Forbes: Spore’s Piracy Problem

EA are too silly to pay attention. 

"The tighter you squeeze, the more slips through your fingers."

It's pretty sad, really; they just don't seem to understand that they're shooting themselves in the foot here. Lots of people who would normally buy it want nothing to do with the insane DRM, and either don't buy it or even pirate it instead. It's literally having the opposite effect that DRM systems are intended to have.

When Microsoft came out with the Windows Genuine advantage program, people were very very pissed off because of it.  It means that it punish people who actually owns a legit copy of windows.  Because if you get updates, you need to go online and get verified whether your copy is legit or not.

Now with the problem of piracy, the SD's impulse model is very similar to Genuine Advantage program.  It is in many ways, the best non intrusive DRM ever around in the sense it does not mess with your system.

I think EA is the equivalent of Microsoft in the PC game industry.  Or they think they are, hence, no one can boss them around and even more so, pirate their games.  Soo they feel that they have to tow the line and tell the whole world, you can't mess with us by pirating our games, otherwise no the entire game industry will go down the drain. Hence people who pirates the game will be made an examples of by having draconian measures in an attempt to curtail it. 

The end result is in a year or so , Blizzard/Activision will be the new #1.

Ea is not an equivelent to Microsoft.

Microsoft does NOT limit you to installing only 3 times, just on 1 pc.  If you call them up years later to reinstall Xp they'll do it.

EA =ENRON.

EA's Rail Simulator works the same for its add-ons that have been released.  Only three installs before you have to buy them again.

So true. Especially with DRM. All I'm seeing is more legit users frustrated, while the real pirates simply share a cracked version online. It's just not working, and is in fact quite counterproductive.

Please not here  I cant read anyting on the spore UK fourm without seeing something to do with DRM or how EA (half the people have it in their sig) somehow sucks. but at least you can descuse it here without people comeout with complet rubbish like "EA should have said it might not work on laptops" when it says so on the dam box that it might not work or "the DRM is causeing this random crash in the game" I am on the verge of ingoreing and classing them as people who want to just complain for no reason and not that they actually belive what they say.

*checks to make sure the black hole thing has not gone wrong*

must be a joke the worlds not ending and someone is saying Microsoft is not the most evil out there. But you can in theroy call up EA in years time and get spore working

PS the stardock bill of rights was posted on the UK spore fourm before spores release and I posted a link to that priacy & gaming thing yesderday (my time)

since i cant get edit to work. i did have a DRM problam when i got the game it would not regester but i could still play it off line with anything i manually downloaded.

Fifty cents that by now, Spore has been cracked, making its DRM not only unpopular, but worthless. Stick away from EA. They can't do anything right.

From what i have heared it was cracked before release day.

What do you mean" by now?" Spore's DRM was cracked before the game was even released in the U.S. That's the most riotously comical thing about all of this, really. They pissed off (and pissed on) their customers and got nothing out of their efforts.

Well it was released in Europe before the US so there is no  eason why the US release date should be the expected crack date.

Wrong, they got EXACTLY what they wanted, to destroy the resale market of their games. AND to force their most die hard fans to buy their game multiple times. (dammit, out of activations, i need to buy another copy...)

Ofcourse, I hope this is the end of EA, because EA is so evil, but I somehow don't think that is the case. The audacity of it all, is that they are playing it as if they are the victems trying to protect themselves from piracy (which has nothing to do with activation limits)

But you were right on the money that piracy was unaffected in the least considering a cracked version was available BEFORE it was for sale in stores.

"it was released in Europe before the US"

Not all pirates work with US copies of games. And due to when the main games shop in the UK sends out its online pre orders it would have arived a few days early (unless the post is slow) So technically it had been sold by a "high street" shop

They've certainly done quite a bit to lose my respect. One of my biggest issues with EA is how they take over and pretty much destroy other gaming companies. Westwood was completey destroyed. C&C: Generals was a completely different game that didn't didn't resemble any other "Command and Conquer" title. SimCity was torn away from Maxis and given to Tilted Mill, and the resulting game was a flop. How has this helped anybody? Yeah, EA sucks.

