Slashdot Mirror
Will DRM Exterminate Spore?
AC Dude writes "Will an anti-DRM flash mob that's determined to give EA's latest sim game Spore a rock bottom rating on Amazon.com sink the game, or will Spore evolve and shed the DRM? Is this the beginning of the end for DRM-laden games?
'Over the past few years we've focused a lot on the music industry and how it has attempted to use DRM to control distribution. While DRM in this market segment has been unpopular, anti-DRM campaigns have largely fallen flat when it comes to attracting widespread public attention because of the fragmented nature of music. Games are a much easier target given the monolithic nature of their release — campaigners only need to spread the word on a handful of specific online outlets to reach a wide audience. A quick read through the Amazon reviews of Spore seems to suggest that the negative comments are already putting people off from buying the game.'"
http://thepiratebay.org/search/Spore/0/99/0
I really want this game but I will wait until a patch is available that turns off the DRM.
Some would call it a crack but if I buy the game then I say it is a patch.
A piece of code that improves the program is too my mind a patch.
I have have had more problems using DRM software that I have paid for than I would ever have hunting down pirated copies.
Companies have got to learn to stop treating paying customers and criminals.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I agree. DRM on games sucks. Thanks to DRM on games, it's nearly impossible to play certain games on Linux with Wine, because things like SecuROM don't like Wine. Pretty worthless 'rights management' if it prevents a legitimate customer from using it.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
The fact that the game is shallow like... I DON'T KNOW BECAUSE NOTHING CAN BE AS SHALLOW AS THIS! will destroy it.
Most "unfun" game ever.
PS: Incoming EA "PIRACY DROVE OUR SALES DOWN" talk.
and I'm a geek, a gamer (though mostly console) and a slashdot reader. The general public are screwed!
Spore is ace, and frankly if it wants to shaft my vista installation it's welcome to it. It's the only thing I use vista for.
Its not the negative comments that are putting me off the game - its the drm!
I need a new sig...
It's like a grad school tech demo with a giant marketing hype campaign bolted on.
The server side community is an integral part of the game. What do they need DRM for? Are they so used to annoying their customers that they just added the DRM out of habit?
I won't have to read any comments on Amazon to know whether or not to buy the game but that's because I've already read about it elsewhere. Had I not I would be grateful to everyone writing about it. I was planning on buying Spore but changed my mind after hearing about the DRM.
Yes.
DRM does not make sense for a medium that is about freedom of expression and creativity; What about my rights as the spore creature creator?
I was bit by BioShock's DRM (didn't realize the extent of it until after my purchase.).
Whenever a game is coming out that I'm interested in, if it's laden with such anti-consumer machinations, I intend to e-mail the publisher explaining that I would rather pirate it than pay them money thanks to their greed.
No sig for you!!
All the reviews I've read about Spore have said the same thing - great toy, boring game. I'd think that would be far more likely to repel potential buyers than some scuffle over DRM.
Will an anti-DRM flash mob that's determined to give EA's latest sim game Spore a rock bottom rating on Amazon.com sink the game, or will Spore evolve and shed the DRM?
Neither. This strategy will result in more people discovering that Amazon ratings are simply manipulated by both corporate shills or advocate shills, devaluing the ratings system itself.
Hopefully, this will result in Amazon cracking down on shill reviewers, and modifying the system so that those who attempt to game the system in either the positive or negative direction have a substantially reduced score.
I don't understand how the cost of developing DRM protection on games and then dealing with the support costs of having DRM can outweigh the "cost" of a few pirated copies of the game.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Comment removed based on user account deletion
All the messageboards commenting on the game are discussing the issue - and most everyone realizes that they tend to move games from machine to machine over the years, or at least are forced to reinstall windows enough that a 3 install limit is FAR too limited a deal. Oh, and uninstalling the software anecdotally does NOT appear to give you 'back' installs of the game so far.
I've worked making software protection schemes on occasion - from encrypted dongles with 'click counters' to sequentially mutating upgrade codes linked to custom hardware to send customers to extend licenses, all to make sure software was limited in terms of what users could do with it under license. This is one limit that really is too far for honorable customers.
The biggest suspicion is that all this was done to minimize the chance and value of the reselling the game. I can see that perspective... but if it's at the cost of actually selling the game in the first place, or of pissing off future customers, they've made a terrible mistake.
Ryan Fenton
Of course, by the time Spore has hit the bargain rack, EA may have turned off the activation servers for the game, and it won't work any longer!
For once I find myself happy a game has DRM. I was going to buy Spore, until I heard of the DRM. Once that information became available it was off my to-buy list and I forgot about it.
Then a few days ago I am informed there's a cracked version available. I decide to see if it lived up to the hype and install it. Three hours later, I delete it out of boredom.
If it hadn't been for DRM, that would've been money out the window. There can be but one conclusion. DRM really is there for my benefit.
It's called soap.
I was going to buy the game until I found out it had DRM.
Sadly it's just terrible. Horribly boring. Evolutions is largely meaningless. There's basically no point in playing more than once, even going down a completely opposite tree was an identical experience. Just painfully dull.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
At one time the various methods of DRM used to be a nuisance. However, in the last few years they have become a hazard. Getting tired of this crap, if I ever have to fix another PC that gets screwed over by bullshit DRM (screwed up CD/DVD drivers, etc) I'll be filing a lawsuit.
I did my part and gave a 1 star rating without owning it. 8-B Hopefully EA really is looking.
And EA loves $$$. I'm glad that customers are (potentially) hitting EA where it hurts.
My only regret is that Maxis and Will Wright may also suffer (undeservingly?).
There's an assumption about targeting "a couple" of sites, but EA's reach is much broader than that. They have a ton of big-box retail distribution whose customers probably don't care about DRM.
Games are a much easier target given the monolithic nature of their release
Like music, their customers are not monolithic and most don't give a moments care to DRM. Worst case scenario, "Urgh stupid Windows is broken again!" No real connection to what's "broke." Losing the DRM key for itunes is another example of the same thing. Itunes "breaks", not "DRM is to blame"
Finally, there's nothing like a little controversy to sell a few more boxes. Unfortunately, anti-drm advocates are easy to marginalize so it stands a good chance of enriching EA. In the U.S., enterprises get the benefit of the doubt well after the facts prove harm. Consider it the downside of our vibrant economy.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The rule for media is: If it's good, you don't have to protect it to make some massive profit.
Same goes with computer games. If your game is popular enough to start getting viral through torrents, then you probably should be working on the sequel. Look how good Batman Begins, and now The Dark Knight, are. Even if they invent a new DRM to go on the DVD for that one, they're going to sell millions.
Because I can't even get that far on the install. Tried it on six systems with three different Internet connections so far, and none will make it past the remote activation screen. EA didn't test their installer at all. Of course calling EA support did no good. I don't think the people handling support for them have ever even seen the game. Not testing the installer means they're incompetent and arrogant. They know by the time the installer fails, the customer has already paid them and the vast majority of their dealers won't do returns.
How about you play the game all the way through, and don't just complain when you get bored after the first two stages? Which, I might add, are practically tutorials and character development leading into the later levels?
I agree with you regarding books. I've pirated a few but once I've read enough to know I want the book, I go out and buy it because I want an actual book in my hands. Movies and everything else work just fine when pirated. My xbox 360 is connected to my network so I can download whatever I want to any of my computers and then play it on my tv via the 360. Works great. It even works better than my dvr because if I download my content, I get a better version. That's the funny part of this.
See I have an SD tv but I like to watch widescreen video because then I get the full frame rather than pan and scan or worse. With my dvr I can record regular shows or hd shows but if I record hd shows, the dvr fills up really fast. I also have to hit the fast forward button every so often to skip through commercials. My alternative is to download shows that are in widescreen format and have no commercials. They show up online usually about the same time they air on tv because I'm on the west coast and people on the east coast get stuff up immediately. The only time when my online access fails is for live events like swimming in the Olympics. There was great online coverage of other events but the big events, like Phelps swimming weren't shown in realtime online... at the main site anyway. I have however watched streaming tv for stuff like the NBA playoffs last year and that worked great.
Napster brought digital piracy to the masses and broadband made it possible to pirate large files. There's nothing at all difficult about pirating movies, music, or tv shows, and programs and games are only slightly harder but usually include a readme and any crack files you might need. Plus there is help all over the web if you run into problems, so who is that is suffering from The Dumb and can't math today?
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
...of people who have absolutely no interest in buying the game, but who will claim they didn't because it was infected with DRM.
I'm surprised there's not a hardcore fundie backlash against the game due to the fact that its creatures evolved- or do they secretly love it because you get to play "intelligent designer?"
Spam Free: http://www.amazon.com/Spore-Pc/dp/B000FKBCX4/
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
You're welcome.
If you only reached the tribal stage - you're half way through a 4 hour character creation tool. The space game changes everything.
A real review:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/09/05/spore-things-to-know/
Excerpt:
"... the three things you should know about Spore.
1) Spore is a four hour character creator for a polished version of Space Rangers 2. It's neat.
2) Ignore anyone's opinion who's played it less than - oooh - eight hours. There's certainly good reasons to dislike or even dismiss Spore, but it takes that point before you see past your preconceptions.
3) There is no Autosave. I repeat: there is no autosave"
How exactly does this drm work, I know they all have their own annoying tick, but seeing as I just bought the game and am patiently waiting for it to arrive I would like to know what problems I should expect.
What a completely shill review by the way.
http://discuss.newsvine.com/_news/2008/09/08/1841134-spore-is-a-game-for-all-gamers?threadId=352205&cmt=2818650#c2818650
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
DRM itself, won't kill Spore. The backlash from potential mainstream users is what will kill Spore.
There will always be those gamers who will put up with it any new 'features' surrounding the next 're/evolutionary' game. Despite the DRM, 3 install limitation, they will always be there willing to put up with what ever the industry dishes. THEY are not the majority however. The majority, KNOW that there are so many hours in a day, and know just what games are on the market, and know what they are willing to put up with in terms of user rights, and money spent. THESE are the people posting to message forums, creating backlash that they view is past the boundary of user expectation. THEY will kill Spore before DRM does.
I don't know about you, but $50 doesn't go as far as it used to. Your gonna tell me that this game is SO 'RE/EVOLUTIONARY', that it is a must buy despite all those restrictions, and more than potential hassle that might(see probably ...) come along down the road? And I'm not talking about the game here...(looking at you Microsoft)
People have wised up, and expect the gaming market/distribution system to change. EA's Spore is the last desperate throw of an industry that doesn't want to let go. The sooner they realize the fans are on THEIR side, the sooner their profit margin will increase.
...at least are forced to reinstall windows enough that a 3 install limit is FAR too limited a deal.
or, if you uninstall something, let's say MS Office because you're turning the machine into a Linux server or something, it should do its call home to tell MS that its no longer installed. That way I can move it to another machine if I wanted to. Blowing hundreds of dollars on a piece of software and have it stuck on one machine is ridiculous. Which brings me to this:
The biggest suspicion is that all this was done to minimize the chance and value of the reselling the game.
It's one thing to install software and then give the license away or sell while still using your installed copy - that's assuming you don't need the CD/DVD in a drive to use it - but, if I don't need the software anymore, what's it to the publisher if I sell it; other than a loss of extra revenue because they couldn't sell another license?
It hurts them more. Because now, I'm much more hesitant to by software. Unless I really need it for some reason, I won't buy because I know that there's no recouping the cost if I should fin that I don't need it in the future. So I make do without or find a F/OSS alternative. I'm not a gamer.
I own Mass Effect PC. No, really. As in went to the store and bought a copy. The game is great.
But the DRM? Not so much. A few days ago it just decided to stop working for a while, and instead of running would tell me that I wasn't authorized to run it. Seems odd, since not only was I running it just fine before that happened, the box is still sitting on my desk. Why am I not authorized to run a game that I paid for, while some guy who pirated it can run it just fine (and with shorter startup times due to the lack of SecuROM)? Nobody has ever really had a good answer for that other then "bend over and take it."
Since then it started working again as inexplicably as it stopped working in the first place, but the whole thing put a bad taste in my mouth.
Now, throw the three install limit on top of that, and I'm really not sure why I should ever give EA another dime. In fact I am sure, I'm not buying anything from EA again until they start acting like they care about paying customers more then pirates.
Spore is the first on the "would have bought, but won't due to DRM" list for me. It won't be the last. EA can try to blame it on piracy all they want, but the fact of the matter is that they're doing more damage to their own sales then any pirate ever did.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
A quick read through the Amazon reviews of Spore seems to suggest that the negative comments are already putting people off from buying the game.
This line from the product page seems to suggest otherwise:
I wonder if these people (the flash mob ones I mean) would be rallying towards any kind of online store that sold legal (but unhealthy) stuff. Like alcohol, tobacco and firearms. Let's throw pot into the mix just for fun. Yes, people can get bitten in the ass by DRM. Just like they can with alcohol, tobacco, firearms (well, shoot themselves in the foot more likely) and pot. Yet that is (almost) always argued to be a personal choice. "I can damn well fuck up my own body if I want to!". Why not so with a computer? The DRM isn't a virus or a worm. Malware, sure - but it's not infecteous to other people's computers, so I say "let those who wish to use a DRM program/game do so". No skin off of my back. "But I want that game!" Then buy it. You can't just go around buying non-cancerous cigarettes or alcohol that doesn't impair your judgement. If you don't want DRM, don't buy that game. It's a game. Nothing more. Do I like DRM? No, I can't say that I do. But I can live without that game. Or any other game that has it. My "sollution" and fairly good compromise would be to include an electronic one time pad token in the game box. To play you have to do a challange/response against an online server (alright, doesn't work for single player games), but at least it'll be 100% platform agnostic. Would work great for online games like World of Warcraft, since someone not only need to steal your token, but also know the password to the token to steal your account. Probably not so much for offline games. Though I suppose you could just have to verify to get new online content (like Spore does when you download).
I don't know about you guys, but the DRM is the most exciting part of the game I've seen so far! Find out what programs must be stopped before proceeding, navigate the legal work, avoid deadly lockdowns! They are like today's minotaur's maze -- for free!
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Slashdot has just saved me $50. I was an hour away from buying this game, but a 3 install limit is insane.
Would someone explain to me why my previous post should be considered flamebait?
it#s not that I'm sore, I'm kinda mystified.
I haven't given EA any of my money since the Need For Speed: Carbon fiasco. Going on 2 years old, and they haven't released a patch to fix video/audio syncing issues. No thanks EA, I'll pass.
Speedy thing goes in; speedy thing comes out.
I'm an avid gamer. My first games were games like Zork II, Ultima I, II, II I played on my C-64 and 20 or 30 carts I had for my 2600. I've played most of the major Sims, Strategy Games, and RTS titles. Everything from Dune II to Warcraft III. From Sim City I to CIV IV. From MOO to the demo copy of Sins of a Solar Empire, which I'm about to try.
And let me say, Spore is an interesting game, but after playing it yesterday for the first time, I think it was a real let-down considering the type. I would say that its a GOOD game, and I actually had some fun during the creature stage "tweaking" my creature, but the cell stage was a boring arcade style game. And the tribal stage was a let down because basically all you do is collect food and either kill the other tribes or play "music" to impress them.
Not really an "in depth" game like I was expecting. I'm on the civilzation stage, and I was a little disappointed to find out that you have to "harvest spice". Come on, how original is that? That goes all the way back to Dune II and Dune 2000 from Westwood. At least they could have come up with something original like "Smithore" ( M.U.L.E. )...
So I think the negative reviews are probably just that. Negative reviews.
Although one cool thing was that I encountered one of the creatures I designed about a month ago with creature creator show up in the creature phase of the game in "EPIC" size! It proceeded to "eat" half my population...
An excuse to dump PC games completely. They already have pulled most of their sports franchise games (which pissed me off).
Look for Bioware even to drop the PC.
In the short term, dinosaur clueless behemoths like EA getting out of the PC gaming market will be bad, BUT keep in mind the installed base of PC's is STILL far greater than that of any console, that means opportunity for others to enter the market. There is opportunity there, and where there is opportunity, there will be those who will take advantage of it.
