Didn't we tell you that Vito doesn't like it when you try to weasel out of paying protection? Maybe these broken fingers will make you think about trying to skip out again."

Personally, I've found RWW's immature and illogical cheerleading for unethical and illegal activites has actually made me view EA's attempts to use DRM more favorably. After all, they're only trying to protect themselves from ungrateful creeps.

Perhaps if you wrote an article on the business and distribution strategies that EA could have used to recoup their huge investment in Spore -- without resorting to DRM -- I might view your side more favorably. As it stands, you just come across as a bunch of whining ingrates with a huge sense of entitlement.

If Stardock can do it, EA can too. Or not?

Regards
Nohab.

1. DRM efforts have largely failed to protect vendors’ legitimate rights because they are rapidly cracked
2. They have contributed to destroyed customer relationships and trust by impinging, inconveniencing and even impugning honest customers
3. Annoyed and hostile gamers publicly vent their outrage and fury on game suppliers and DRM suppliers via portals, blogs and message boards
4. Impacting honest users tends to shift their sympathy towards the pirates rather than the developers and publishers. In effect, onerous DRM legitimizes piracy – because with pirated copies you avoid the hassles DRM imposes.

How did technologies and efforts designed for the benefit to the industry instead become the enemies of the software business? And how do we fix it? The whitepaper "Is Anti-Piracy/DRM the Cure or the Disease for PC Games?" draws from multiple sources across the PC Games industry to answer these questions and it can be downloaded from http://www.byteshield.net/byteshield_whitepaper_0005.pdf

When their customers leave, after deciding that they have had enough with jumping through hoops and putting up with being treated like criminals, just for bothering to do the right thing and PAY for software & games, the companies blame piracy and not their own practices. This gives them what they need to justify adding even more DRM. They figure if they add more, the pirates won't crack it and their customers will come back because now they have to pay for it.

They are idiots...total fools. They will run themselves out of business, eventually, if they don't get a clue.

With all of the buzz and anticipation surrounding this release it makes more sense to me that that would be the driving force behind the surge in pirated copies.

I'm hardly defending DRM here but does anyone else see this article falsely connecting the two? Or am I just way off-base?

Yes, I'm downloading it specifically because of their heavy-handed method of dealing with piracy. I never would have bought the game, but neither would I have bothered pirating it if it hadn't been for the DRM.

This argument only fails if it turns out that people in the third category don't love the game at all. If they play it and lose interest, they won't buy. And you know what? Good for them, the customer should not have their wallet held hostage to bad programming, software bugs, or over-hype of a poor product.

It used to be only the billboard top hits or sales numbers. This seems to be much more democratic. It makes me think if this game was a little cheaper and without DRM if all of those people would buy it online or not.

Would it help their sales? As much as I hate DRM I hate to see a mediocre game be destroyed entirely by people playing it and not paying for it.