Spore and its DRM

[JaguarWong]

The attitude people are taking to this just reinforces the sterotype that gamers aren't very smart.
DRM is designed to stop low level re-distribution not piracy.

If someone can give me one genuine reason why this is a bad thing then I'd love to see it.

It's all rather pathetic.

you can't trade in, towards new games, as many gamers do, particularly those not well off enough to spend £30 to £40 on games. Thats why both buying preowned games and trading in to get cheaper prices enables more gamers, children, the working class, anyone struggle with rising inflation and higher taxes, to still participate in the cultural experience, which what the developers of spore have claimed "Creativity for the masses". So if games are become part of cultural makeup then anyone has the right to experience just as anyone has the right to experience Shakespeare or Dickens.

Is that really the best you can do?
It's bad because poor people can't play?
Can I ask how these street urchins and vagabonds have afforded a PC capable of playing Spore?

Try again.

 

[Northery]

Even if the game tries to auto connect online to check whether its legal or not there are still a ton of crack that can stop this from happening. Also why wasn't the game released at the same time world wide, if i wanted to i could have torrent it. But no im stuck waiting while to pay for a game while people who pirate the game have it 4 days ahead of me, FREE.

 

[runtheplacered]

Can I ask how these street urchins and vagabonds have afforded a PC capable of playing Spore?

To be honest, just about any computer can play Spore. My girlfriends 3 year old laptop (which wasn't anywhere near top of the line when she bought it) can play Spore.

It's bad because poor people can't play?

That's not what he said at all. What does poor people have to do with anything?

Try again.

I tried for him. Now he won't have to, I suppose.

Why are your panties all waded up, anyway?

As for your original question, "If someone can give me one genuine reason why this is a bad thing then I'd love to see it."

Well, first of all I can't answer that without disagreeing with you and defining something. And I will. DRM (in general) is to prevent the duplication of digital copyrighted material. That's it. Call it piracy, low-level redistribution, or whatever you want. That's the idea behind DRM. To stop people from getting their hands on the material that belongs to EA.

Now, why is it a bad thing? I'll tell you what. I could sit here and name off reasons all day long. I could do the obvious and say, "Because you shouldn't have to pay to only be able to install it 3 times", or "securom sucks!" or even "because it hurts the free market!" And believe me, I could come up with plenty more. But why don't you research that for yourself? Maybe if everyone from Bill Gates to my next door neighbor finds a problem with DRM, maybe there's really something to it. Why spoon feed you the information? It's better to teach a man to fish then give him a fish. Besides, you can formulate sentences, so I'm sure you can handle this little homework assignment.

Good luck!

 

[Theo Samaritan]

There have been a couple of questions asking about how many people own more than one machine to install the game in the first place, so why would three installs be a problem?

It's not three installs its three activations. Simply upgrading your GFX card has reportedly been counted as an activation. People who upgrade regularly will be fucked. And by "upgrade" I mean simple things that you swap with older simple things, not the entire OS or motherboard.

 

[JaguarWong]

I tried for him. Now he won't have to, I suppose.
Why are your panties all waded up, anyway?

Thank you.
My panties are waded up because because mass idiocy galls me - nothing more, nothing less.
Moreover, your attitude doesn't exactly go far to separating you from this.

I've read all the supposed problems that people have and not a single one has any grounding in fact.
The REAL problem is that PC gamers are so used to piracy that any measure to stop it (no matter how effective) is seen as a bad thing.

Shame on a business for trying to make money huh?

 

[Theo Samaritan]

The REAL problem is that PC gamers are so used to piracy that any measure to stop it (no matter how effective) is seen as a bad thing.

Shame on a business for trying to make money huh?

Most pirates don't give two shits about the DRM on a game as they never have to deal with it short of copying a file to cancel it out (does not apply to the 1% or so that actually does the cracking).

EA are just miffed at the amount of cash they lost for second hand copies of Sims 2 =/

 

[unangbangkay]

I cannot but confess that I too gave Spore the 1-star review, though my own copy is already in the mail (sigh). But it's very obvious in this case: EA is looking to set a DRM precedent, by including nasty DRM with sure-sell uber-hyped titles like Spore, Mass Effect, and Red Alert 2. If the titles sell poorly, they'll blame it on pirates. If the titles sell well, they'll credit the DRM working, even when it clearly doesn't. "Voting with your wallet" just doesn't work in cases such as this, and they know it.

Sure, EULAs state that you're really only buying a LICENSE to play the game, but that doesn't make it right or fair. Games are a privilege, not a right, but it's gamers' right to complain as loudly as they can when confronting such bald-faced exploitation. Ideally a game with mass appeal such as Spore can get into media with a larger reach. As was said on Kotaku re: this story, it's best to complain in a place where it may just be effective (Amazon), than simply to gripe about it on a forum. For that matter, Bioware mentioned concerns for international and military gamers as one of the reasons why they watered down the original DRM scheme. As I sent an impassioned e-mail to Bioware regarding just that, I'd like to think I was part of that.

Developers have no say in the matter, as long as they're with EA, Red Alert's dev said as much, so this is little more than a PR defeat. It's up to us and our whining to make it matter.

So complain, fellow nerds. Complain! It's one of the fundamental benefits of the First Amendment, and of democracy in general!

If I were to suggest a future target, let's complain about attaching achievements to unlockables in TF2. WHINE PLS KTHX

 

[Leon P]

I installed a friends copy to try it out, was connected to the net
now I own his copy of spore!

how can any company get away with this is beyond me!
If you've paid full price £35 for a game there should be none of these 3 limit installs!

they tried this crap with the PC version of Bioshock
they had to remove it in the end.