EA et all pulling out of the PC arena will serve to give indy and start up gaming companies more oxygen.
EA has been only barely relevant as a game publisher for some time in the PC arena anyway. Other than their sports sequels it's been forever since they've put out anything groundbreaking. Burdening their mediocre game lineup with DRM just makes it worse.
Corporatism != Free Market
DISCLAIMER: I'm a die-hard PC gamer. I go all the way back to the Commodore 64 and I've owned and I have had the privilege to play some of the best games of all time.
PC gaming is already in a fragile state. There is much competition from the Console market. Cheaper hardware, less compatibility problems, more stability and no DRM (at least until they go all download based). Assuming that DRM will eventually permeate every PC game, it could very well be the factor that pushes PC gaming over the edge. It just adds one more reason to choose Console over PC as a gaming platform. Soon, everyone will compare the two and most likely arrive at the following conclusions:
In today's day and age, consoles are unfortunately what most people want. They want to go buy a game at the store, plug it into their console and start playing right away. As much as I hate to say it being a long-time PC gamer, this is just one more nail in the coffin for PC gaming.
If the PC gaming platform is going to be saved there are many issues that need to be addressed. Gaming PC's need to be cheaper to be competitive with the price point of Console rivals. There has to be some sort of compromise about DRM. There has to be a way to raise the level of quality (stability, hardware support) of PC releases. Most PC releases, especially console ports, seem like they were just slapped together. Lots of products are released that are buggy as all hell and you have wait for 2 or 3 patches to get to play the game properly.
I sincerely hope that PC gaming lives on but right now it seems like it's fading away.
We'll make great pets
Because it's supposed to be a game. If it were truly evolution-style, the player would have nothing to do but watch. Games that are made to be realistic are oftentimes dull as wet cardboard. That you design your creature I hope doesn't come as a shock to you, since every Spore tech demo Will Wright gave in the last two to three years showed exactly that.
Personally, I really enjoyed it until I got to the space thing. I wasn't aware that I'd have to play a broken tech-demo version of Master of Orion to finish the game. I was in constant space combat using a control/camera system that I'm sure was designed to make space combat as painful as possible. And my race had been pretty much a peacenik during the whole history. None of that mattered anymore, apparently. The cell, creature, and tribal stages I thought were fun. The civ stage was okay. Once you get to space, just quit and go load up Sins of a Solar Empire instead.
The skillset required to tweak a PC for gaming and really enjoy PC games overlaps significantly with the skillset required to play pirated games. Consequently, there are two ways to really turn a profit on PC games: make the game online-only, or release a mega-hit. And face it--if you release a mega-hit, people will accept the DRM. Grudgingly? Sure. But they'll accept it.
Different people might accept it, and therefore more people. I have not accepted it, and will not accept it. I haven't bought HL2, either -- even though I had the money in hand, ready to fork it over. After all that hype, I might even have bought Spore, DRMless.
Could anybody share their experience with the DRM and installation on OS X?
Spore came out on the interwebs last week sometime, DRM free.
... and has no clue what's installed with it. Then he wants to burn a DVD of his own videos but can't, because secuRom prevents these tools from running.
Furthermore, the securom services run as local-system, and can't be removed. This is a rootkit, which could allow distribution of serious worms/viruses etc. without the user being able to prevent that, as the stuff can't be removed!
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Strangely enough, I don't see that contract clause on the outside of the box so that I can give informed consent.
Then buy it and return it if you disagree with the terms. Some stores don't let you return products for which you can't give informed consent; shop elsewhere.
The UK Amazon ( http://www.amazon.co.uk/ ) store has one review, I have just written another.
Of note, does DRM apply to Mac installs?
Link http://www.amazon.co.uk/Electronic-Arts-Spore-Mac-DVD/dp/B000FN7K2S/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1220893313&sr=8-1
I have a problem with Amazon letting people rate/review any product that they haven't bought from Amazon anyway. There's already way too much astroturf in the world. Amazon doubtlessly knows that this is going on and are hopefully doing away with a hotbed for fanbois and naysayers alike.
So go ahead, pay 50 bucks to get on your soap box about DRM. But give the game a chance to stand on it's own merits instead of letting people go wild about not liking a product that they've never touched.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Maybe I missed something...
If brute force isn't working, you are not using enough.
There is no such law.
Yes, there are laws related to private real property where the sale of a copy takes place.
Developers are free to agree or not agree to what a publisher wants.
Unless all publishers with access to Best Buy, Walmart*, and GameStop require DRM.
Anyone can post a comment on Amazon.com... people have started up whole businesses based on selling positive reviews. Without any procedure for vetting the reviews and/or reviewers, they're all suspect, and consequently, hold no value to me when making a purchase.
If you want game reviews, get them from a reputable source (to avoid any holy wars, I'll refrain from listing my personal favs).
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
EA just blows they turn everything they touch to sh*t. Ive already sworn off ever buying an EA title again.
I buy a house, I get the keys
I buy a book, I can do whatever I want with it
Why is it that "buying" software is any different?
If they want to rent it to me, they should do that instead of charging $60 upfront. Maybe that's the new business model. $1/day to play the game. If it sucks, well I will be the judge, and it won't cost me $60 to find out. Survival of the fittest. Methinks appropriate in this case.
Software companies will inevitably lose the cat-and-mouse game in every case. Because they sit opposite to a million monkeys on million typewriters.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world > > Those who understand binary and those who don't
If nobody got together and started some activist movement, which btw I think is awesome, they'd still get crap reviews from everyone that can't play the game because the DRM is stopping them. I don't know the exact workings of it but if their comp crashes and they have to reinstall it and it doesn't work or they're trying to play on a laptop while in a car and it can't phone home or a similar situation, they're going to go write a bad review about it. What's happening now is just a bunch of people warning everyone about it ahead of time before they buy it cuz the ratings were going to look a lot like that soon enough anyway.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
If you're bored after the first two stages, why would you move on to the third? A game is supposed to be fun. If it's not fun relatively quickly, there's no point in playing it.
Maybe you're a masochist, but apparently he's not.
Developers: We can use your help.
Losing the DRM key for itunes is another example of the same thing. Itunes "breaks", not "DRM is to blame"
Then it's up to FSF and its allies to inform the public that the brokenness is by design.
I've been reading the reviews at the Amazon.com review page and they've been coming in faster than I can read them! Almost all of them are hugely negative, citing shallow gameplay and draconian DRM. One guy posted a story about how he used up all 3 activations in his first day (different computers/partitions). There are only a small handful of positive reviews, and they read like paid advertisements. Each contains a statement to the effect that anyone who doesn't love the DRM is obviously an evil pirate.
I skipped Bioshock because of SecuROM. I pirated Mass Effect because of SecuROM. I think I'm going to skip Spore for the same reason.
Actually you are right and wrong:
EA is but one company. THQ is far better.
I was about to buy Spore online Direct2Drive when i read the details and backed out. Unless Spore relents and removes DRM completely, iam not buying it.
Stardock did away with DRM plus they care shit about pirated copies. Which is why i purchased Sins of Solar Empire, even though i never play it. I bought it, mailed them about their good sense, but i don't play it (my genre is WW2 strategy, spacewars never interested me).
PCs excel at strategy like AoM, AoE, CoH, CoH OF, etc.
I prefer consoles for simpler games, but that's my preference.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
This is actually perfect marketing for the makers of Spore. It gives them an infallible (if not logically correct) counterargument to all negative reviews.
So, EA, we hear that Spore is getting bad reviews. It must not be a good game.
Not at all. That bad review is just posted by someone who never played the game, and is trying to attack us.
And what about this other bad review?
Same thing.
And...
UTF-8: There and Back Again
There's nothing evolution-like in there, unless you believe in Intelligent Design
No shit. Do you have any freakin' clue how frustrating it would be to play a game where you can't control what happens to your creation? And this is beside the point, anyway. It's certainly evolution, just not evolution driven by random chance.
It's basically a series of mini games, starting with packman, each of which has been done better before.
That's kind of the point. It isn't meant to be the best at any area. Furthermore, afaik, the space stage of the game isn't something that's been done before.
The science is terrible...
Who the hell cares? Well, you, I guess, but no one should care. It's a game, the science isn't required to be anything resembling good.
...and the visual style is more kindergarden than Vista.
Whether this is good or bad is a completely subjective call. I'm neither excited nor put off by the game's style, but if you think that many people won't love it to death, you're only kidding yourself.
I'm sorry you didn't like the game. I enjoy it, it's reasonably fun, if not very deep until the end (when the game really does take off), and toying with making a creature is plenty of fun. But again, you're only kidding yourself if you think people are going to be put off by this game.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
I was really psyched about this game as I loved the sim games. I bought it yesterday but I havn't installed it yet. Reading up, this all sounds like total BS on the part of EA and I should return it and get a pirated version. I really don't pay for software all that often and I went out on a limb here out of respect for the developers and wanting to keep my game play experience easy and not wanting to deal with cracks to play online. But it sounds like buying it could lead to the opposite case. Now I'm suspicious. Does this DRM scheme rely on some spy-ware installed on my machine? Also, I have a PC and 2 laptops that I wanted to put it on for work & personal travel. Now I have to pick up the phone and get ahold of a stupid call center for permission to use my property?
---------
No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
I agree. Spore itself will eventually be it's own downfall.
There's just not a lot of game here to play.
The tools are great fun, but its supposed to be a game, not a toolkit for creating whacky creatures.
Save yerself the DRM and $40 and just buy the creature creator.
I have intermittent internet access, and when I found out (unpleasantly) about the Creature Creator's "phone-home" DRM, I was miffed about the $10 that I donated to their cause.
I won't be buying Spore for the same reason that I didn't buy Bioshock, or any other game that I know to have such a restrictive DRM system.
2) Ignore anyone's opinion who's played it less than - oooh - eight hours. There's certainly good reasons to dislike or even dismiss Spore, but it takes that point before you see past your preconceptions.
Pure, weapons-grade Balonium. You should be able to tell if a game's any good or not from the first thirty minutes of playing it. Having to slog through eight hours of tedium just to get to the Good Stuff is asinine.
and you have to buy the game to know that the DRM on it sucks.
Ergo, selling a lot and getting a lot of negative feedback doesn't prove that there is no negative feedback working.
My father in law was an avid PC gamer too. Then he had two games in a row fail to work on his machine due to weird DRM incompatabilities with his hardware. We could never figure out exactly what the problem was, since he wasn't doing anything all that strange and although it was a custom-built system, it was all pretty standard hardware.
He solved the problem by buying an Xbox 360.
He expects that if he buys a game and puts the disk into his machine, it should run. DRM caused that to not happen. To me, it doesn't seem like an unrealistic request (and the Xbox has no problem doing it).
And people wonder what is killing PC gaming? Its the companies that make PC games.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The fact that people were allowed to post reviews the game BEFORE IT EVEN CAME OUT shows just how useless Amazon's ratings system has become. What would be the big loss for them to only allow people who have purchased the game from them to make a rating? Doing otherwise just makes it highly vulnerable to abuse from astroturfers and haters alike.
Yes it will. Many people upgrade computers, you only get 3 chances with this games DRM and then u have to call EA and explain why you need another one.
I was tempted to give Mass Effect a miss due to DRM but I just heard too many good things about it. I'm glad I did get it, it is one of the all-time best RPGs in my opinion. Bioware has not lost their touch. However, the DRM is bullshit IMO.
However, there are patches to take it out. Gamecopyworld.com is a place to go to get them. If you live in the US, it is probably not legal to use them because of the DMCA. However in other countries, it should be just fine so long as you legitimately bought the game.
I am also with you on giving Spore a miss because of DRM. While Spore interests me, and is on my Amazon list, I'm not going to pay for games with crap DRM as much as possible. Mass Effect was good enough that I was willing to get it anyhow. However Spore, not so much.
I was also looking forward to the release of Spore, until I heard that they were using SecureRom.
I'm not installing an app that causes that much headache just for one game. I might look at it when it releases on the 360, but the bad reviews I'm seeing are making it less likely. And if they hadn't used SecureRom, I'd have bought it on release day, without waiting for reviews.
I don't know how long it's going to take for publishers to understand this simple truth:
Copy protection pisses off the paying customer, and makes the pirate laugh.
Let me make that clear for MBA's - the only people inconvenienced by your protection are the people who paid for the game!
From a gamer who buys all his games, and is old enough to remember when Electronic Arts was a great company. "Can a computer make you cry?", indeed.
I believe it's on the part of the box that says something similar to the following:
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:
With how short and different from each other the first two stages are, wouldn't the logical thing to do be to play until the fifth stage, knowing stages 3 and 4 are very likely to be different from 1&2, and very short?
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
The skillset required to tweak a PC for gaming and really enjoy PC games overlaps significantly with the skillset required to play pirated games.
Your comment is mostly moot. For one simple reason.
The money "required to tweak a PC for gaming" also indicates that the people are the potential buyer.
All business need is not to turn them off - because they are purchasing power, target audience and consumers.
Steam and StarDock both work well and earned a praise in gaming community. Yet, EA consistently (and insistently) cannot do it.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Read this,
Checked the wikipedia article on securom
Got me thinking:
My daughter's dvd burner stopped working last year and I had written it off to manufacturer's defect.
I know she had purchased Sims 2 like a year ago as well.
tracked down the removal for securerom, cleaned the reg, deleted files and rebooted....
DVD burner works now.
Screw DRM.
ohh,,yeah.. and Microsoft.
The problem with the ANTI-DRM movement is the fact they don't separate themselves from good Non-DRM advantages vs Bad Non-DRM advantages.
Being able to copy a game and give it to a friend (who may give it to an other friend or post online) is exactly what they want to stop, they want people to pay for their copy. These aren't Not-For-Profit companies, They want to make as much money from their product as possible. If you don't understand that then move to Cuba. So any debate that goes I wouldn't get it unless it is free, will fall on deaf ears. Or Piracy as a marketing method, for the next version (that is why they give free demos).
In order to fight DRM you need to convince people of some real advantage that not having DRM will have to the Legal Copies Purchased owners who run on software and hardware that they officially support.
Back in them old days of the 1980s when games fit on a Floppy disk they had copy proctection on it. Normally putting a bad sector on a disk causing the disk copy method to skip that bad track. Allowing them to fairly successfully prevent illegal copying of programs. (pre internet day made it hard for someone to find the crack) however this only lasted a couple years and they went back to normal files (non Copy Protected). Why did this happen because the Copy Protection had a lot of flaws for legit use of their software.
1. Floppy Disks didn't last very well so a Backup Copy was considered good practice, where the game was actually normally run on the backup disk keeping the master disk safe. So Copy protection put their media at risk (chances are people wouldn't buy a new copy if it was gone)
2. Hard Drives were becoming popular they loaded faster and easier to and cleaner (no mess of disks flying around) People wanted to use this mass storage mechanism to run their products faster then before.
3. Upgrades those 5 1/4 disks drive systems were being replaced with 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 inch disk as well game size for new versions have gotten bigger. Wasting space for DRM was not efficient, on those small disks and people can often take 5 1/4 disks and put it on one 3 1/2 . As well they could see the end of the 5 1/4 disk so by forcing Copy Protection means once the drive goes so does their program.
None of this issue back then were about fluffy ideals (or as Fox news would call them, Crazy Hypi-Commi-Liberal UnAmerican ideals.) You need to prove that DRM is bad for the company and effecting its bottom line or will effect it soon. This thing on Amazon may or may not last. However people have been getting better at reviews and sifting threw the Glowing Reviews or Negitive Reviews and finding the middle stuff that actually give a good story of the product.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
For me, PC gaming has been reduced to FPS, and that's only because the mouse+WASD is the greatest strength of the PC gaming interface. I bought both a PS3 and a Wii last year, which got me off of PC gaming after being hardcore UT/UT2k4 for years (20-40hrs/wk). The games on console are different, to be sure, but no less enjoyable and I found that my attachment to shooters was not as strong as my history would seem to indicate.
