Don't Discount the Voice of the Gamer re: DRM

Business 15 Responses »
Sep 092008

SPOREBack in July, I wrote about the plans EA had to include the SecuROM “Digital Rights Management” rootkit with Spore when it shipped.  I was not the only one who wrote about this to be sure, but the voices of the masses got EA to back down.  A little bit.  In the end, they went ahead and limited you to 3 installs of the game and included SecuROM.

Well the gaming community has spoken with one voice on how it feels about EA and SecurROM.  In spite of Spore being, by all accounts, a wonderful product it now has a user rating of 1 out of 5 stars on amazon.com.  Looking at the Spore review page, it appears that over 1000 people have rated the game with 1 star due to the included DRM. A cursory view of some of the reviews found them to be thoughtful and well-reasoned.  Some examples;

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Posted by Genda at 3:41 PM Tagged with: ,

Spore to be DRM-Addled?

Business, Opinion 5 Responses »
May 072008

It seems like the geniuses at the game companies are still following the erroneous assumption that people who pirate games would actually be customers and buy them if they make the DRM (Digital Rights Management) onerous enough.  In that vein, this article on ShackNews.com details the announcement that the PC versions of Mass Effect and more importantly the eagerly-awaited Spore will indeed have DRM that likes to “phone home” relatively often.

I’ve written in the past about companies who treat their customers like criminals.  I don’t think game publishers are in touch with reality here. They are still laboring under the false pretense that everyone who pirates their game would have bought it, and are trying to count all those unhatched chickens.

I can save them a whole lot of trouble.

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Posted by Genda at 1:40 PM Tagged with: , ,
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