Spore was one of the most anticipated PC games of the year and launched to great hype. While most reviewers weren't too ecstatic about the game itself, it was Electronic Arts' attempt to stop piracy with an overly restrictive DRM scheme that got Spore a lot of its post-launch coverage. Shortly after its release, irate users started to flood Spore's Amazon page with negative reviews. Most of these users complained about the DRM scheme that only allowed the game to be registered on three computers and only allowed for one user account per license. Now, according to the BBC, Electronic Arts has given in and extended the number of possible installations and users to five.
According to Electronic Arts, less than half of one percent of users ever tried to run the game on more than three machines, so being able to play on five different machines should alleviate the DRM problem for virtually all users.
While this is probably a smart move by Electronic Arts, it is important to realize that these protests were not just triggered by the details of the DRM scheme, but by the fact that the game was DRMed to begin with. If you downloaded a pirated version of the game, you never had to think about the DRM anyway because your cracked copy was always DRM free. In the end, schemes like this do nothing to deter piracy and only punish legitimate buyers. Pirates will always find a way around these schemes anyway.
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These companies are just clueless. They are inconveniencing people who actually buy the original games while doing nothing to deter pirates. Since any DRM they come up with is going to be cracked sooner or later, they should instead come up some value added services which would encourage people to buy the games.
Posted by: Rahul Das | September 23, 2008 3:00 AM
EA caved? Er...no. They slapped on a bandaid and hoped their customers would be as gullible as the reporters who failed to actually investigate the issues being raised by the gamers.
It won't do anything to reduce customer anger: in fact, it only makes us even more angry. Shame on EA.
Posted by: cd | September 23, 2008 1:03 PM
The really sad thing is that with Spore they already had a very nice feature they can tie in with user registration and legitimate purchases: the user generated content.
The sad thing is the majority of games won't have a feature like this to capitalize on.
Posted by: Min | September 24, 2008 4:14 PM