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Poor Spore
Tuesday, September 16, 2008 — posted by Sarah O'Keefe
The new game Spore from Electronic Arts (EA) has been described as a cross between The Sims and Civilization, which sounds like months of lost productivity. Yay!But although the game is selling well, there has been a remarkable backlash against its digital rights management (DRM) "features."
On amazon.com, Spore has a one-and-a-fraction star rating. But look at the reviews (a small sample is shown at right) -- they are all about DRM. The few reviews that focus on the game itself are much more positive.
Mac Slocum has an excellent article with more details on O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing blog. He writes in part:
If the backlash to Electronic Arts' new game "Spore" serves as a sign of things to come, strict digital rights management (DRM) restrictions are transforming from consumer annoyances into full-fledged business mistakes.
Corvida at Read/Write Web has a similar perspective:
There's no doubt that Spore would've been pirated regardless of the DRM system. However, users of P2P networks are now encouraging others to pirate the game in order to teach EA a lesson. [...] We hope that EA will learn from this experience and the feedback of their customers.
The emerging consensus is that "overly restrictive" DRM will cause customer revolt. And "overly restrictive" is determined by the customers.
Labels: DRM
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