DRM just plain does not work. It is cracked quickly. The pirates aren't even being slowed down, much less stopped. Legitimate users, on the other hand, have to deal with bugs that the DRM may have and silly activation rules that mean their game may stop working if they reinstall it too many times or if their internet connection goes down. In addition, EA is constantly rewriting their rules and making them harsher. DRM punishes legitimate users more than it hurts pirates. Yeah, DRM sucks.

It could. Some game developers have experimented with intentionally causing the game to crash or cease  to be functional somehow if it suspects it is a pirated copy. In addition, many forms of DRM are known to install themselves at low levels of the OS, and bugs at such a low level could cause instability.

I just listed a bunch of reasons, and if there is a mistake in anything I've said, feel free to point it out.

They don't need to implement draconian DRM to accomplish that. They could've accomplished that with a simple registration system.

If you're reading obssesively about this, there's a new column in the Wash Post today. The author seems to have a middlin' opinion of the game himself, sees the DRM kerfuffle as an EA error, has some friends who still think the Sims is better, but like me, he is very interested in how this "massively single-player online" thing might work out in the long haul.

Last chunk in the article: "Already, I'm a little tickled to see that people are using the game to poke fun at itself. Some joker, for example, has created a species named EA's DRM Policy. While I can't tell for sure what it's supposed to be, it looks kind of like a creature with its head parked up in its hindparts."

[q]They don't need to implement draconian DRM to accomplish that. They could've accomplished that with a simple registration system.[/q]

True, but they hate their customers...

A quote from the article GW Swichord linked to:

Great comparison EA - let's see, what happened to DRM on music? Oh yeah, that's right. It totally flopped. Sony had their rootkit fiasco, Steve Jobs wrote a letter denouncing DRM, EMI went DRM free on iTunes, and later all of the major publishers released DRM free music on Amazon and other music services. Great analogy, EA, great analogy!

Oh I am not completely saying it is not the problem but if a game crashes do you go straight into a topic about DRM on the games official forums and start screaming about it crashing your game or do you go to the tech support section and then happend to find that the first topic there is about these random crashes which seem to be graphics related.

Neither. Firstly if a game crashes you have no way of knowing why it crashed. usually.

And there is a good chance that a game that crashes OFTEN has multiple causes for the crashes. Some are graphic, some are DRM, etc... it is annoying that there are any DRM related crashing though.

We are talking specific instances though. There are DRMs that are known to cause specific problem. There was the broken rootkit fiasco, there was the 1 minute load time (cut down to under 5 seconds by the crack) in some FPS game, there were specific known crash scenarios.

The complaint here is that EA is using a known culprit. Securom.

i tell you that I love Sins but the big news with mates and around the neighbourhood was that it had NO copy protection so to speak. That is awesome cause games like Bioshock only allowed 5 installs per copy which was useless( making me not want to buy the game) whereas in Sins i had no worries. Sure having no protection is a risk but still none gains respect something i have most towards Stardock especially with the Bill of Rights.

I love spore it is a great game. I want to buy it but my biggest thing is, I DO NOT want to support there DRM ideas. I love the way Stardock does it, ive actually lost hard copies of there games. But since i had the serial number linked to my name in my email, i was able to download the game back on to my computer and play it. No needing cd's, no third party DRM crap, its kind of hard now to support the companies that try so hard to protect there games from the legitamit buyers.

The funny part is that game makers, publishers, gamers, etc.... knows that there is a pirating problem for computer games and there has not been a single piece of software to stop it. Why do they think that doing all of these DRM rules will help the problem, when it is so easy just to go and download their game with out their DRM's on them. My thought is that if you get rid of the DRM's and lower the prices a bit ( you wont need to pay for the DRM software), you WILL see a dramatic reduction in pirating.

So, you have a pirated copy?