Spore gamers turn nasty over DRM – Amazon review roasting
Spore, the game that has taken The Sims creator Will Wright 10 years to make, has finally arrived, and reviews have been somewhat mixed to say the least. But rather than the usual mix of 90%, 9/10, and 4/5 seen on most sites, any Amazon customers will see a huge amount of low scores for the game.
Spore is a game that sees you create a creature from nothing and then take it from primordial ooze to empire building space race. Evolution in other words. Or alternatively, it could be seen as just a collection of mini-games, most of which are average.
The reviews for the game have been mixed, but most have scored the game highly as an experience while disregarding the actual nuts and bolts gameplay. None of which matters a jot to the hundreds of people reviewing the game on Amazon.com.
At the time of writing, there are just over 1,000 customer reviews of the game, the vast majority of which give the game one star out of five – the lowest score possible on Amazon. While some reviewers cite the simplistic gameplay and over hyped, over long wait for the game as the reasons for the low scores, most are rallying against just one aspect of the EA release: the draconian DRM system.
The problem is that EA have decided to release the game with a stupidly harsh DRM mechanism in place. According to Ars Technica, not only does the disc have to be in the computer for the game to be playable, but it requires online activation to ensure you have an official copy of the game. In its wisdom, EA has issued the game with a limit of three activations, after which you’ll have to phone EA customer services to beg them for an extra one.
While this is bad enough, the DRM issue leaked in May, and at the time, the game was going to be released with a requirement to go through an online authentication every ten days. EA luckily changed this, but still kept a draconian limit in place which has annoyed gamers so much so that hundreds of them have expressed their displeasure on Amazon.
Does it matter? Well, it actually does, because this means any customers browsing videogames on Amazon will see Spore with an average rating of exactly 1/5 – which is hardly going to encourage anyone to buy it.
The ironic thing with this whole issue is that the game leaked on file sharing sites days before its official release. And thanks to methods enabling the bypassing of the copy protection, the pirated copies aren’t inhibited by the DRM in the slightest.
Once again, people who have made the effort to buy a legitimate copy are being punished. No wonder they are showing their disapproval by carpet bombing Amazon with bad reviews.
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September 9th, 2008
When is the industry going to GET it? Are they never going to get through their heads that DRM schemes only hurt legitimate customers? I can remember draconian DRM schemes (which, by the way, this one in Spore is NOT) going all the way back through dongles and on back to physical errors on floppy discs that caused my Commodore disk drives to constantly require physical repair, I’ve had dongles corrupt my ability to print, etc. etc. etc.
STOP IT guys! When are you going to realize that you’re ENCOURAGING piracy when you do such stupid things like DRM? If Spore is a crappy game (despite 10 years of development and a “big name” behind it), it deserves to be hounded by reviewers, but EA you’ve eliminated the possibility that all those reviewers are wrong by your stupid DRM actions. Did someone at EA HONESTLY think this game wouldn’t be pirated? I’m not condoning piracy at all, but who do these game publishers listen to that makes it OKAY in their mind to do stupid stuff like this???
September 9th, 2008
That would stop me from buying it.
Glad I read this. Thanks
September 9th, 2008
We have no use for this game and the DRM that comes with it. Several others are not buying it either.
September 9th, 2008
This is a terrible story for 2 parties – legitimate users who simply wanted to play Spore and couldn’t because the activation servers went down and EA because Spore was cracked even before it was released.
Often developers walk a tightrope with the trade off between protection strength and the degree of impact on legitimate users but this was a failure on both dimensions! Is this really what the publisher wants to ‘accomplish’? Why not use a solution which is friendly to honest users, has no impact on development time and the strongest available protection against crackers – see our whitepaper
http://www.byteshield.net/byteshield_whitepaper_0005.pdf.
Christian Olsson
ByteShield, Inc.
http://www.byteshield.net
September 11th, 2008
I bought Spore for the experience. It was worth it in my opinion. I also bought it to support Will Wright, one of my favorite game developers of all time. I already got my $50 out of it.
The DRM is nasty though. I hope it goes away, and I’m glad people are making a stink about it on Amazon. EA deserves to burn in hell. They’ve screwed enough people out of their money… (anyone see the trainwreck called Mercenaries 2?) It’s about time they started playing nice with the PC gaming community.
September 11th, 2008
Either Amazon’s system can’t handle the load of comments or they have frozen new reviews of Spore. Nothing new has been posted in almost 24 hours.