Hardware incompatibility is a huge bugbear. Before my UT bouts, I was very much into racing sims as well, both arcade and more realistic ones. I have a Logitech Momo and I drilled a hole in my desk to make it even more stable. Did the squash-ball mod for the brake, too. Guess what? Need For Speed: Carbon didn't want to play nice with it. I'm not sure what its problem was, but my impression is that EA decided to change something that required me to remap the entire wheel. Since I got NFS:C for cheap, I took it as a wash and just swore off PC driving games and now the wheel sits gathering dust on the floor next to my right foot.
The last game I really bought was The Orange Box (Half-Life 2), which was fun, but it wasn't anything that translated to other games. It was just another story to finish and didn't matter where I was playing it (PC or TV).
Maybe this all pegs me as a casual gamer, so casual I'll spend $1000 on a couple of consoles and related accessories, but not tied to any one genre, game, or platform. But you know what? I've always been agnostic in this way, with no preference between Ladders on CP/M, that square car race game with the dots on the TI 99/4A, Gorf on the VIC-20, or Motorstorm on the PS3.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Bingo.
The waking call for me was when I stumbled upon the preorder page for Gothic 3, mostly out of sheer surprise that it existed already and it showed an unrealistically close release date. Back then it wasn't even in _alpha_. Even the official site and press releases had nothing more than a couple of "look what the engine can do" screenshots. There was no information about the story, the world, or anything. And again, nobody had a playable demo yet. Probably not even the devs, yet. So it seemed way premature to even have a preorder page.
Well, a few fanboys had already taken upon themselves to post glowing reviews. If you listened to them, it was the greatest game ever. Superb gameplay, the best fantasy story since Tolkien himself, no bugs, the best graphics ever, etc.
Needless to say, when the game was released a year later, it was nothing like that. I suppose the other categories are subjective, but let's just say that the "no bugs" part was waay off the mark. And the "a hamster can kill godzilla if it hits first, because it'll then keep interrupting the other" gameplay way at least for me a huge turnoff.
I can't remember the exact games, but I remember I looked at another couple of yet unreleased games the same day, out of morbid curiosity. Yep, you guessed, the fanboys or maybe shills (take your pick) had already written tons of glowing reviews.
So anyone who takes the Amazon ratings as anything more than comedy relief, is bound to have a bit of the surprise sooner or later. Probably sooner.
Mind you:
1. The situation isn't Amazon-only, nor games-only. When you give zealots, fanboys, trolls, and shills, who already exist to force their opinions and views upon everyone else, a forum whose purpose is just that... well, what did anyone expect?
2. Even without that, the amount of sheer stupidity in user reviews online is either hillarious or worth losing faith in humanity. I haven't yet decided which. (And I mean, seriously, stuff like, for a soundproofed Sennheiser headset, where the whole _point_ is that they massively dampen outside noises, someone hat taken the time to write a review to the effect of, "OMG, they're crap! If you put them on, you can't hear anything else, not even the doorbell or phone! Stay away from them!" And that's actually one of the milder examples of online stupidity.)
3. The whole point about tastes is that they're subjective. What may be TEH GRATEST GAME EVAR ;) for me, might be the most boring thing ever for you. I can see a point in trusting a reviewer or forum member who you've already established that he has the same tastes as you. Or maybe taking a reputable source and taking just the facts and ignoring his opinions of them. (E.g., "ok, he hated it because it's turn based, I like turn based, sound interesting.") But trusting some random guy online to tell one what to buy? Why? How stupid is that?
So, on the whole, that yet another group of zealots has taken it upon itself to pollute that already-polluted resource... well, it's a bit like spitting down the hole of an outhouse. Amusing, but won't make the contents any worse than they already were.
I'm not opposed to the idea, but I'd wonder about how would it work. How do you distinguish between, basically:
A. Some hypothetical corporate shill, giving everything from company X top marks just because he was paid to.
B. Jenny Gamer who likes to play with dolls, bought The Sims because it sounded just like that, and genuinely liked it. And then bought the 7
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I respectfully disagree with you that PC gaming is almost dead. I think RTS, Strategy Games, and Simulations still are much better on the PC.
I think "Console" games are more for simple fun with arcade style games, sports games, and "Mario" type games and first person shooters.
But I can't imagine playing StarCraft, Civilization, Sim City 4 or any other game with a decent amount of keyboard input required on a console.
Unless you add a keyboard to the console, and then well.... You have a computer...
Gaming PC's need to be cheaper to be competitive with the price point of Console rivals.
I think that this is essentially a meme that needs fixing from PR people, not tech or price changes. The opposite spin on the same idea, and one that's closer to the truth, is that on a console the technical qualities of games on day 1 is roughly the same as it will be on day 1200. On a PC, day 1200 graphics (with brand new hardware installed on day 1200) can generally be set to about 4x higher levels than on day 1, but people with hardware from day 1 can still run the new things and have them look as good as anything from day 1, which was already looking a little better than a console on the same day. PCs allow you to upgrade, they don't force it.
Perhaps the real solution is for graphics to be automatically set during installation to be optimized for the user's PC, and done in a much more successful way than has been done in the past.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
nope, not if you're RELOADED.
which is yet another nail in the coffin of DRM. It's still a mistake to use DRM.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Which laws? I'm assuming it was actually a contract between them a third party?
Does anyone have some more info on this?
A hugely anticipated game ships with the most oppressive DRM yet. Aside from a handful of educated gamers not buying it, the backlash consists of Amazon comment spam... and this is supposed to be the end of DRM? It looks more like just the beginning.
Tell you what, when a hugely anticipated triple-A title from an outfit like EA ships with no DRM, why don't we call THAT the beginning of the end.
Bait and switch is against the law in many jurisdiction; at least I know it is around here. People invest time and money to go to the store and buy something, therefore if you sell them something on false pretenses, or hide an important caveat, you are basically ripping them off, even if you offer a refund. And btw, just try exercise that right to a refund; it sure as hell ain't easy to recoup the Windows tax even though it's explicitly stated in the EULA that you can get a refund if you don't agree.
Spore HAD the potential to be the best selling game of all time, but of course something had to destroy that chance. DRM is that something. I for one, will not be purchasing Spore. It's just amazing, do people do this sort of stuff on purpose?
President/CEO Pacy World http://www.pacyworld.com
I intend to e-mail the publisher explaining that I would rather pirate it than pay them money thanks to their greed.
It says "I would rather pirate than pay"
But it doesn't say "I am going to pirate"
The argument here is that they're not going to pay for it anyways, but it doesn't say that they would rather just not play the game at all VS pirating it.
Compare it to a statement like "I'd rather swim with hungry sharks than shop at your company again"
It doesn't mean you will (or want to) swim with live sharks, just that it's preferable to shopping at company X.
Well, a big lure is that various types of gameplay require authentication. Online play is a big one, which can be pretty easily tied to a less-irritating but still rather effective authentication scheme.
Anyone else? I have had such poor results with anything published by EA over the last 5 years or so that I have stopped buying anything that EA puts out. I know it has been compromised or kneecapped or has some stupid gotcha like DRM. Looks like that holds true for Spore.
I've just bought Spore and haven't even noticed any DRM. However, the package said Mac OS X and Windows, but on my OSX machine Spore always crashes no matter what I do. The same happened to Spore Laboratory I bought earlier. I tried to contact EA support. It took me hours to find a support web page where you could actually enter your question into a form and send it to them. They never bothered to answer. IMHO, that's fraud. Anyway, works fine on Windows.
Moreover, Spore installed an application called "EA Download Manager" that just sits around in the tray and whenever I open it shows an empty window. Now an application that just shows an empty window, that is really annoying. Summary: Nice game, but EA totally sucks.
"Sims 2" came with enough intrusive DRM that I uninstalled it about ten minutes after I installed it and then went back and gunged out my system -- thoroughly.
If a game company has done "all your bits are belong to us" in the past, they will do so in the future.
So why was everybody so shocked, shocked! to find "Spore" tries to take over their PCs in the name of fighting the dread pirates?
Like all Stardock's stuff you can get it via Impulse, but this one is going out to retail channels too. That seems to be their MO these days. They get old games, indys, and such and those are done Impulse only. However big titles that either they do themselves or they publish, go retail, as well as Impulse. Galactic Civilizations II (and expansions) and Sins of a Solar Empire have both worked this way, and now Demigods it seems.
Also, if they keep true to form, the retail copy will not have DRM. GC2 and Sins don't. The only thing they do that is even remotely DRM like is push you to get Impulse and register via that to get updates. However it doesn't seem mandatory, as you can find the updates on Flieshack and the like as well. Regardless, there's no copyprotection of any kind that I can see. The game has no bullshit during install and doesn't want the DVD afterwords.
Personally I do the Impulse thing as it is really convenient.
I bought Spore, and I'm returning it as defective or suing for misleading advertising - the game is absolutely NOTHING like the multiple years of hype made it out to be. YOU CAN'T EVEN SAVE YOUR IN-GAME PROGRESS AFTER REACHING THE SPACE STAGE, that's why the freaking game never ends! Sure, you keep your created content, but you don't get the chance to restart from where you left off (except in the Civilization stage.)
The vehicle creator, while nice, doesn't do everything as-advertised, and makes you do weird workarounds for attaching some parts that makes absolutely no sense.
Spore wis nothing more than several years of misleading advertising. I'll keep the Creature Creator, since that's enjoyable enough and comes with all the parts. I can model little things all day. But to play through a game where I can't save my progress after reaching the highest level of the game is damned annoying.
This has totally turned me off from any and all EA-related games. I thought it was over the first time when EA acquired Origin, now it's really over.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
EA feels as if pirating is harming their bottom line so introduce a fairly harsh DRM to the game.
People pirate it anyways and increasing numbers of people download it BECAUSE of the DRM. Additionally, increasing numbers of people just don't play the game at all for the same reason.
EA notices how many people have been illegally downloading the game and combined with their lackluster sales they validate their decision to include such a harsh DRM.
Repeat with increasingly worse DRMs.
I don't care about Spore. But I won't buy a game with call home DRM. When the servers aren't working someday, you can't play your game. No thanks. Just look at Microsoft and Yahoo music services to get a clue how long these servers will run.
So if the game I am waiting for actually has this crap. I won't buy it. This is after buying BG1, BG2, NWN and all expansions, plus KOTOR. I love Bioware games. But I will not buy into this kind of DRM nonsense.
And you know what. It will still get busted and copied, they are just alienating the purchasing customer. Or soon to be former purchasing customer.
But hey it's OK, I still have NWN and 10000 mods for my RPG fix if these guys don't want my money.
I bought both a PS3 and a Wii last year, which got me off of PC gaming after being hardcore UT/UT2k4 for years (20-40hrs/wk).
Your hands and wrists will thank you for that. Playing UT marathons with a mouse and keyboard is one of the top offenders and a major league cause of developing Repetitive Stress Injury to your hands. The sooner you quit UT cold turkey and never go back, the sooner your hands can start healing from the damage. They'll never come back 100% however. I've been UT-free for almost three years now, and my hands have healed up only about 70%.
Have someone step on your scrotum over and over. I've seen some videos where people like it. You just have to keep going until it gets good, just like everything in life.
That's scary.
14 2 star reviews 420 1 star reviews A lot of these people may be flash mob herd thinkers, but it looks to me so far like there are genuinely more people saying the game play sucks than there are people giving it 5-stars. I've been curious for a long time...but I don't think I'll be shelling out $50 for this one.
I installed the game, and clicked the icon. The screen went full screen and black, then it kicks out with a GPF error. I try again. I reboot and retry, still could not play the game.
After some more uninstalling, rebooting, etc, I finally got it to start up. So I go to create the EA account to use all the wonderful online content they've touted for the last few years. What happens there? "An unknown error has occurred, please try again." Try again as much as I want, and it does not want to create me an account.
So then I dig through years of email and find I did have a general EA account created some time ago. Groovy (or so I think). I try to log on with it at EA's web site. Oh, there's a message that you have to use an email address instead of the old system's username/password. There's a handy link to convert my old account to this new system. Ok. I click through a few screens, agree to the terms of service, etc. "The EA account (email address) and password you entered appears to be invalid."
Try as I might, I guess they really, really don't want me to play this game...
Recently Slashdot linked to an article listing the Gamer's Bill of Rights.
This list was created by a publisher called Stardock, best known for Galactic Civilizations and Sins Of A Solar Empire. The list makes tons of sense, and it's doubtful if the PC gaming market will survive if publishers don't heed the wisdom of its suggestions. I never even heard of this publisher before Gal. Civ., but now I'm becoming a fan due to their benevolent attitude toward gamers. Boycotting clueless publishers isn't enough because there will always be people who will buy the game anyway. Instead of showing publishers what they can lose (which might not be a lot to them), show them what they can gain. Show them the profitability of treating customers well by giving the good publishers a chance. Also, don't underestimate the innovation of indie games.
You have got to be kidding me. The people who care about DRM to the point of it affecting their buying decisions is such a vanishingly small population that it's lost in the statistical noise. Most people just don't care about DRM. Of the ones who do, most of them will buy the game anyway and apply a crack to remove the DRM. The remainder probably wouldn't buy the game anyway; not just because of the DRM, but because it's not released under the GPL.
If Spore is fun, people will suck it up and buy it despite the DRM. If it's not fun, people wouldn't buy it even if it was completely free of DRM. DRM or lack thereof will have no significant impact on sales.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Old news now, but a good company.
Stardock Announces "The Gamers Bill of Rights"
1. Gamers shall have the right to return games that don'}t work with their computers for a full refund.
2. Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state.
3. Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a game's release.
4. Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game.
5. Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will play adequately on that computer.
6. Gamers shall have the right to expect that games won't install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their consent.
7. Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time.
8. Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers.
9. Gamers shall have the right to demand that a single-player game not force them to be connected to the Internet every time they wish to play.
10. Gamers shall have the right that games which are installed to the hard drive shall not require a CD/DVD to remain in the drive to play.
http://www.stardock.com/about/newsitem.asp?id=1095
As far as I can see no commenter yet has actually installed this game, it's just a bunch of "EA Sucks"/"I won't buy this (but I wouldn't have anyway)"/"It will run under WINE" rants based on stories they've read on slashdot.
I bought it and installed it and, aside from the usual serial number, I've not noticed any DRM yet.
And probably I won't because I won't be playing it again. DRM won't kill Spore, brain dead gameplay will kill Spore. Such a beautiful and well executed concept has been ruined by Will Wright's desire to go for the Sims-level market. There's nothing even remotely challenging about the first stages, though the concept and execution are great, then the last stage over-compensates by being impossible (it's basically Elite II without the tedious flying bits, but you always start next to large and aggressive empires who give you not a chance). I truly hope that they have a change of heart and produce some kind of advanced gamer mode patch to make the promising pre-space stages deeper and longer, but having read WW's unapologetic response I won't be holding my breath.
More than 300,000 peers on the torrent!
Wow, EA never saw that coming, but the rest of us sure did.
You get a better product by pirating it instead of buying. EA really screwed this up big time.
The correct first question to ask isn't whether what GP describes is legal; it's whether it is true that the EULA says that in the first place. Questions like this can't be settled without seeing the precise language of these documents.
It will now.
The non-reviewer reviews of this game give it a MUCH lower rating than the average pro review on any of the sites. Sorry, it doesn't take a flash mob with Spore.
There are several disadvantages with consoles.
First, cost. If you want to play all the different console games you have to buy 3 separate platforms. Which means buying a $300 Wii, $300 PS3, and a $300-500 Xbox, plus memory sticks and the whole shebang. Compairitivally, a well-designed gaming PC needs to be upgraded every 3 years and your total cost of ownership for 6 years (the average life of a console system) is about $1500. So by going with the consoles you do save some cash but it isn't as much as you think. If you just want to play Zelda, I guess it's a few orders of magnitude less. Plus with the failure rate of some of these consoles (cough Xbox Cough) you will likely replace a console a few times.
Second, Consoles are still limited to the master controller concept where the vendor makes one controller that fits all game,s whereas PC's have keyboards, mice, knockoff controllers for the Xbox, Wii, Gamecube, PS1, 2, and 3, etc, driving wheels, joysticks, etc. If you happen to get such a device for a console, it's usually tied to just one game and is expensive. The can remedy this by putting a stack of 16 USB ports onto a console and allowing you to config it to whatever your want to use.
