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 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
If you read the EULA, EA owns your creations. You only get the rights to use them as they see fit.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
My understanding however is it actually limits the number of installs your allowed to do. EVER. I can't play it since i'll be outa the country for a bit, but when I do I'll be picking up the game and installing whatever crack is necessary so I never have to worry about this 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
Supreme Commander was a case where the developers were forced to ship games with Securerom, but they had no requirements placed upon them about removing it via a patch. Since that was the case, they abided by the letter of the law and then immediately stripped it off.
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'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...
The game was release Feb 16, 2007 and the no SecuROM patch was released on March 5, 2007. That wasn't as short as I had thought, but then again its not as long as you had claimed either.
I installed on OS X last night. The installation was a piece of cake, though it does ask for your root password to install (for the DRM, I'm sure). The only things I noticed with regard to DRM were a few small notes in the manual and readme file, usually along the lines of "you have to be connected online to play." Otherwise it seemed fairly transparent/hidden.
I'm not happy with the DRM but decided it wouldn't affect my usage patterns much. Should the time come where I do need to reinstall it more than the DRM wants, I'm sure I'll be able to find the "unofficial patch" to allow it.
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.
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 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...
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.
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.
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.
Sadly, Spore does not come anywhere close to this. The best parts of the game are the Cell stage and Creature Creator... and that's not really saying a lot. [TL;DR version of this review at bottom.]
First off, the cell stage plays almost exactly like flOw, so if you've ever played that game, you already know what this is like. You can try it out here for free.
Next is the Creature stage. You design your creature using very limited DNA points, and the most basic body parts, and then you go out into the world. This stage consists of avoiding any creatures tougher than you [Which is most of them.] and befriending or killing any creatures weaker than you, then doing this while looking for bones laying around on the ground. [Finding bones gives you additional bodyparts in the creature creator.] Killing creatures consists of clicking on them until they die. Befriending creatures consists of repeating a song, dance, charm or other emote, and doing it several times in a row. If your creature sucks at social things, you won't be able to befriend much of anything. Basically this stage is grind grind grind grind to find bones and kill things/befriend things for DNA points until you have the parts you want, and the brainpower needed to advance to the next stage.
After the creature stage comes the Tribal stage. Here you can change the outfits on your creatures to add to their gathering, hunting, or social skills. You spawn more creatures out of a hut, up to a maximum of 12 [once you've conquered a couple other tribes.] Once again, you can do two things: Conquer a tribe or befriend them. Befriending them is essentially the same as in the creature stage, except that you need to build musical buildings to give your creatures access to musical instruments so they can repeat what music the other tribe plays. The combat is essentially summed up as: click on an enemy and wait until he dies. If you die, respawn more creatures at your hut and do it again. There are no strategies involved beyond equipping your creatures with different weapons. [Axes, torches, or spears.] The difference between these weapons is pretty negligible, and don't really add to any strategies or tactics.
Once you've befriended/killed 5 other tribes, you move onto the Civilizations stage. Here you have a city where you add a couple buildings to change how happy your citizens are, or how much money you produce. You can also add turrets. You are also given 1 type of unit for each unit type, for a grand total of 3 different units. You use these to capture spice mines around the planet, or other cities. You can capture a city economically, religiously, or militarily. Economics involves buying the city out, religion you target unhappy cities and convert them, and with military you right click on a city and select 'capture city'. That's really about all there is to this stage. The AI generally doesn't defend itself.
Finally you get to the space stage. You're given a spaceship and told to go plant a colony on another planet. This stage has the most gameplay in the game, by far. But it has one incredibly annoying drawback: Every 3-5 minutes, [Literally. Sometimes even more often - I used a watch.] you will have one of your colonies attacked by pirates, unfriendly aliens, Grox, or you'll have to go and deal with ecological disasters on friendly alien planets. Typically the game tries to force you to do several of these all at once. I found myself going to an allied planet to stop an ecological disaster, only to find that my homeworld and colony are under attack by aliens. This stage would be fun if it weren't for these kinds of constant annoyances. Overall the gameplay for the space stage is similar to Star Control, though in my opi
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]
Have you actually played the game, or just done extensive review reading?
Cell Stage: Resembles flOw indeed, except the way you design your cell has impact on your tactics, both short and long term (flOw doesn't allow you to equip yourself with poison glands to kill off anything that chases you).
Creature Stage: Designing your creature right will give you special abilities such as sneak, spit and charm - the limitied DNA currency forces you to make tactical decision - the fact that you don't know which parts you'll find to unlock means that even two tactical powergamers with the same ideas will not necessarily breed creatures with similar skillsets. That fighting is simply boiled down to clicking your target repeatedly is just plain false (or how you would play if you don't know any better, cause yes - it's an option).
Tribal Stage: Are you deliberately excluding the shaman staff, that turns units into healers, from the equation to benefit your conclusion of weapon choices being insignificant? Also, the fact that axes are good vs. living things, whereas torches are good vs. buildings is not tactically unimportant. Personally, I rarely use the spears, as most of my creations have been inately able to shoot (which along with various degrees of sneak capabilities and flying are other ways for the creature designer to have impact on gameplay). I've managed to complete tribal stage with very few casualties, so zergrush being the only tactics is just plain false.
Civilization stage: Grand total of 3 different units is just plain false. You can reach 9 different units if you control both military, religious and economic costal towns (I've personally had 4 active types at once - economic and military versions of both ships and airplanes). That the AI doesn't defend itself is false on Hard difficulty. The vehicle designer actually affects the properties of your vehicles (I like my military vehicles sturdy and full of firepower, while my economic vehicles are fast and with good capacity, but frail).
It just dawned on me that I actually might even think you're able to create a fast military aircraft in one city, and a slow, powerful one in another... but that needs some checking up.
Space Stage: I haven't played Star Control. Basically, I must agree that the constant attacks are a nuissance. The space stage has a lot of potential, it's just too bad that I'm constantly too busy fighting stuff off to actually check out that potential.
Basically, I'm under the impression that some 60% of the actual depth in this game is lost on you.