Sep 172008
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For eight years Spore has been in development, and finally released last week. I don’t play a lot of computer games, but this is one of the few that i’ve looked forward to. I’ve been following it for quite some time. But once it came out, i was immediately put off because of the DRM that came with the game. You can only install it three times before having to call their tech support and beg them to let you install it again. That’s the bad side. The nice part is that you don’t need the CD in the drive to play. For the average joe user, they probably don’t know and/or care about the drm. They just buy the game, put in their code, reigster online with EA and then play the game for a few months and that’s that. Good for them. But philosophically i just can’t support DRM like this. EA initially defended their stance saying “the music industry, such as iTunes, does the same thing”. uhm, HELLO – i can’t stand the music DRM either, and don’t support it. Spore quickly becamse the most pirated game in history. The people who bought the game are stuck with a ‘crippled’ version and the pirates have a nice version that works great and has no restrictions. Well, except that you can’t go online to the sporeipedia to share creations with others. It is a cool feature. So what’s a guy to do – support the DRM and buy the game, or go the illegal route and pirate the game? Or just not get the game altogether? Fortunately, there has been enough outrage online that EA has taken notice (or maybe they’re looking at the # of pirated copies and realizing they are losing a lot of revenue because of their flubbed drm decision). In any event, they have decided to pull back a bit on the drm and will release a patch that will allow you to ‘deauthorize’ a computer after you install, thus allowing you to install on another computer. This would allow unlimited installs on any number of machines. And still no cd in the drive. Bravo. They have also agreed to put out a patch that will eliminate the drm altogether at some future date when the game is no longer supported by them so that when they take down their spore authentication servers, the game will continue to work (thus i can still play spore in 20 years if i wanted to). That i can live with. Let the spore begin! |
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