Third, graphical and game quality, and the types of games that can be played. Look at MMO's, which are entirely a PC Phenomenon; or at MMOFPS, another PC-only phenomenon. PC games are also more moddable, which adds to game life; look at second life. And that's just the start, really.
And really, there is no executable environment for games. You can't take a supreme commander patch and apply it to an Xbox360 version of the game.
So when Consoles can overcome these major hurdles to success, and when the developement of PC gaming environments gets as good as it can get (which is soon), you'll see consoles become truly superior to gaming.
If the system requirements clearly state that Windows is required to play the game, and you instead choose to run it in Linux using some buggy third-party Win32 API, that's your fault.
"Sufferin' succotash."
But now I'll wait. Maybe I'll torrent the fixed version instead, and buy it if and when it's worth the money.
I've been spoiled by Blizzard lately, all their offerings (at least all the ones I'm interested in) are now available on both PC and Mac without as much as a CD key as a download, and multiple downloads to different PCs are apparently encouraged.
Not only this, but my old PC cd keys will work to download the Mac versions. This is exactly how software (and music/video) should have always been delivered.
I'll buy Diablo3 from them the day it ships assuming they use the same system--Probably the new Starcraft as well.
Why? It's not fun. It's basically a tech demo pretending to be a game.
And this was my question. I was planning to buy or order this yesterday either. But I read several of the comments on Amazon. Mostly about DRM, but others who said it was nothing like the game that was promised. Said one reviewer (paraphrase) the game was based on stats, so even if you're creature had 6 legs it wouldn't run any faster than a one-legged creature with higher stats. Also you could make winged creatures, but they couldn't fly. Speculation was made that this would probably come in future add-ons, making you spend more money.
This also sounds more like a game of "creationism" vs. evolution. I thought you gave the creature some basic anatomy and the creature would change, but not necessarily the way you might expect it to. For example, if it lives on a mountainous region, it might gain legs adapted for climbing mountains. If there were tall trees it needed to eat from, it might grow a longer neck, learn to climb trees, fly, etc.
As it is, it sounds like the Sims in outer space. As much as I think the Sims are great, we don't need another version of that.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
Well, the problem with that idea are many:
1. A game that basically plays itself would be freaking boring for most people. You've basically described Sim City, but without actually placing the houses or streets or managing the budget. Seriously, think a Sim City where all you can do is throw tornadoes and whatnot at a city and hope that the people take the hint and build it like you want it to. It's at most freeware game material.
2. Occasionally intervening negates the whole science aspect just as badly. If a deity up there in the sky decides that sheep should have longer legs by personally throwing lightning at short legged ones, what you have in the end is still ID, not natural selection. You just replaced it by something that's just as unscientific, only now it's (A) with less gameplay, and (B) a stupid and inefficient way to do things for a deity.
3. Occasionally intervening sounds good until you realize what a boring janitor job that is. Evolution happens at large scales and large populations. Do you want to personally inspect 1000 sheep to decide which one deserves a lightning strike? (And that's realistically a very very low number.) Then do it again? And again? Congrats, instead of playing a deity, now you're playing a shepher's apprentice.
4. Accelerating mutations isn't necessarily a good thing. For evolution to even work at all, you need enough stability for the mutant population to edge-out the others or be edged-out, over a long time. If every other sheep born has a different mutation, and different enough to be noticed by the player, the species just diverges fast and it becomes 1000 different species competing and soon running out of compatible partners.
5. We're still far from simulating a realistic and self-contained ecosystem. I've seen a few simulations and they tended to fly off the hook pretty fast.
6. Exactly what is your achievement as a player there? E.g., in Spore I can set a goal for myself like "make a race of Kilrathi and take over the planet/galaxy by military might." What would be the goal and achievement in your version? So I drag the temperature down and see what animals happen to result. It could be sheep with thicker wool, or it could be yeti, or I could have a mass extinction event. Uh, ok. Now what?
What variables would I even have to play with to get evolution to produce sentient felines? And how do I know I don't get sentient parrots instead? I.e., _can_ I set any such goals for myself and realistically achieve them?
7. It sounds like a recipe for frustration. RL evolution is a mess of dead ends, extinctions, etc. What if the same happens to the species that you put all that work into guiding down a certain path?
E.g., the first species to reach, in Spore terms, tribal stage on Earth, were the Neanderthals. They had ritual burial, were self-conscious enough to use (primitive) jewellery, used fire, skinned animals, built elaborate shelters, had work specialization and possibly some primitive trade to support those specialized crafters, built crude musical instruments, and... went the way of the Dodo.
So if that happens in the game, now what? Watch the game playing itself some more until it produces another sentient species?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Amazon wouldnt let me post a review (you have to have made a purchase from them at some point to review their products). So, in case anyone has an amazon account, hasnt had a chance to play the game and feels like helping me out by posting this up there for me, heres my review:
Rating: 1 star
I have been looking forward to this game for a long time. I finally got the chance to buy it - at no point was I warned just how dreadful an experience it would be.
As already stated in the other reviews, the DRM software that this game comes with is absolutely appaling. The game comes bundled with a modified version of securom software (and a simple google search will tell you all of the problems that computer users had with that) which allows only 3 installs of the game and requires an internet validation at install, and seemingly every time you want to use the game online.
Not only is this game an incredibly expensive rental rather than a purchase, it doesnt even have a decent system for renewing your "3 installs only". You must beg EA's customer support via email to have your count reset. Complaints to EA resulted in a clearly automatic email telling me how many wonderful advantages restricting my usage of the game I fairly bought gave me. I fail to see the logic behind any of them.
I upgrade my PC hardware or reinstall my operating system on a regular basis (every 2-3 months), so this system is just another annoyance to me.
In terms of gameplay, the game as described before release was full of wonder, intricacies and exciting things the like of which had never been seen before (or so the hype says). After release I was disappointed to find out that the majority of the game is horribly simplistic (using a very basic "part x gives you advantage y up to a max of z" system - you can have as many arms as you like, but your strike will still only do a set amount of damag, for example). The creatures themselves are nowhere near as customiseable as I imagined, and some of the stages are laughably easy and mind numbingly dull (I completed tribal stage whilst watching TV and clicking pretty much randomly on enemy tribes)
My advice? Spend your money somewhere else. You wont get value for it here.
If you don't read the EULA, then there is no "meeting of the minds" and therefore no contract beyond that which common law or statute enforces.
Neither party can say "you agreed to this" when the words didn't even appear on your screen without you having to scroll down. Heck, if you are a computer-luddite, you can legitimately claim "I just started clicking things until the dialog box went away."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I buy PC games. I have about 50-60 on a bookshelf next to my PC desk & a few more I bought thru Stardock. I haven't bought Spore strictly because of the intrusive DRM in it.
The same DRM that *didn't* prevent me from downloading the ISO & playing it for about 16 hours this weekend.
There is a war going on for your mind.
No shit. Do you have any freakin' clue how frustrating it would be to play a game where you can't control what happens to your creation? And this is beside the point, anyway. It's certainly evolution, just not evolution driven by random chance.
Actually, you could easily do that--make a game where players change the organism's environment, instead of the organism, and have the organism respond appropriately as per natural selection. That's far closer to evolution than what Spore is. Unfortunately, Spore doesn't resemble any form of evolution, at all.
Anyway, you don't understand evolution at all if you think it's "random chance". Read less Stephen J. Gould, please.
Maybe, just maybe, if you care about DRM, your not in EA's target audience? Actually, if you care about quality games, your not in EA's target audience really.
My girlfriend loves spore (and rarely any video game), and the DRM didn't do crap to my computer, end of story. Get over yourselves really, the game is like wii-sports, a tech demo showing of things to come. Think of it like buying golf clubs and getting a 6-hole course that comes with it.
If that's not appealing to you, just wait it out. More content will come, the game will be cheaper, but you won't be one of the first people to show your creation off to other people. That's the trade-off that comes with any new product or idea really.
We've only played through the cell and creature phase, but the kids love it. I played a little this morning and enjoyed it as well.
Spore is not a hardcore game on par with Grand Theft Auto. It's a Sims game, with no story and only vague goals. So far my favorite part is the fact that when I wander around, half the creatures were created by other people. That's fairly unique in a single player game, and it's a subtle but interesting aspect.
I won't give my final opinion until I get through the space stage, but I played some last night and this morning and generally enjoyed it. There's some repetitive aspects that I can see might get to me, but the stages go quickly and you don't have to ever repeat them again. I think the space stage will be the decider, as it's where people could spend most of the game.
While the upgrade-ability issue is a major one, I think there is a much more fundamental problem with the PCs-are-a-much-more-expensive-gaming-platform-meme. Specifically, that you're getting a computer anyway.
:), but the point is she could. Total cost of the gaming platform portion: half an XBox... oh, and it has a 250G hard drive.
I built my mother a desktop last year with two gigs of RAM and an E6600 Conroe for about $500, case, shipping, et. al. included. The motherboard has a PCI-E 16x port. It would cost what, about USD$150 for a gaming-class graphics card to make that a machine capable of playing any of the XBox360 ports at a resolution of 1024x768 easily. She wouldn't, because she's not exactly a gamer
My machine is a little beefier. I made it more recently, and I do image processing in Matlab and compile all my Linux software, so it was easy to justify the bigger processor without games. My GeForce 8800GTS was $175 with a mail-in rebate. Even if you say I didn't need a whole 4G of ram, could have gotten a slower processor... I spent maybe $250 at the most to go from modern standard-use to gaming quality, and I played Assassin's Creed at 1600x1200 with every bell and whistle at the max... for a price equal to, or less, than the cheapest 360 package.
It both surprised and made me proud of my fellow consumers that so many people do care about the unacceptable DRM being used in this game.
EA marketing can spin it all they want, but they will kill their DRM servers the moment:
1. The game no longer makes money
2. The server gets a non compatible "upgrade"
3. EA gets bought out by another company
4. EA smartens up and realizes DRM was just a bad idea that only punishes the legal users (and if this happens too late, nobody will be create an EA patch to the game)
What if I wanted to still play Spore in 2026, that's not as unrealistic as it sounds because as you read this I'm playing many 15yr old PC games still. There are many DOS games I still enjoy (legally) to this day in DOSBOX.
What EA needs to realize is pirates aren't their demographics, some people will just steal the game, protection won't change them either way. Meanwhile, intelligent consumers like myself, who actually had an interest in the game, will not either boycott or get the game using more nefarious means. Mind you I am an active consumer, I've purchase two new PC games in the last 6 weeks.
Finally keep in mind there's another reason behind this kind of DRM: to prevent the sale of used copies, Half Life 2 did the same thing when they tied the game to Steam. I'll bet the shirt on my back if you were to call EA and say you bought the game used and want a 4th authorization, they'll turn you down. It's both a moral and a technological abuse.
Just say no to rent-ware masquerading as a product!
you need the builder to make that marsian girl with the three... actually, scratch that idea
As someone who was excited for spore for years, I have to say, the negative things I've been reading about secuROM has kind of killed my enthusiasm. While I fully planned to pay for it from a store, I'm concerned about what it will do to my computer. So.... here's one person who's not rushing out to buy it. Here's hoping it comes out for my new Xbox360.
But, my point is, that if you put the word out to people that the DRM that comes with a game/song/movie is potentially harmful, at least some people will take that to heart.
*reads the comments before the parent post...reads the parent post again*
Your reading comprehension isn't very high, is it? Someone mark the OP flamebait, please? I used all my mod points yesterday. (Oh, and do this post while you're at it. *grin*)
I am a dedicated PC Gamer, buying a new top of the range gaming machines every eighteen months, and buy about 15-20 games a year, and i have not and will not buy Mass Effect or Spore because of the restrictive DRM used. By contrast i bought Sins of a Solar Empire because it was a good game that didn't treat me like a criminal. I do not like being at the mercy of an internet connection to install and play a game, especially not if i pull it off the shelf five years later to install on my third subsequent PC. No thanks.
If no one buys a product locked with DRM, then DRM will die. We control the market.
Also if Spore wants another chance they can roll out an open free game for Linux , all of macos not just intel, and windows. have a subscription based online play, and also a free online play with reduced levels of play.
DRM doesn't work. You may have noticed that, regardless of how draconian the DRM on Spore is, people are still pirating it (and had it out almost a week before it was in stores). Therefore, DRM is only hurting the paying customers- I bought the game and considered using a cracked version to keep DRM off of my system because I don't want to risk losing access to my game just because a server goes down. In the end, DRM encourages piracy, not discourages it.
Look at Galactic Civilizations II, which only had a CD key, no software DRM. The publisher said it was fine for people to install it on multiple computers. It did fine, and if the comments people posted online were true more people were buying it that would have pirated if it had DRM.
I doubt that people will be so put off by the DRM as to not purchase Spore. Plus you think EA executives will know WHY people gave Spore a negative review? All you're really doing is telling them "Hey we don't want games like this anymore!" Nothing short of a lawsuit against game companies for putting DRM on content you should legally be entitled to use unrestricted. Obviously putting the game on a website and sharing with the world should remain illegal, but the DRM should not be forced on anything you legally own a copy of.
Besides DRM doesn't even work. I paid for the game a week before it came out and downloaded it online. I didn't realize I was only pre-downloading most of the game. After two hours the download software told me the game is released on September 7th. I thought that was quite dumb since I paid for it, I downloaded 99%, why can't you just let me play? So I went off to the pirate bay and there was spore already cracked and waiting to be downloaded. I still haven't installed a legit copy of spore since I can't find the EA Downloaded to get the game on my home computer (I downloaded the game at work.)
So far I think the game is terrific, it goes a bit fast to the space stage and there's hardly anything to the tribal stage. My only complaint is that I can't install it on my MacBook Pro since the game requires Leopard (I have 10.4.) This game is probably going to be my only reason for updating my laptop to Leopard.
Where "multiple machines" equals, at most, three. Not three at the same time, either, three total, ever. Hard drive crashes? You eat an activation. Upgrade your graphics card? Spore says "Hey, this isn't the same machine I was installed on," eat another activation. In a surprisingly short period of time, you find yourself on the phone with EA, begging for more activations so you can reinstall the game.
Now, imagine it isn't just Spore doing this, but every piece of software on your computer. Do you REALLY want to spend hours on the phone with various tech support companies in India every time you upgrade part of your computer or buy a new computer?
Odd, I've played the entire game twice now. He says tribal stage which means character development is finished; no more changes to character. Now you go through two RTS stages that have really idiotic AI to get to the space stage. This stage automatically pits you into a fed-ex grind for the next 4 hours to do anything...
He was right, game stops at tribal stage. Even then here we go on a list of ways they dumbed down this game for his 3 to 5 year olds.
*On reaching land stage; you get a full reset.
*Anytime you want to 'evolve' you can change your creature entirely from front to back (i.e. a whole new creature that bears absolutely NO resemblance to previous creature)
*At tribe stage, all 'evolution' seems to cease for the entire planet.
*At civilization stage, no matter where/what/how you put the guns on your vehicles they will shoot the same as the opponents (mine were on the bottom just to show how silly it is)
*At civilization stage, Speed is worthless. Health/Attack for easy win.
*At civilization stage, just nuke the opposing teams once you have 6 cities or build 10 fighters. Even on hard, easy win.
*At space stage, you spend the next 4 hours of your life transporting spice or doing idiotically easy missions (oh, and for your enjoyment every mission has a timer! because they have got to have those plants scanned in the next 3 minutes after you arrive!)
*At space stage, when you finally get past the fed-ex grind and you want to kill some things you're incredibly weak. Just keep grinding combat till you get a planet or two. Then you get stronger attacks and more health... till you're almost invincible.
*At space stage, enemies are incredibly repetitive (same attacks/defense structure and they don't build many settlements up or terra-form).
I'm sure I missed a few; but I wish I stopped at the tribe stage and just did the fun bit and 'pretended' my creature evolves by adding the parts slowly and methodically.
I was an avid PC gamer since the late 90s. These are exactly the reasons I gave it up several years ago.
