Comments on: Spore gamers turn nasty over DRM – Amazon review roasting

By: Cerus

Cerus — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 22:30:57 +0000

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.

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:03:16 +0000

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.

By: Christian Olsson

Christian Olsson — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:48:39 +0000

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

By: Ralph

Ralph — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:23:19 +0000

We have no use for this game and the DRM that comes with it. Several others are not buying it either.

By: Norm

Norm — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:02:17 +0000

That would stop me from buying it.

Glad I read this. Thanks

By: DavidB

DavidB — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:12:40 +0000

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???