In the end its not that brilliant of a game anyway.

 

[Tjebbe]

That whole 'please the shareholders' attitude should be thrown away completely, and replaced by 'please the friggin customers'. Oh brave new world, that has such people in it!

Now that i think about it; maybe all those DRM schemes are in fact *intended* to piss off the legitimate customers. The more annoying it gets, the more free news for the publisher, and they get to go to their shareholders saying 'look at us trying hard to maximize your ROI'. Even though it helps nothing in the fight against piracy, and it might even make things worse in that regard.

Occam's razor makes me go for the 'uninformed management forces DRM to the benign developers because they don't know better' though.

But how to combat this? You can't boycot the games for such reasons, because losses in that are would be accounted for as losses due to piracy...

 

[Lilim]

I'm trying to think of the number of times I've had to install and reinstall a game (any game) over the years. A corruption of the game means an uninstall and reinstall. Getting bored with the game and wanting to make room for something else sometimes means an uninstall. New interest in said games means a reinstall. Hardware failure and loss of the hard disc's information means a reinstall. Switching computers and wanting to take advantage of the new systems power means a reinstall. There are an incredible number of reasons you might have to reinstall a game.

I can see people easily going over three. In the last decade I've gone through seven computers. Most of my games move to the new one. I tend to keep the last one around, but another upgrade means I move up. I tend to have two computers at once. A brand new one and the last one. Anything beyond that gets taken to recycling after a thorough hard disc wipe.

 

[Capt_Jack_Doicy]

I tried for him. Now he won't have to, I suppose.
Why are your panties all waded up, anyway?

Thank you.
My panties are waded up because because mass idiocy galls me - nothing more, nothing less.
Moreover, your attitude doesn't exactly go far to separating you from this.

I've read all the supposed problems that people have and not a single one has any grounding in fact.
The REAL problem is that PC gamers are so used to piracy that any measure to stop it (no matter how effective) is seen as a bad thing.

Shame on a business for trying to make money huh?

EA fanboys i thought you guys were extinct.

The Protection isn't effective as the Pirates had it weeks before consumers, and as pointed out to you, but your EA zealotry refusing to accept, it is designed to stop the second hand market not Pirates. As for any protection being decried, i loved the old school protection games like monkey island with the little disc, they made a game out of it and it was fun.

 

[Lilim]

I tried for him. Now he won't have to, I suppose.
Why are your panties all waded up, anyway?

Thank you.
My panties are waded up because because mass idiocy galls me - nothing more, nothing less.
Moreover, your attitude doesn't exactly go far to separating you from this.

I've read all the supposed problems that people have and not a single one has any grounding in fact.
The REAL problem is that PC gamers are so used to piracy that any measure to stop it (no matter how effective) is seen as a bad thing.

Shame on a business for trying to make money huh?

EA fanboys i thought you guys were extinct.

The Protection isn't effective as the Pirates had it weeks before consumers, and as pointed out to you, but your EA zealotry refusing to accept, it is designed to stop the second hand market not Pirates. As for any protection being decried, i loved the old school protection games like monkey island with the little disc, they made a game out of it and it was fun.

I remember that. It was frustrating. Not fun. Not the game itself. Not even having to do it. It was the inevitability that over the years such a thing could easily be lost. Years after I finish a game, sometimes just months, I like to go back and play again. Quest for Glory stood out for me. The Map for QFGII: Trial by Fire, for example, that one was lost several times over years, and without navigating the maze of ally ways was infuriating. Quest for Glory IV did something similar with Dr. Cranium, his potions required recipes (they had ingedient codes in the manual).

Such items are easily lost, especially in a case like mine where you move regularly and stuff just falls through the cracks over the years.

 

[Sixties Spidey]

DRM doesn't stop pirates. It creates them.

 

[aaron552]

I don't like DRM, but EA is at least trying to create a middle ground - 3 installs seems pretty reasonable. I certainly don't have 3 machines that can handle a game like Spore.

If you want to blame anyone, blame the pirates.

The issue for me isn't having 3 PCs to run it, the issue is reinstalling the game. I format my Windows PC every 3-4 months for sanity and performance reasons and if spore wasn't so much of a dissapointment, I might want to reinstall it again. This particular DRM has not stopped the pirates, and as others have already stated, the pirates got a DRM-free release 2 full weeks before anyone else. By your logic, EA's shareholders could probably sue right now since the DRM is such a failure. I agree with Capt__Jack__Doicy, who said that the DRM is probably to combat the resell market, from which it sees 0 profit.

 

[Versuvius]

You cannot actually disable any installs. Every time you install the game it is registered by EA, so they hold each record of each game installation. Once you've done your 3 it's time to negotiate with customer support.

Let's not forget you have to have an internet connection just to play a single player game.

Disgusting policy.

I pirated, i have the torrent bookmarked. Works fine. Just dont install EA manager, and make sure your firewall blocks its web access so they cant auto tamper with it

 

[Versuvius]

Actually it does. There isnt a limit if you do it that way. Just keep cloning the for how many times you need.

 

[Volucer]

I don't see why the DRM is such an issue here, I mean how many PC's do you want to install it on? If it was something like MS Office then I'd understand, I had to install that on 4 pc's when one of them died and I updated, and even then it was just a 5 minute phone call to the customer support to get it fixed.