The phone home stuff is old. The original idea of the DRM was it'd call EA's servers to reactivate every 10 days, and would shut itself off if it couldn't.
So if you put it on a laptop and went offline? Oops, no game for you. After a massive outcry on the Mass Effect forums (the first game that was supposed to have that), they backed off on the 10 day thing.
It still refuses to install after 3 activations though, you have to call EA to get another one and prove that you're actually a paying customer... as if any pirate would need to call, since their copies have cracks to remove SecuROM.
I recently had Mass Effect randomly decide I wasn't authorized and stop working... then a while later randomly start working again. Maybe you're okay with that, but if I'm paying for a game I expect the the game to actually run when I want it to and not randomly decide I'm no longer authorized.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
"What would be the big loss for them to only allow people who have purchased the game from them to make a rating?"
The loss of reviews from people who've purchased the game elsewhere.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Someone like EA_Spouse came up with the email nomenclature for EA's 3 letter likes of John Riccitiello (CEO) Eric Brown (CFO) and John Pleasants (COO)....I'm sure the flash mob might be able to get the point across about how badly they keep going down the wrong path, unless all 3 of these guys are asleep at the wheel...which may be very close to the truth....
As for me, I could care less about Spore's DRM - I wasn't ever going to buy (or pirate) the game anyway. My final straw was BF2142 and how unstable of a mess that is.
Well, I'm a Wii/PC gamer and what the PC needs is more pros, not so much the cons.
For a long time, consoles were something made for a 480p TV while my computer monitor has been 1024x768+ for ages. Because of the low resolution, things that required great precision like FPS or desktop applications weren't all that great. With the current generation it changed and with the next generation it'll change again. I would imagine 1080p full resolution (except maybe the Wii2) and keyboard/mouse options are already there as far as I know. So if I got the same inputs, same outputs, same game (no need to dumb down the interface then), what's the advantage of the PC?
You could turn it around and say the upgrade cycle means graphics are rapidly getting better while console games get dated. You could also say that the flexibility in hardware means there's a wide budget range from the lowest possible to the most expensive quad-setup possible. That the graphics are getting better are a case of diminishing returns that is probably near irrelevant at the next generation as even a $200 4850HD can take almost everything you throw at it at 1920x1080. And the budget to time investment ratio is more important I think, it's not whether you can afford the console but rather if you can afford to sit around playing games all day, most people will find a few hundred bucks (more than 65mio consoles sold this generation alone).
With the patching you can say that at least you *can* get patches - there's no such thing as perfection and bugs happen in console games too. In practise there are ways to patch yet a large amount of consoles won't be online to be patched - it's pretty much the best of both worlds when it comes to getting QA up front, and still get the things they miss in patches if it's really bothering you. I went with the Wii this generation because it was more fun and got PC upgrades instead. Next time around, I might seriously ditch the PC for gaming altogether and just get another console. That all depends on how far out the xbox720/PS4/Wii2 are.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I won't buy a game nor any product ever that sports even a microscopic hint of DRM, period.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
I am not sure if you know, but consoles also need to install things in the harddisk. In this case, waiting 25 minutes might be just TOO long for me. Considering that this is a 10 hour game, half an hour is around 5% of play time. So it is time now to review that concept of consoles better than PCs: they need an install as of now.
He expects that if he buys a game and puts the disk into his machine, it should run. DRM caused that to not happen. To me, it doesn't seem like an unrealistic request (and the Xbox has no problem doing it).
I thought you put a disk in an xbox 360 and it blinks a red ring at you?
I kid, I kid.
I agree with the whole anti-drm thing though. I no-cd crack pretty much every game I own because it lets me play them without having to have a stack of different games by my desk. Once or twice I've had a game that I've HAD to crack to get it to run at all. I have no problem with steam, or similar systems, but I absolutely prefer games that I can just PLAY. I'd love it if companies started making pc games that only OPTIONALLY needed to be installed at all, and if you did, didn't need the disk to play. DOS games did that, a lot of Amiga games did that. We've stepped back...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As far as I know, no publisher has bothered to do a study on the topic. However I'd be suspicious that the sales gained by DRM preventing copying are not enough to offset the cost of said DRM. Most companies don't develop their own, they buy an off the shelf one. SafeDisc, Securerom, etc are all products you can buy. Like most things of that nature, the prices aren't listed on the website. However, I'm going to guess they aren't cheap. Most development tools, modules and such for games aren't.
So they would not only have to result in higher sales, but it would have to be by a non-trivial factor to be worth the money. If your DRM costs $200,000, and you only get 5,000 more sales out of it, chances are you didn't make any money (remember for a game to be $50 retail, the publisher is probably getting less than $20/copy).
I think it is just kinda accepted on faith that DRM is worth it by publishers. I've never seen any sort of study from them, or anyone else, showing that yes indeed it does increase sales by an amount significant to offset the costs.
It actually says Windows XP and Vista. I might even buy Spore if it will run on my windows 2000, which I refuse to upgrade to avoid an environment more infested with DRM.
Random example of DRM: The FREE basic spore creature lab fails to start if you have run sysinternals ProcessExplorer before, a quite legitimate program that can be downloaded from microsoft.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
I hope it does.
I sincerely hope (but I realize that it is likely in vain) that publishers one day realize that DRM only hurts your customers, turns away potential customers (like me), and does nothing to stop the pirates.
On the contrary. DRM is precisely the reason the Nintendo Wii homebrew community has taken so long to get a halfway decent homebrew platform working. The xbox 360 has similar DRM. You can't just whip up some code, burn it to a DVD, and stick it in your Xbox or Wii; both systems will only execute signed code.
And, as you've already hinted, downloaded games are DRMed as well.
Console DRM is present. It's just transparent and non-invasive. This is largely because they can control it at the hardware level. However, there is no hardware DRM on PCs, nor should their be.
We only expect our consoles to run games designed for them, vetted by the manufacturer (nintendo, microsoft). However, we expect PCs to be able to run any code from anyone. As long as you can run any code from anywhere, for DRM to even have a *chance* of locking potential pirates out, it must be *very* invasive, and *very* restrictive. As each generation of PC DRM schemes is defeated, the next becomes more aggressive, with more draconian restrictions. And even then, it's never enough -- nor will it ever be. Pure-software DRM can never work. And the sort of hardware-based DRM present in consoles would render PCs useless.
So, that's pretty much why console DRM gets no attention, while PC DRM is a terrible annoyance.
I increasingly lost interest in console game as the game pad evolved. I seriously dislike game pads. The PC interface isn't a joystick, but it is so much more versatile than a game pad.
This is why I was determined to buy a Wii even if it sucked (which it doesn't). I want to promote the death of the game pad.
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
Given that the Mac "port" of the game is little more than Cedega + the Windows version, is there any Mac-specific DRM, or is running it like that fairly safe?
Omnes stulti sunt.
No, they are even free to agree or not if that were the case. There are marketplace realities that might make them want to pursue such an agreement
If "marketplace realities" are that all publishers require digital restrictions management to protect the publisher's investment, the choice is either "publish with DRM" or "don't publish at all". Considering the latter choice might bring the developer under the scope of another law: fiduciary duty to its shareholders.
As most have said already, Spore doesn't live up to the hype, even though it is a fun game to play once.
Most of my issues with the game are in the space age:
1- spaceship battles go one way of two: Either you circle strafe and use missiles (until the AI runs away, you catch up and use lasers) or you start the shields, don't move and use your lasers/bombs to destroy everything. Boy does that ever get fun after the first 100 times.
2-What the hell is up with the keybinds? Every major game that I've played in the past 10years has had customizable keybinds. I just love having to click pages to be able to use 1-2-3-4-5-6 to activate skills before clicking the next page.
3-Micromanagement VS macromanagement. Space is fun until you get more than 7-8 systems. After that, you either need to stop caring for your rep with allies and let ecodisasters ruin your possibly hard-earned terraforming advances, pirates steal your slowly earned spices or enemies retaking systems the second you move out to keep on killing them. It's like you are the only competent person in your empire and you have to worry about the calorie count of every meal of every living being in the universe while trying to actually expand that empire.
4-Regardless of what you chose to do, there'll come a point where you'll want to capture a planet. At about the same moment, you'll realize that you can't effectively do that more than 2/3 of the time because your max-rank weapons 1-shot colonies at the lightest touch of the mouse.
5-So you evolve to a galactic empire but yet you haven't managed to keep track of your planets and their defense/production/population in one central galactic library? Great.
6-I actually had to use 2-3 fingers to use my mousewheel and I'm thinking that on the next game, I'll probably have to watercool my mouse. The amount of scrolling (even with ctrl+ and ctrl-) is just astounding.
7-The AI for the allied spaceships is so nice that even at max-rank, chances are they'll be mostly dead before you even shoot a single missile when assaulting a planet. Spam that AOE repair, suffer the reputation decrease or conquer alone. The choice is yours!
All in all, the minor irritants is what makes me want to change my plan of "pirate first, buy when available" to "try it and forget it". It's just that ridiculous. There's only so many times you can get to a 7 planets empire before going crazy over the overwhelming micromanagement attached. Which is kind of silly for a game that proclaims that you can expand as wide as you care for.
And people wonder what is killing PC gaming? Its the companies that make PC games.
I agree. Instead of using DRM and features that only the most advanced computers can run, try making a compelling story line and fun game play that just works.
Mark me down as one of those "been a computer gamer for the past 25yrs but lately all I play is console games". And mind you, my computer is cutting edge but if I have the choice between a PC version or the Xbox 360 version, I'll pick the 360 every time.
Although having a large HDTV is requirement of this mindset.
From a consumer standpoint, I couldn't care less. It won't actually stop me from enjoying the game, so it's a non-issue there.
From a nerd standpoint, it's not enough to make me upset. I know getting upset won't stop them, complaining won't stop them, and a boycott won't stop them. Asking EA to not use DRM would be tantamount to asking the pacific ocean to get rid of its salt, or asking Obama to stop using the word hope.
"Sins" is a great game, you should at least give it a whirl once.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Geez, consoles have loads of DRM and they require that the disc be in the machine to play. The best of both worlds would be for your computer to have a Trusted Computing module then, eh?
The irony in the parent's story is that "the solution", just buy the XBox 360, is going to a platform that has even farther and harder DRM restrictions. As a DRM platform, the XBox 360 is far more stringent about enforcement than the PC can be at the moment.
So why are people angry about DRM on their PC but not in their XBox 360? It is because the DRM on the XBox 360 is hidden an unobtrusive while it sticks out like a rusty nail on the PC.
This is why ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) are flocking to the super DRM hardened platforms. Although they don't intend to make inferior products, weaker software titles can have an easier time returning invested money back to the producer on DRM platforms than open ones like PC/Mac. Another irony is that we'll see it played out again with Spore if given a chance. A game like Spore which will be rejected or subject to other modifications (*cough*) while on the PC. A game like Spore on the XBox 360 will not offer any option except for buy or not buy. Add to this Gamestop create a cycle where you can buy a questionable game, decide you didn't like it, sell it back to Gamestop for credit towards the next questionable big budget game.
The parent is correct that its the companies that make PC games that are killing the PC gaming platform. They are trying to bend the generic PC platform into something that is like consoles because they see easier money there and not being very successful or graceful about it.
I didn't know Spore had one of these stupid DRM systems.
Now I do, and I won't buy it.
This was one of the games I've been waiting to play for quite some time, so I wasn't too concerned with what type of DRM this game employed, if any. I bought it yesterday and have played about 8-10 hours thus far (day off, good timing).
All I know is that I'm having an extremely fun time playing now that I'm in the space-race portion of the game. If I were someone on the fence about this game, I wouldn't let EA's shitty DRM practices deter me from enjoying this game.
Hell yes!
reminds me of some books I tried to read. I read some amount and just couldn't get into it. I don't care how good that you think the book is, if I can't get into it, then I can't get into it. I am not going to read a book cover to cover just because you think its good. I am just only going to go so far if I don't like it.
No way am I going to endure 8 hours of a game just because someone told me that it gets better once you get 9 hours in. Its either entertaining or I am not going to play it
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I increasingly lost interest in console game as the game pad evolved. I seriously dislike game pads. The PC interface isn't a joystick, but it is so much more versatile than a game pad.
This is why I was determined to buy a Wii even if it sucked (which it doesn't). I want to promote the death of the game pad.
Don't know about more recent consoles, but my PS2 has a USB port on the front. I've plugged a USB keyboard in and you'd be surprised how many games JFW work it.
will Spore sink DRM with the growing popular appeal of Stardocks 10 commandments.
While I respect the attitude that one should stick up for what one believes in, this particular boycott will be futile in the long-run. Quite frankly, Microsoft's XBLA has shown the viability of locked licenses on the XBox 360, and I fail to see why they are not a reasonable business strategy on the PC---just another gaming platform. EA has seen the handwriting on the wall regarding this business model, and the fact that it isn't what PC gamers are accustomed to doesn't matter to them. There's a very real possibility that this will become the de facto standard for the big-name players.
Boycott if you feel it's right. Just be prepared to have that boycott extend to all big-publisher PC games... And then understand that the average user isn't going to care enough to not go out and purchase Madden 2010.
Take care,
Mark
There is a solution...
I've logged... eighteen, nineteen hours in Spore.
I am unimpressed with the Space stage.
Hell, I've been unimpressed with the whole thing. It's just minigame after minigame.
As I've said upthread. I'll give it another go this weekend on Hard difficulty. (Started on easy, have a normal game going now.) I'd really like my opinion to be changed, but I might be too old (mid twenties) to understand these newfangled video games anymore.
Can you tell me what I'm missing?
I only liked the first stage of the game which lasts about 10 minutes. After the first stage it goes downhill.
You cannot make any creature modifications past the second stage.
For its price the game is not worth buying.
I going to play the first stage a few more times and just uninstall it. Spore is not a keeper.
You know, I started seeing those messages yesterday about an hour before Spore went on sale in the stores.
Sounds to me like someone is putting on a protest, and is using Spore to do it.
That will have zero impact on Spore sales, since most (non-tech) people don't give two figs about DRM.
If you want to change DRM, do it a different (and more effective) way than posting comments on a product site.
Bottom line a forced phone home install is bad, very bad. I won't buy any product that does this. Because this is a rental, not a purchase, you are using your product at the whim of the publisher and if the publisher in future decides the game is past profitable, no more installs for you.
If you only play games as the flavor of the moment, this might not be an issue for you. If you actually like to play your old games sometime, it is a show stopper.
I have Total Annihilation installed on my computer. I bought this 10 years ago and Cavedog is defunct. If it had Phone Home DRM, it would be a dead game. I also played Baldurs Gate 2 again last year. The company is still in business, but what are the odds they would still be supporting the DRM server on this one too?
Just look at Yahoo/Microsoft and their music DRM servers. Trying to shut them down even though they are still in business.
Phone home DRM is a plague. It should be fought on all fronts.
PC gaming is already in a fragile state. There is much competition from the Console market...
OH GOD NO GAMING ON THE PC IS DYING YET AGAIN!!!!
Calm down. There is place on the market for several platforms.
Assuming that DRM will eventually permeate every PC game, it could very well be the factor that pushes PC gaming over the edge. ...or people will discover that it wasn't as bad after all, and the alternative (consoles) comes with even more DRM.
With a PC, I have to upgrade my hardware almost every year just to play the latest and greatest games.
Last two years I've bought a new graphics card, and I can play all the newest games just fine.
With a PC, I have to install the game, download updated drivers and deal with software incompatibilities.
Now really, how often does that happen these days?
I sincerely hope that PC gaming lives on but right now it seems like it's fading away.
It isn't. If you count online and international sales, the PC is actually still #1.
Technically there is DRM on most consoles and games. It just doesn't interfere with the gaming. At all. Pop in the disc, and play. Hacking the hardware is usually a bit of a problem, to allow homebrew, but it's been done on nearly every (or every?) system available - either through a mod chip, or through a software exploit (such as the Twilight Princess savegame hack on Wii).
PC DRM is invasive, it interferes with being able to play, and is even more useless than the DRM on consoles (same-day crack - or even cracked before it's released).
