Amazon Users are Overhyping Spore’s DRM


Spore Installation

Spore Installation

So much for the wisdom of crowds!

As of my posting this 1,962 of 2,134 reviews posted on Amazon for EA’s Spore are one-star, claiming the DRM method employed by EA to prevent pirating was so draconian that it has rendered the game worthless.

So there are 1,962 dimbulbs on the Interwebs, criticising a game they haven’t played for DRM they apparently know nothing about. Hundreds of them are even monitoring the 5-star reviews that come in so they can click “No” for Amazon’s “Was this review helpful?” query. It must be nice to live with your mom and dad and have the time to pursue such worthwhile endeavors.

I wonder… Were these kids running on a Windows XP operating system when posting these one-star reviews? If so, wouldn’t that make them hypocrites? Windows XP has even more stringent DRM running on it.

Just like Spore, you have to activate your Windows XP installation online with Microsoft. Unlike Spore, Windows XP regularly connects with Microsoft to report on you (this got even worse with Vista). Spore only connects on the initial installation and when you download expansion packs.

One of the rumors floating around online is that you only get to install Spore three times, but the reality is that you get three licenses. There’s a very big difference, which all the Boing Boing sheeple are apparently too technically illiterate to understand. Anyone who works in an office understands the concept of software licenses, maybe when all the Boing Boing kids grow up and get jobs they’ll understand.

How many of these kids play World of Warcraft? Perhaps they should aquaint themselves with Warrant, which is scanning player’s computer’s processes while they adventure in Blizzard’s world. Where’s the outrage over this? World of Warcraft had three versions in the top ten best selling PC games for April 2008. Where was the slew of one-star reviews for them?

I’m just as anti-DRM as the next rational human being; however, I also appreciate ideological consistency. The online crowd is trying to burn down Spore while there are obviously much bigger offenders out there. Imagine if all this energy was focused on a really offensive software like Vista.

What does suck about EA’s licensing strategy is that it opens users up the same victimization Microsoft’s Music store inflicted on its users, where Microsoft is dropping support for the music sold, which requires their DRM to run, and leaves users with music collections they can no longer access.

While the same thing could happen with EA and Spore, it’s important to remember that EA isn’t Microsoft. We can give EA the opportunity to make the honorable decision to free Spore of its DRM should they ever be forced to stop supporting it. Spore’s DRM is an improvement over forcing users to keep the CD in their drives, but it’s not as good as the Steam Games, which allows game owners to create an online account, which they may subsequently resell.


On the plus side, all those bad reviews didn’t prevent spore from claiming the #1 spot on Amazon’s best-selling games list. On the down side, I still had to enter that @#$%ing 20-digit product code to install the game.

I’ve copy and posted the following documents for anyone wanting to read the fine print. Lawrence Lessig once said that excessively long license agreements constituted an undue burden on users, requiring a substantial investment of time to read and understand:

(HT Clint for the lead on this story.)


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