Leet Gamxrz
2009-06-xx
by Darknut
The Case of Spore
I don't buy very many new computer games. After you've played a couple thousand games, the fact that most boxed games made nowadays are cheap derivatives of each other makes them pretty boring. But when I first heard about Spore, and that it was a Will Wright game, I got personally excited about a new video game for the first time in years. Even if the game wasn't perfect, surely it would be interesting enough to be worth paying for.
Is this what it's come to?However, I stopped short of buying a copy because I read about the ridiculous copy-protection scheme. It is notable that "copy-protection" is now called "DRM" because DRM connotes a whole new league of inconvenience. It is unacceptable for a game I paid for to include spyware. It is unacceptable to have to connect to a server just to play a single-player game. It is unacceptable to have to contact the company just to get permission to install the game. It is unacceptable to do business with a company that treats all of its customers as thieves. And didn't we already go through all of this seven years ago with Windows XP Activation? Once again, it is unacceptable for me to give a corporation any kind of vague, passive indication that maybe it's OK for them to fuck me in the ass. If DRM constraints are OK with you, great, but they're a huge turn-off for me.
It's only natural for EA to worry about piracy, but it's retarded for them to think that this approach would even be effective. I can avoid all of this mess by simply getting a cracked, pirated copy. Don't they realize how easy it is to do so? Don't they know from years of experience that this type of copy-protection will always be defeated, usually within "zero days"? If EA knew that their DRM scheme had been cracked before the game was released, why did they continue to use it anyway? Or rather, what message does that action convey? In an age when everyone is pirating everything, it's wrong for a company to bet upon people being too stupid to figure it out. If showing appreciation for a product must include making the statement "I am a fool," then I'm not going to do it! This abuse of DRM tactics is simply an extra incentive for some people to go the cracked & pirated route when they wouldn't have otherwise. I don't want to say everyone should pirate Spore right now, just that the option is extremely easy to come by if you really want it. (People who say otherwise are ignorant or are feeding you FUD.) It's amazing to me that video game companies, of all people, are less and less in touch with this issue than ever. It's retarded for EA, a big game publisher that's been around for 25 years, to not understand how in the year 2008 this obsolete DRM strategy would be counter-productive. It makes them look bad, it makes Will Wright look bad, it insults paying customers, and it helps to fuel the self-righteousness of pirates.
Ultimately I just wanted to point out the irony here: I would have bought the game if they had not used this severe DRM scheme, and the DRM scheme is itself what prompts me to pirate the game. Because people love to fantasize the motives behind piracy, I'm writing this to present a single concrete example of someone who is willing and able to pay for a game but consciously chose not to by principle specifically because of the DRM scheme, not for some other, made-up reason.