It attempts to do many things at the same time, and fail miserably on all but one : make up a new creature. I started a game as herbivore/religious from cell up to space time, and carnivore/warrior to space time. There are few difference of game play during the cell stage, more during creature and tribal stage. For civilisation stage, whether you are a warrior firing cannon or a religious guy firing "prayer" there is really no difference. Maybe the economic gameplay differ, but probably not. Up to now I have not yet started the long space stage. I have got the feeling the 4 first stage is more like a way to set up your creature. An advanced character editor. And afterward you have got a loooong space stage.
It is not a bad game, it was simply overhyped, and really only the last space stage is of note. I won't say it is a BAD game, but neither it is a good one. In 10 years I will remember populous, planescape torment, and other games but I won't recall spore.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I forgot to add, the reason there are so many negative review is more due to the hype and the weakness of the game, rather than true fight against the DRM.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
No, DRM will not kill Spore.
The fact that as a game Spore is boring, has little to no challenge, and the best part of the game was the Spore Creature Creator which you only use for the first part are what is going to kill Spore.
Spore is an interesting concept and may lead to truly fun and interesting games later (especially if there is a way for users to mod it), right now it is basically an engine demo, shiny but ultimately lacking in substance.
-Lifyre
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
As a pirate, I don't ever really have an issue with DRM, if the game is up for download, it already has a no-cd patch available. So, it's a non issue. Also, I agree with some of the posters above, DRM is a major issue when I decide to buy a game or not. If it has heavy DRM, I decide to stick it to the man and just download it, as per usual...
IMO PC gaming will stay strong due to MMOs. Consoles have been trying to break into that market for a while but PCs offer so many advantages for the MMO platform. Given the current popularity of MMOs I see that PC games still are going to be around. I will thou admit that every time I post something like this I normally kinda /facepalm at the idea that there is impending doom for PC gaming but the consoles are, finally, kinda taking over single player games.
Thanks in no small part that DRM on PC games, especially ports, is a nightmare. I recently picked up Mass Effect and it's just awful. Well, the game itself is great but it crashes non-stop. Lots of people try to say it's hardware related but that's a load of bull. When you have a port that has a pretty hardcore DRM system on it it's not hard to figure out why it's crashing so much.
BioWare of course has remained pretty mute on the subject. No real surprise to me but they are losing a lot of good will from PC gamers. How that fact will impact their, and other more stand-alone style PC games, will be interesting. Seeing as how it's more common now to see such games designed 1st for the console then ported to PC rather than how it used to be; the other way around.
I still think that the often cried demise of PC gaming is much exaggerated. However as I said I do concede that consoles, in no small part due to DRM type issues, are making their presence felt.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
To be honest, I'd rather have to do my research on a variety of online retailers (and miss any that were purchased in meatspace) than have to wade through a bunch of astroturf/badmouthing spam. I understand that Amazon wants to be inclusive, but it opens them up to mass attacks like this. Who knows then the b-tards on 4chan will get bored and decide to mass-defame (or mass-hype) some undeserving product.
Now that the spying bill is in place ... (thanks Obama and Pelosi and the republi-Crats she leads) its time to start using all the knowledge gained from recording and sifting thru what each and everyone of us is doing online.
First up, MICRO-PAYMENTS would relieve the world of DRM once and for all.
If the gov't (and corporations because we live in a fascist state since July 9) knows what you are doing why cannot they just pass along a bill for what "content" you have (now legally) "consumed".
Make it fair, say penny a song, nickel a movie, split over all the peers offering downloads on a per-download basis, and even a Comcast "hog" using his whole 250 gigabytes would have only a modest $10 tacked onto his bill for "file sharing".
No, actually it seems to me like you're the one with the basic comprehension problem
Re-read the question in the summary, lemming. Basically a small group of trolls seems to think they're so important that, just because they posted a couple of negative reviews on Amazon, surely either the game will flop or EA will bow down and remove the DRM.
'Cause they're important like that. Someone gave them a browser, and _obviously_ now the rest of the world is listening to every word they say. Why, whole populations obviously drop everything they were doing, and purchase what Random Internet Troll #123456789 told them to buy, and stay away from what he told them to avoid. 'Cause he can post on the Intertubes, see. He's got DA POWA.
That last paragraph is sarcasm, btw.
It's a common delusion these days, sadly. It doesn't work that way.
And at any rate, the GP's post just shows that they failed to make it flop even on Amazon. You know, the site they flooded with those fanboy anti-review.
Could it have sold better? Maybe. But, at any rate, not to fulfill that prophecy that the game will surely be killed by those reviews, or EA will have to remove the DRM. You don't go, "hmm, where did we fail, and what can we fix?" for a game that's the #1 seller. As fanboy delusions of self importance go, that one is an "EPIC FAIL", to abuse that meme some more. Those reviews didn't give anyone even cause for worry, much less make EA bow down.
So, you, know, before accusing someone of lacking critical thinking skills, make sure that you do have them. Because the GP's post was right on target and plenty relevant to the question being asked. Yours is the irrelevant foaming at the mouth. Or were you one of those fanboys, and it's better to throw insults than to realize that the world doesn't revolve around your keyboard?
PS: Don't get me wrong. I don't like DRM one bit. But zealot delusions of self-importance are an even sadder spectacle, from where I stand. Had it merely tried to inform about DRM, it would have counted as a noble goal and effort. But delusions of self-importance like in the summary (""Will an anti-DRM flash mob that's determined to give EA's latest sim game Spore a rock bottom rating on Amazon.com sink the game, or will Spore evolve and shed the DRM? Is this the beginning of the end for DRM-laden games?") are just freaking sad. Anyone deranged enough to think that, needs a life ASAP.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Completely agree. I've installed Starcraft probably 20 to 30 times. More if you count multiplayer "spawn" installs and what not.
(And I've bought it 3 times now. Not because it quit working, but because I lost the discs once, and once gave my copy away.)
Spore is intended as a huge, open-ended game with user-created content and lots of gameplay "meat": the kind of game that should be lasting 5 or 10 years. 3 installs isn't going to work for that for a lot of people. Not just people who upgrade a lot or move around or crash a lot - just regular people who like the game for more than the first year or two - are going to get bitten by this.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I really like these guys...
The Gamerâ(TM)s Bill of Rights:
1. Gamers shall have the right to return games that donâ(TM)t work with their computers for a full refund.
2. Gamers shall have the right to demand that games be released in a finished state.
3. Gamers shall have the right to expect meaningful updates after a gameâ(TM)s release.
4. Gamers shall have the right to demand that download managers and updaters not force themselves to run or be forced to load in order to play a game.
5. Gamers shall have the right to expect that the minimum requirements for a game will mean that the game will play adequately on that computer.
6. Gamers shall have the right to expect that games wonâ(TM)t install hidden drivers or other potentially harmful software without their consent.
7. Gamers shall have the right to re-download the latest versions of the games they own at any time.
8. Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers.
9. Gamers shall have the right to demand that a single-player game not force them to be connected to the Internet every time they wish to play.
10. Gamers shall have the right that games which are installed to the hard drive shall not require a CD/DVD to remain in the drive to play.
check out the whole article at:
http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/?aid=322522
Spore is designed so that the player can start at any one of the five stages. So you don't actually have to play through the first three stages to play the last two.
That having been said, you don't need to enjoy all five stages to enjoy the game, though you might feel a bit gypped. But that's how the game was designed to be like. It's also perfectly reasonable for people to enjoy different stages on different days. If you're tired from work, you might not want to play the last two stages. You might like the simplicity of the first two stages though. At the same time, if you're at home on a weekend bored out of your mind, you might want to spend your time on the last two stages instead of the first two.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FKBCX4/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top "There are no customer reviews yet. Be the first" The negative reviews were closing on 700.
(I'm sure this will be modded down) Seriously, what the fuck is everyone complaining about? Yes, Spore has DRM... but it's not at all as bad as everyone is making it! Yes, it's SecurROM. But what do average consumers have to worry about?
We have proven to EA that they HAVE to put this DRM stuff on their game. Someone fucked up and released Spore weeks early in Australia, and just a FUCKING DAY after the game comes out, there's already a shitload of torrents! Hello? If you want to bitch about the DRM, tell the people stealing the game to stop...
If anyone read about Spore's DRM, here's what it does:
1. Let's you install it 3 times and only 3 times. Yes, this is an annoyance, but it can easily be fixed by simply calling EA. If you ahve that much of a problem with this, get the crack. You bought the damn game...
On the contrary, Spore's DRM is far less worse than even Steam. I don't need to be connected to the Internet to play my game. I tried it, it just says you just can't play online.
Again, people showed EA they need DRM, so stop complaining about it.
(Also I fully support downloading movies or music... but I draw the line at PC games.)
I'll have to go with the GP here. That might be due to my own understanding of hiding caveats, and bait and switch. You noted:
I think the caveats the GP is talking about are indeed serious enough to "run afoul of merchantability statutes", certainly vis-a-vis the "three installs and that's it" condition apparently placed on Spore. Hiding that from people purchasing the game is a grave misrepresentation -- they think they're buying the game, meaning they expect to be able to install it and use it and reinstall it later as needed, for as long as they have hardware that can run it. What they're getting is effectively a rental. Yet the game is ostensibly being "sold" by major retail outlets... That sound like an abusive gotcha to me. (And, incidentally, this appears to answer for the "false pretenses" described by the GP.)
Then we have bait and switch. You noted:
This definition indeed seems to fit what is happening with Spore. The offer is to sell you a cool whizbang game. The switch is that you're not actually allowed to buy the game, for normal definitions of "buy" -- you're effectively only allowed to rent it, due to the three-installs-only condition. And this important caveat is not openly acknowledged in any publisher or retailer description.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
You can contact EA at:
eagamesonline@ea.com
just wanted to say that Starcraft is the best game ever.
As strange as it sounds I am ok with limited DRM. I understand companies need to product their products. However, I have a big problem with the way EA is going about it. They have taken things overboard and won't listen to reason.
That's ok, I will just spend my money else where. I am not going to download it illegally or anything, I am just going to spend my money with a company that appreciates my business.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
You need to input your admin password to change anything in the Apps folder. It's not actually about any DRM. Try it now -- try moving any file or folder on your desktop, say, into the Apps folder, and you should get a request for your admin password. It's Apple's way of trying to make sure that folks don't accidentally bork up their Apps folder without even realizing it.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
One thing about console DRM. Say you want to play a homebrew game, but you must mod your console to play it. Today's consoles break alot of the time when they detect a modification of the console itself. No indie development on consoles without sacrificing also the big name games.
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
...they want their "immunity from criticism" card back.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I was actually pretty keen to buy this game until I read that it was DRMed, I only just found out the restrictions of the DRM used.
Am I going to buy this game? No way in hell.
Am I going to download the game illegally? Probably not.
Is the lost profit from me boycotting the game going to be counted against the piracy column? You bet.
I've stopped buying games that I really wanted, like Mass Effect, because of onerous DRM. I wasn't really planning on buying Spore but this definitely caps it. I won't EVER buy Spore even if they remove the DRM. The same with the aforementioned Mass Effect. I buy about $500 in games every year per platform (PC, PS2, PSP, XBox, Wii). So if you want to honk off your best buyers, just go ahead and keep amping up the DRM!
Be More, Be Manly, The Manly Geek Ubergeek Extraordinaire Blogger: www.manlygeek.com/blog Podcaster: podcast.man
SPORE won't run for me.. Latest drivers (Directx, mainboard, graphics card, sound). Vista.
It is very hard to find help through EA.com
They are doing a terrible PR job with this one.
Well, for my father in law, maybe. When he tries to play the game, he wants it to work, and not give him weird messages about not being authorized for some reason despite having a legitimate copy.
Its not a high-minded anti-DRM stance on his part. He wants it to work. DRM on PC games made it not work for him. So he took his money elsewhere.
I don't want a trusted computing module, but then I'm still here buying PC games (without DRM, because for me it isn't just a practical issue, although the practical side of it is that DRM makes PC games not work more often, which is bad).
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I'm making a comment purely for the sake of making this /. story seem more important. I'm sure there's irony here, but that's completely coincidental.
Spore's DRM is no worse than typical these days, but the scope of this game has the potential to draw the issue out into the spotlight. Of course being covered by Slashdot and Kotaku isn't exactly putting this in the public eye. Has anyone (else) submitted this to CNN?
Right, because there are no studios self-publishing
There are a few, but it's not widespread. I'll run through some of the reasons:
On the consoles and the handhelds, studios cannot self-publish due to the lockout chip. They all need to have the console maker press discs (with DRM).
On Windows, there are several multiplayer genres that don't work well on the 17 inch monitor attached to a typical PC, exemplified by games such as Super Smash Bros. and Bomberman. These games rely on interactions between the console owner and house guests gathered in person, and until more TVs have VGA inputs (projectors and other HDTVs have it; SDTVs typically don't), there really isn't an affordable way to display PC video on a big screen. This drives developers of party games to publishers with access to the consoles, and these publishers tend to use DRM on games for Windows from the same developer that they publish.
On Windows single-player, smaller studios lack the clout to get their products into the nationwide retail chains where their customers are already shopping, such as Walmart* and Best Buy. Without the possibility of impulse buys, sales of E and E10+ titles to children who pay with saved allowance cash, or sales to people without high-speed Internet access, a studio has to put out much more effort to promote to the remaining market. It's possible, as you point out, but nowhere near common.
Well I won't buy it now
The DRM isn't helping, but the biggest problem with Spore is it's a huge disappointment.
I don't know about you, but I played through most of the game in one sitting. I started out as a little googly-eyed bacteria, and got to the space exploration stage. At that point, I got so intensely bored I just stopped playing.
There isn't anywhere near enough variety in the game to keep things interesting. The only challenge is patience, there is no skill involved, and very little thinking. The various creatures are interesting to see at first, but after a dozen races they all start looking the same. It's hard to specialize your critter, because the parts look different but have very similar stats. You can get the fastest legs, the meanest teeth, the strongest arms, all on the same char. There are no tradeoffs.
What's worse is one stage has little or no bearing on the next one. It feels less like evolution and more like 5 mini-games bundled together. Your race's appearance carries over, but the abilities/stats become irrelevant. It is difficult to lose in any phase, and downright impossible in some, thanks to unlimited lives.
I think we all got hyped up about the potential, but reality (EA) came along and made sure this game was anything BUT epic. They probably did this so they can release expansion packs later on, because had they delivered the game we thought we were getting, there would be no room for expansion.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
is to google bomb it and then they will be really f***d ,
N.
Its one of my favorites too. I'm waiting for StarCraft 2. Hopefully, it won't be a disappointment. But so far, it looks good...
This will seem a tad off topic, but in the end Spore really does deserve all those low scores. Its poorly designed, and the "multiplayer" database of species is just a means to get around actually having to put real effort into creating content beyond their normal point and click interface. Sure, the species creation is a novelty - its actually quiet fun. so fun, in fact, that the designers RUSH you past it to get to the boring parts. Starting at Tribal mode, the game just falls to pieces and tumbles down the potters grave of Monotany.
I'm a little surprised that EA is willing to make their customers vulnerable to such a single point of failure. All it takes is some enterprising hackers to crack their authentication server or their authentication method and they will have to revoke all existing keys, depending on their level of automation it might even do it all on its own.
I'd love to see the class action suit that follows EA further screwing every single legitimate customer, 3 activations or not.
Where did I say it did?
Also, absolutely no surprise my comment got modbombed into oblivion by the drooling college retards who spend all day pirating everything under the sun using their broadband connections. You're not opposed to DRM because of consumer rights--you just don't like that it attempts to stop your freeloading.
Incoming modbomb by more retards.
"Sufferin' succotash."
The game has system requirements. Those requirements state Windows. How can somebody complain that something doesn't run properly on a system that is not in the system requirements and get +5 Informative?
"Sufferin' succotash."
ok, my bad , i forgot its adults here for a moment, mea culpa, dont shoot me
(and if you do, clean up the mess...)
Man, how could you possibly forget that the folks who post on Slashdot are adults?
*looks around at the posts, drops the filter threshold...*
Erm, never mind...
Bow-ties are cool.
The trend is towards cd keys which are verified during a central server during install. Some are doing the checks semi-continuously while the game is RUNNING. This is dramatically worse than the current solutions. It means that the computer must be hooked to the Internet to play the game (screw you laptops!) and even worse, when they bring down those authentication servers a year or two after the game launches, you'll NEVER be able to play your game again. In fact, nobody will.
The goal here is to kill the aftermarket GameStop is making so much money on. Fuck you resellers!
Personally, I'm making it a point to help crack games that use these schemes, even if I have no interest in the game at all. Game companies who go out of their way to screw their customers this way don't deserve to make a dime. If cracking and pirating their game drives them out of business, GOOD. Maybe their employees will end up working for a better company.
Get some perspective. This is DRM, not world hunger. Find something more significant to worry about than whether or not a game is copy protected.
Spore comes with drm? who would of known. I haven't been inconvenienced by any drm while playing spore. I was inconvenienced for a whole 30 secs after I installed the game and before playing it though. I had to copy over some file for some reason. But drm? no haven't seen any in spore yet. Maybe I can create and evolve it with the creature builder?
With a PC, I have to upgrade my hardware almost every year just to play the latest and greatest games. With a console, I just buy a game for my console and it's guaranteed to perform decent because the game developers develop specifically for that hardware.
No you don't. Truly you don't. Just don't pick the most graphics intensive title every time. Or better yet, DON'T buy the latest and greatest. Take a look at the bargain bin. Also your upgrade to your PC benefits you for other things - be it office documents or coding, picture editing etc. Consoles mostly don't do that at all in standard configurations. (I'm sure someone will tell me about running gimp on their PS3 or some such nonsense but it's not easy or standard)
With a PC, I have to install the game, download updated drivers and deal with software incompatibilities. In addition, most technical support departments are awful at helping users with these issues and more often than not leave them to fend for themselves. With a console game, it just works out of the box. ...or not at all. When a game's got a glitch it may be impossible to finish it, or even get very far in it. With a PC game there's a good chance you'll get the patch. Sure it's more hassle because game publishers come to depend on patching on the PC but would you rather more hassle to download a patch or to be stuck with a brilliant game that falls short due to a bug that wasn't caught in testing. As for compatibility issues, it's gotten much better lately. Stick with standard graphics (NVidia and ATI) and a fairly common sound chipset and you'll do just fine. Software incompatibilities? Well yes, but I've got a box with a few dozen high end titles and no conflicts so far. Just keep the thing relatively up to date.
I can play a console game on as many consoles as I wish but it can only be one console at a time. I can only play a PC game on a certain number of PC's and after that I have to go through a time-consuming, annoying process to make my case to get additional activations.
Only if you buy games that have activation or other mindless DRM. I am an avid flight simmer but I'm on MS Flight Sim 2004 and not FSX for exactly that reason. MS can keep their activation schemes. They're BS. All PC games are using this kind of mindless DRM only because it's being accepted. However there are a few places where games have been hard hit due to DRM madness. For example take a look at what happened to Lockon Modern Air Combat thanks largely due to Starforce copy protection: I can't even find it in stores anymore.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Right on.
The thing that gets me is that PC games are almost an afterthought to most companies. Take for example, the latest Rainbow six series. The controls are designed for simple console control. The number of keys required to command complex squads are too many for the console so they just don't have them. It's much more action packed rather than strategic. Take also, Assassin's creed. The control is also obviously made for a console. I feel dumb, really dumb, playing these games. They are fun, button meshing games, but not much more than that. PC games are now PORTS of console versions whereas years ago it would be the other way around.
No pussy for YOU!
I, for one, do NOT welcome our DRM-laden game overlords.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
DRM is extinct.
Everyone has said what I wanted to say.
FREEDOM!
Freedom from all tyrants and oppressors!
DRM is evil.
There was one game like that on the PC: Portal. A modern game that has great story, great gameplay, hilarious humor, and limited DRM interference through Steam. Granted, I played it on the Xbox 360, but, Portal doesn't require the most advanced computer to run it.
Isn't it interesting that a game about the proliferation of life could be killed off rather quickly by a simple computer virus? As highly vulnerable as most PCs are today, limiting the installation of anything is nothing short of foolish.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Is it just me, or are a large number of the people writing the Amazon reviews hypocrites?
As far as I can tell, you must have PURCHASED a copy of Spore via Amazon in order to review it. I cannot believe that the majority of these people are vehemently opposed to DRM, but then didn't bother to check the numerous sites that have indicated for MONTHS that Spore would include online DRM. Sure there may be a few people who got caught, but not the 400-500 1 star DRM related reviews.
So basically it seems they are saying "Sure, I got my copy, but nobody ELSE should enjoy this game cause EA should be punished. Of couse I don't have the balls to actually not buy & play the game myself...I'll just try to convince all you other poor saps to do so."
If you don't like DRM, don't buy the game. Don't be a whiney crybaby & try and convice others to support the values that you lack the convictions to uphold.
Of course I could be entirely wrong, maybe there is some weird backdoor that let's you write a review without purchasing the game. In that case, I have a whole other set of issues with such a "review".
PeerGuardian
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
I've actually finished the game (as much as it can be) so I'll tell you this. You've missed the best part of the game. The cell phase is fun, but too limited. The creature phase is OK. The tribal phase sucks and the Civ phase is way too simple. But the space phase is fucking amazing. However it does start a little slow. I felt like the game was rushing me through the other phases to get to the space phase, then when it got there it suddenly slowed way down. But once you get a decent variety of tools for your ship it's all they promised.
It's only 25 minutes for DMC4, it'd different for different games. Oblivion also has a 5GB install but is practically instantaneous.
Depends on how you use, or where you have your console. In the living room, you'll probably want a good sized screen, but if you're like me and have Linux installed on your PS3, you'll have a desktop style setup with a smaller screen. 19" for me.
I can play all sorts of "homebrew" games on my PS3 and I can still play the big name games:
It's quite easy to run the GIMP on your PS2 let alone the PS3. The default PS2 Linux kit install comes with a 1.foo series GIMP. (Though I eventually had GIMP 2.4.5 on mine) The install itself if reasonably user friendly, a pretty standard RH 6.foo style from what I gather. I had no Linux experience at all when I installed it on my PS2. It's even easier to run it on the PS3 since all you need is install media, it's got to be one of the easiest Linux installs a person can do. I had Linux on my PS3 within 12 hours of buying the thing.
As you said, it's not standard though. They said it was going to be, but changed their minds on it.
Console DRM is present. It's just transparent and non-invasive.
It's important to make the distinction between copy protection and Digital Rights Management. Copy protection is a method of verifying that the application being executed from the installation media is valid and authentic, not a copy. Digital Rights Management, while perhaps affording this functionality, is really about controlling when and how you can use the application regardless of whether the media is authentic or not.
IMHO, what consoles implement is copy protection or more specifically, code signing. All applications created for consoles must be digitally signed so that the digital signature can be verified by the hardware. If the check passes then the code is allowed to run.
This is certainly not the same thing as the DRM in Spore, Mass Effect and Bioshock. This DRM actually limits the number of installations and requires communication with an activation server which may or may not be available for future installations. Code signature verification, on the other hand, does not require communication with a server on the internet and should always work. Also, many DRM schemes include a kill switch where the application can be remotely disabled and may even only allow the application to run during a certain time frame. That's why a lot of people don't like DRM but have no problems with copy protection. DRM is much more draconian than your average copy protection scheme.
I can certainly understand the frustration of having to jump through a lot of hoops to circumvent the code signature verification somehow to get home brew applications to run but I think it is understandable why that copy protection mechanism works the way it does. I just wish the console makers would be more community oriented to encourage third party development of applications for their consoles and offer signing services they can use. Who knows, they might even be able to buy out some great home brew projects and make a lot of money from them.
We'll make great pets
I agree, I love the PC but all this DRM bullshit is turning me away. A high end GPU from Nvidia or ATI costs more than a 360 or PS3 all so that I can play one game and that is Crysis? That does not include the cost of the CPU,RAM,power supply,hard drive,etc. PC games and genres are also starting to get stale. If its not a console port, it will be either an RTS,MMO, or another FPS or combo of the 3. Nothing stylish or easy to get into like stuff on consoles. Make a game like Uncharted for the PC, or Soul Calibur but better on the PC. Unfortunately, PCs and the annoying DRM is downright clunky and doofie.
I purchased Spore and I have a MacBook Pro for gaming that runs Mac OS 10.5 and Vista 64 bit. I chose to install it under Mac OS and have had no problems.
My optical disk drive is toast. I had to install from my fiancee's drive from targeted disk mode. My Spore disk is never, ever, in my drive. I have not had Spore complain once.
(I know its a little late in the game to respond, but, I haven't seen any crippling DRM; but, they probably just didn't think about crippling the Mac version).
I was actually very happy the game included both PC & Mac versions all for one cost.
(Of course, I've posted this so late no one will read this comment.)
[insert witty comment here]
I purchased Spore and I have a MacBook Pro for gaming that runs Mac OS 10.5 and Vista 64 bit. I chose to install it under Mac OS and have had no problems.
My optical disk drive is toast. I had to install from my fiancee's drive from targeted disk mode. My Spore disk is never, ever, in my drive. I have not had Spore complain once.
I was actually very happy the game included both PC & Mac versions all for one cost.
[insert witty comment here]
So I actually went out and bought this. This is the first PC game I've bought since Guild Wars...
and I can't play it. My legit copy refuses to believe I'm online in order to "verify ownership."
To top it all off, it's now been over 36 hours since I contacted their support, still with no answer.
If they want people to put up with their shit, they better at least suck up to us. This will be the last EA game I ever purchase, which is saying something because I work for a company that releases games under EA. At least our QA team actually lives up to their name.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall
With your opinion which is of no consequence at all
I've been thinking about picking up GalCivII, and this may be the time to do it.
As long as Spore is a DRM infested mess (and from the sounds of it, not all that great a game) I could go get a game that has no DRM, from a company who cares about it's customers, and from the demo I played way back when should be quite enjoyable.
Hate to say this, but I've actually installed apps using drag-and-drop. Of course, I'm running with a full Admin account, but the point is, I can drag anything into the Applications folder without being prompted for my Admin password. In fact, I just did this earlier this evening. And I'm running the latest version of Leopard (10.5.4).
Tried it again just now. Nope, no admin password. Not sure what your settings are on your Mac, but on my MacBook Pro, the behavior you describe is not the case. Conclusion: do not assume that the admin password is merely required to alter the Applications folder.
I can already tell you that I installed the Spore Creature Creator, and it did a heck of a lot more than create a subfolder in Applications; I can see another folder, /Users/-loginID-/Library/Preferences/SPORE Creature Creator Preferences/p_drive/User/Application Data/SecuROM/UserData
That folder contains 4 files: readme.txt, securom_v7_01.bak, securom_v7_01.dat, and securom_v7_01.tmp
The thing I want to know is, what else got installed on the system, and where. And what background processes is SecuROM spawning that are being cloaked from view?
A friend of mine has a Mac Pro, and he installed the Creature Creator; he reports seeing some rogue network activity that he could not identify, when the game was not running. That's definitely of concern!
Despite your clear ability to get a copy of the game, you're worried that you wouldn't be able to get a copy of the game you paid for at some indefinite point in the future, which justifies you not paying for a copy of the game in the first place.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
This is a terrible story for 2 parties - legitimate users who simply wanted to play Spore and couldn't because the activation servers went
down and EA because Spore was cracked even before it was released.
Often developers walk a tightrope with the trade off between protection strength and the degree of impact on legitimate users but this was a failure
on both dimensions! Is this really what the publisher wants to 'accomplish'? Why not use a solution which is friendly to honest users, has no impact on development time and the strongest available protection against crackers - see our whitepaper
http://www.byteshield.net/byteshield_whitepaper_0005.pdf.
Christian Olsson
ByteShield, Inc.
http://www.byteshield.net
I just spent my last mod point and then someone makes the best post ever, damnit. :(
No you don't. Truly you don't. Just don't pick the most graphics intensive title every time. Or better yet, DON'T buy the latest and greatest. Take a look at the bargain bin. Also your upgrade to your PC benefits you for other things - be it office documents or coding, picture editing etc. Consoles mostly don't do that at all in standard configurations. (I'm sure someone will tell me about running gimp on their PS3 or some such nonsense but it's not easy or standard)
With a console, I DO buy the latest and greatest title and I can be 100% sure that it will work perfectly. Without having to worry about specs. Ever. Also, if I upgrade my graphics card, arguably the most critical gaming component, it does exactly zilch for my office documents.
When a game's got a glitch it may be impossible to finish it, or even get very far in it. With a PC game there's a good chance you'll get the patch.
Oh PLEASE. When was the last time this happened with an even moderately mainstream game? 1979? When there's no way to patch a game, developers and publishers will make damn sure they get it right the first time. Whereas on PC, you get shit like Hellgate.
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
All this recent fervor over draconic DRM in PC games is missing the point. I play tons of games but buy very few, the creation of Gamefly and Blockbuster before that have always provided a better value for single player games that I am only going to be playing once. Laws restricting resale of software have been around for as long as I have been buying PC games and it always meant that you don't own your PC titles, merely the right to use them. What I want to see is bulk licenses sold to rental companies that allow for temporary keys to last a prearranged amount of time finally allowing people to try these titles with out having to make large nonrefundable purchases. Without some arrangement whereby I can rent a game I am forced to download a copy to try it out and once I have a copy on my hard drive... well it has to be a very good title for me to purchase.
I don't intend to spread conspiracy theories but couldn't it be possible that EA like everybody else are fully aware that no matter how much protection they put in software, they will always be pirated given they are popular enough? And there will be more or less the same people that download a pirated version regardless of the game. Could it be so that EA is in fact counting on the pirates to continue their business and that EA in the name of "justice" release this DRM to milk the consumers, that actually pay for it, even more?
As I said, it might sound like conspiracy but think about it, is this the first time (or even one of the first milion times) that copy protection fails to work? I don't think EA employees are idiots, they just work for a greedy company. But who doesn't?
I am the lawn!
I haven't had any issues with the game phoning home. In fact, all 9 computers that I recently tested to determine whether I was able to reinstall the game, have no issues. Then again, maybe I should just keep my freakin' mouth shut, prior to there being a fix that will resolve this issue?
Go back to playing WoW, and browsing 4chan ya freakin' trolls.
Well, at least the latest trend doesn't consist of F.P.S. , MMORPG games.
THANKFULLY!
Will Spore exterminate DRM?
Spore is just another Black & White. Lots of hype, lots of "innovation this" and "brand new that", and not a whole lot delivered.
You are right, I've no idea what it costs. For reference, the Unreal Engine 2 costs $350,000 plus 3% of revenues on a game. Now granted that is a whole engine, and thus likely to be pricey, however it is also a generation old (Epic doesn't publish UE3 costs, they just say to contact them). Now on the other end of things, the Miles Sound System costs just $3000 to use, no royalties of any kind. So there's a huge range in what a tool for a game can cost and I've no idea where copy protection comes in on that scale. My guess would be on the high end, since publishers are the ones that buy it and they have the money. The MSS can't cost too much or the devs won't be able to wrangle it out of the publishers to buy it, they'll say "Just write your own sound code." However since publishers think copy protection schemes make them money, they are more willing to pay for it.
As I said, no official numbers, I'd guess probably because the pricing is highly discriminatory (ie you pay based on who you are, what your project is, etc) but who knows? Only info I found is someone saying that they charge about $0.20 per copy sold, not including one time license costs, but who knows how accurate that is? I'm sure it also varies based on who you get it from, and how invasive a version you want. Normal disc based SecuROM is probably cheaper than the new disc + online SecuROM.
With a PC, I have to upgrade my hardware almost every year just to play the latest and greatest games.
This is bullshit perpetuated by trolls and people who think if it's not running on the highest settings at at least 100fps then it's not worth running at all.
I bought my machine in the summer of 2005, and aside from an additional hard drive (which I barely use), I haven't upgraded a single component. 3.0GHz P4, 1GB RAM, an nvidia 7800 GTX. Runs Crysis playably (>20fps) on medium settings. Plays TF2 and the HL2 expansions. Plays assassin's creed (if you don't mind minor NPCs having three fused blocks of fingers). In fact, I haven't seen any games it wouldn't run yet, although it's starting to get to be that time.
So by my reckoning and the fact that Windows, well will behave like Windows and need resintalling several times a year, I will run out of SPORE installs in about 4 months then! Nice!
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
so, you're saying a console isn't a form of "rights management" i.e Analog rights management? Console were made because people are too dumb to compute properly.
"Will an anti-DRM flash mob that's determined to give EA's latest sim game Spore a rock bottom rating on Amazon.com sink the game, or will Spore evolve and shed the DRM?"
Doubtful on both counts. I'm an indie dev who writes games for the iPhone app store. I'm excited because my app just hit 86 reviews after a month and a half in the store. Spore Origins had 86 reviews by dinner last night. Slashdot will get excited about this, some folks on digg will get excited about this, but the rest of the world will see Spore commercials on their TV, drive to Best Buy, and buy a copy. It sucks, but the majority of the people don't care about DRM either way until it is actually messing up their life.
After a bad experience with the Starforce DRM that was included with my copy of X3, I've avoided DRM protected games until the publisher or the developer removed it.
I have been playing and collecting PC games for the better part of 15 years. I have stacks of manuals, boxes, and CD's that inhabit many areas of my house.
Over the course of 15 years, many of the CD's such as Total Annihilation or Seven Kingdoms II have worn out or broke from being dropped or scratched or run over with a car(Ask me later.) I create burned copies of every game I own and I use the burned copies to play the games. And yes, sometimes, to create that copy, I have to circumvent copy protection software. But I don't create the copies to spread through the internet in a splurge of piracy. I create a copy so that 15 years from now, I can still play Civ IV if I want to and I won't need to go diving through the discount bin at Walmart to find it.
After the DRM Atari put on NWN2 I promised never to buy another game from them. It irritated me to no end that I needed to keep the damn DVD in my laptop's hard drive in addition to the required network authentication if I ever wanted to play it. It incensed me that I only found out about their DRM policy after purchasing it.
It's very nice to hear about the DRM on Spore before making the mistake of purchasing it. I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO CRACK A GAME I BUY TO MAKE PLAYING IT CONVENIENT.
On that level, door locks, bank vaults and body armor don't work either. There is always a way around a protection mechanism.
Your analogy only works if, as soon as someone first picks a Master Lock Model 72365-A3, every other lock of that model in the world unlocks, and as soon as one person finds a weakness in body armour design UBA-3X4C5/6A, every other body armour of that type simply falls apart.
No, I know it's not *quite* that simple, but it approaches that. DRM isn't like a physical lock because it isn't required to carefully examine every single copy of a game locked with that DRM scheme and carefully hand-craft a one-off crack. Once {Insert New AAA Game Here} is cracked once by someone (or some group) who does this all the time, possibly even for money (directly or indirectly), everyone in the world has the opportunity to download the crack and the game, or just the cracked version of the game.
So you are correct that it will deter many casual pirates, especially if it is itself unobtrusive, but no, DRM does not work anything like a door lock or a suit of body armour.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Snail Mail:
Electronic Arts
209 Redwood Shores Parkway
Redwood City, CA 94065
Telephone:
650-628-1500 - Redwood City
310-754-7000 - Los Angeles
Semi-relevant EA Representatives:
Jino Talens, 650-628-9111 (Publicist)
jtalens@ea.com
Scott Gamel, 650-628-7286 (Senior PR Manager)
sgamel@ea.com
Tammy Schachter, 650-628-7223 (Senior PR Director)
tschachter@ea.com
There are probably even better ways to contact them. The more venues used to inform them that their DRM schemes are unacceptable, the better.
has just over the course of a lunch break removed all the Spore reviews. From being a low scoring game its now got a single review with 5 stars.
I cant believe that all the reviews contravened the posting guidelines as most seemed well thought out. I just hope people put them back again.
Bad job Amazon.
While I agree with the overall message I have to disagree with
With a PC, I have to install the game, download updated drivers and deal with software incompatibilities. In addition, most technical support departments are awful at helping users with these issues and more often than not leave them to fend for themselves. With a console game, it just works out of the box.
With a PC, you can download updates. With a console game, it should just work out of the box.
Console games often ship with bugs in it that you are unable to fix because of a lack of harddrive and update mechanism. On platforms where you can update..well.. they can go back to intentionally shipping early broken products and patching later on PC making it moot.
It's really up to the company. I know if I had bought Diablo 2 as a console game.. well first off I'd likely have to bust off my old dreamcast(assuming I didn't sell it) just to be able to play it now. In addition to that, it would still be the exact same content I beat years ago.
Since it's a PC game by a good company, if I were to install it right now I'd have the latest content patch which makes the Hell stages infinitely more challenging and completely changes the replayability. If this is to hard for me, I could opt not to update.
Someone I know played Lineage a lot some years ago.
Recently bored with WoW, he returned an old favourite only to nearly drop that one as well, until he got himself a bot.
Now he's playing non-stop, trying to figure out the best way to configure the whole thing, and not get caught; literally, he's playing a different game, bot-ting, that just happens to have Lineage as a context.
He's even thinking of joining a bot-ting clan
Last night he was playing two (bot-ted) characters on Lineage, tinkering with Sims 2, AND trying out Spore, all at the same time! The last two he ditched within an hour.
He kind of wishes that there were servers on which bot-ting was "legal" so he could enjoy "the game" even more.
THE REAL PROBLEM with Spore DRM is not the 3 installs only rule, but that fact that you can only link ONE Spore.com account to any game "key" despite the manual stating otherwise. You also can't install two keys on one PC. In essence, this means that if I want to have my own game profile separate from my wife (and in a game like this, who wouldn't?) then I have to not only buy ANOTHER copy of Spore, but I have to install it the 2nd copy on a 2nd PC! Families who want to play this game and only have one PC are in for a RUDE AWAKENING, and I hope they all band together and class action EA to death! False advertising if I ever saw it, since the manual states you can have more than one account per copy of the game. Nope! It's basically sending the message that if you want a family friendly gaming environment, you MUST buy an Xbox 360 with its well done and even simultaneously tracked/loggwed in multiple accounts. Something no other console can match. It sends the message that you should not game on the PC unless you are a loner single. If only the IDOTS at EA had made this into a Games for Windows - Live game, the DRM complaints would be far less because MS would have REQUIRED the ability for multiple accounts to be able to be signed in an play the game from one PC!
I was going to buy this game, but the restrictive DRM, and the relatively bad reviews have put me off totally. It is sad because I was looking forward to 'purchasing' the game. Unfortunately I will not buy a product if my ability to install it is restricted in anyway. I frequently rebuild my computer, and due to some development work I also wipe and regularly reformat my system. I do not mind the online authentication such as Stardock uses, however I do mind the limitation on the number of installations. The other issue is with the reviews, many of which report the game as quite lacking in area's. I probably would have still purchased the game myself, just to see what it is like, but the DRM issue has totally killed that option dead.
This is a lesson we have to learn over and over again. The more unnecessarily difficult you make it to get something enjoyable, the more likely it becomes that a black market will rise up to supplant the regular one. This is why alcohol prohibition failed, this is the reason that cigarette taxes haven't risen further, and this is the reason that the current drug war is more harmful than the drugs themselves.
People don't like to have to jump through hoops for their entertainment. From the consumer's perspective, this is a dominance game that says "I'm going to make you suffer just because I can." If people can get their entertainment without jumping through the hoops they consider themselves the victor in this struggle. This is why "sin taxes" are usually counterproductive. This is also why so many men cheat on their wives.
Personally I'm disappointed that they've ruined the game for me, but I'm glad that EA decided to do this with Spore. If DRM like this can completely wreck sales of the most anticipated game of the decade, it might teach the industry a lesson. I, for one, will not be giving EA any of my money this year.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
Though I'm skeptical of any impact it will have, I popped an email to Spore's head PR person explaining how excited I was about Spore and why I will not be purchasing the game (nor pirating it), but that I'd love to pick it up if they weren't so consumer-unfriendly with the DRM. Here's the contact info I found:
Games Label PR Contacts by Product/ Franchises
EA Partners, EALA & Blueprint (Spore, LMNO, Red Alert 3, Mercenaries 2, Rock Band, Crysis, Left 4 Dead, RAGE) * Bryce Baer, Director (bbaer@ea.com) * Amanda Taggart, Manager (ataggart@ea.com) * Nikki Flynn, Publicist (nflynn@ea.com) * Andrew Wong, Manager (anwong@ea.com) * Devin Bennett, Senior Publicist (devinb@ea.com)
This lunchtime I was considering getting a copy of Spore. Saw two important things in the window of a games shop before I went in to put down my cold hard cash : firstly the price (35GBP ~= 43EUR) was more than I was willing to spend for a little light entertainment ; secondly, a notice that an internet connection is required to play (when I have time/ energy/ inclination for games, it's because I don't have a connection).
So, the game is DRM'd to the gills?
Oh well, it's back to CIV for DOS then. Oh dear, what a pity, never mind.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
..for me at least. I couldn't play for more than 5 minutes without it crashing fully. I tried the patches, I tried different gfx drivers, sound drivers, even a 2nd computer. It crashed EVERY.SINGLE.TIME. Then I got a PS2 and it hasn't crashed once. I haven't looked back since. I loved computer gaming since my VIC-20 and C-64 days.. and never had a console then. But it's just too much a task to get PC games running. I JUST WANT TO PLAY THE GAME and not spend hours troubleshooting.
-Copyright law #69:Whenever Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain,copyrights get extended by 25 years.
I'm writing to tell you how displeased and disappointed I am in EA's decision to include DRM in the game, Spore. Normally, having to spend $50+ dollars on a game and having to always keep the CD handy and inserted for game play is annoying enough, but from what I'm reading on many sites, your DRM limits the number of game installs and installs itself as a root kit and is impossible to uninstall without wiping out Windows and all my data. What's wrong with you people? Do you seriously think all of the people that buy and play your games are thieves? Apparently so. I read somewhere that the Spore DRM was already hacked and bypassed so all you are doing is punishing honest game players with invasive/deceptive software and treating us all like criminals. Hey people, the criminals are playing the UNPROTECTED HACKED version of Spore for free while I am deciding NOT to pay $60 for Spore because of the DRM. Do us honest people a favor and get rid of the DRM, lower the price of the game, and maybe turn a few game pirates into honest people for a change. You are just shooting yourselves in the collective foot (as it were). My 7 years son is now VERY sad because I told him the game wouldn't run on our PC or the PS3 we own. Had you released the game for the PS3, I'd happily shell out $40 for it. I'm sure the 10+ million (or is it 100+ million) other PS3 owners around the globe would too. Just answer me two simple questions. 1. Are your executives THAT incredibly stupid? 2. Can I have a job as an executive because I am more than qualified to make these incredibly bad decisions. Thanks for not listening (which I'm sure you're not). p.s. I wonder if the creator of Spore wanted to spend six years developing a game than only a handful of people would play because a game publisher/distributor is greedy and stupid? I'll probably never know.
If it isn't on Steam (or any electronic distribution system that's equal or looser in DRM than Steam), then it isn't worth my time and money.
So... Spore isn't worth my time, nor money, and that's it. Pretty simple.
Maybe EA will wake up one day and smell the coffee on how modern PC game distribution works.
Interesting. I speak purely from Tiger experience, as I do not have Leopard. Shame on me -- I simply forgot about Leopard, and that defaults there might be significantly different.
And what you describe might also help define serious warning flags for installing non-system software under OS X -- if it requires more than just copying a folder into the Apps tree, there may well be something very undesirable happening.
Caveat installator.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Will an anti-DRM flash mob that's determined to give EA's latest sim game Spore a rock bottom rating on Amazon.com sink the game, or will Spore evolve and shed the DRM?
No and no? The first 1 ranking I saw raised an eyebrow, then as the anti-DRM zealots started rolling in, I immediately identified their bias and readily discounted their opinions as not being valid. I'd accept knocking the ranking down a couple numbers if the DRM were intrusive (maybe it is maybe it isn't, but you'd never know given the agenda these guys have). Since a 1 ranking just means people are zealots, it has little bearing to how good the game actually is. As for the second No, EA went through the process of adding DRM for a reason. Evidently they think the tradeoff of making their game harder to copy vs. unpopular opinion with the geek-crowd is ok.
Would love to see the Spore fans slam Corey Doctorow's book ratings on Amazon as payback to his fanboys who are slamming the game based solely on the DRM.
Ballmer: Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!
DRM/Daleks: Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!
There's a joke in there somewhere.
Spore sounds interesting, but seems just a tad too close to "Sim Evolution/city/whatever".
What do I know, eh? I still fire up Serious Sam or Max Payne 2's Dead Man Walking mod for wanton destruction (no thinking involved, other than "run awaaaay" from time to time.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Just play console games instead. That way:
(1) Nobody can accuse you of having a pirated copy.
(2) The games work without having to spend pointless hours of your life installing/reinstalling, updating drivers and jumping through DRM hoops. I can't speak for everyone, but I bet if I put a cost on the time I used to spend getting games to work it would have been more cost-effective to buy a console and enjoy myself instead. I'm never going to get those hours of my life back!
(3) You'll be able to play other games for years to come without having to shell out more cash for hardware upgrades.
(4) It will encourage devs to put more effort into making console games better.
(5) Probably other good reasons, but you get my point - it's just EASIER!
As someone further up said (not a direct quote): vote with your custom.
Illiad covered this.
DRM is a cost effective solution for a games software company. They contract Securom or whoever, pay the fees, and the deal is done.
The fact is, DRM is frustrating enough for those who dont have the knowhow to get around it to end up increasing sales. The software company knows it will be cracked, but even if the DRM isnt circumvented widely for a couple of weeks they have made their money back on the license fees 10 fold.
I don't have neither the game or the OS to try, so does this still work? The simple rundown on how it works is pretty obvious - it just creates an empty DACL and applies it to the PROCEXP100 symlink in the object manager. When the app is done, it just resets the DACL to the original value. I included a "reset" switch as well just in case something happens and you need to reset it manually.
Increasing the install limit from 3 to 5 is easing on restrictions??? What kind of idiots do you think we are?? I was really really awaiting the release of Red Alert 3. I had it on pre-order. I have just cancelled my order. EA, you're going to have to do WAY better than that if you ever want any of my money - I will now be strengthening my protest - I will not buy another EA game unless its good and has no DRM.
Just boycott the entire product line. The commotion with Spore seemed to get through to them enough to get a response. We need real action, not number changes. Boycotting a game isn't enough for them - well, lets boycott the product line. They can go screw themselves - that's what they seem to want to do. I am sick and tied of being treated like a criminal. No more. C ya EA. We will meet again when you next release a good game without DRM.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Most amazing to me is the fact that the distribution sector doesn't know they are selling a product that will not work after 3 installs.
I visit 3 stores and mention to them what will happen if I bought the game and it didn't work and all three pointed to me that sorry open software can't be return :_( UNLESS defective - Now I ask does it being unable to install qualify as defective... The answer was... YES ?:D
So I take my 50 dollar game home, install it in my desktop and laptop and then take it to work and put it in my computer at work... :(
IF any of those systems crash!!!! I am unable to reinstall the game Spore
side point: I am not sure but I heard Spore is becoming the most illegally downloaded game of all times!
It may also become the most return because of defect game of all time :(
You see... Many places will not give you your money back but will give you store credit or a copy of the same game... So what will happen (unless there is a CD-check as well) is that people will install the game 3 times on day one and return it on day two... It look fair because
"Sorry my CD is not working is defective and it doesn't install"
"Hmm I see you bought it yesterday I guess it is defective... Here have another copy"
You are not lying because the CD is truly NOT installing lol
AND that way at least you have an extra CD with 3 more install for when your computer crash or you update windows to vista or if your Laptop dies, witch it will, every three years the day after your 2 year warranty runs out :(
I am NOT recommending to do that JUST thinking of what could happen