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September 9, 2008
Anti-DRM Riot Sweeps Through Amazon Spore Reviews
I’ve been waiting around for Spore for a while, same as everybody. I’ve slowed down on game-playing over the past few years, and I really don’t like to buy games for computers, but Spore strikes me as the fulfillment of what I was hoping for but didn’t get when SimEarth and SimLife came out. So if I’m going to buy one full-price computer game anywhere close to launch time this year, Spore’s the likely candidate.
I paid a visit to Amazon last night, not sure I was quite ready to order a copy but wanting to double-check the required specs. It was hard to miss the review summary:
Zoiks! An average rating of one star? 1,600+ reviews? I thought it was a bug until I looked more closely.
Most of the low reviews are coming from people protesting the DRM scheme Spore’s publisher’s using. It limits the number of copies a user can have installed at one time, evidently has some unfortunate behaviors on multi-user systems that make playing in the same setting difficult or impossible, and people claim that hardware changes can trigger a need to reactivate the game. If a user goes through the three allotted installations, then a call to Electronic Arts is required for a new activation.
There are a number of other claims I’m not repeating here because I can’t confirm them on short notice and would tend to move EA out of the realm of “overzealous” and into the territory of “malware distributor.”
There’s a lot of complaining back and forth among Amazon’s reviewers over whether the presence of a restrictive, potentially harmful DRM scheme should factor into a review, and whether or not people who don’t even own the game should be crapping all over reviews of it over that issue alone.
Having lost multiple hours of my life to Adobe’s crummy copy protection, I’m inclined to say DRM matters, and it affects the way I think about software.
Being on deadline and staring at a copy of Adobe CS3 that won’t work because its copy protection is responding to something its support technicians won’t even admit to as a potential problem is really, really frustrating. Heck, it’s irritating to deal with the known issue, which is making sure no other users are logged into the machine before trying to run anything in CS3. If I’d known it was that persnickety, I might have taken a pass and figured out something less feature-packed but also less twitchy.
That doesn’t even take us into the issues surrounding the way DRM is commonly practiced, which seems to involve making sure that some part of your computer is placed out of your control and hidden from you. Some products leave stuff behind when they’re uninstalled, which opens up the possibility of users ignoring security advisories for things they thought they got rid of that are vulnerable through whatever the uninstall process left behind.
So I’d say the riot currently going on in the Spore reviews performed a useful service for me. I want to read more about how Spore’s DRM works, whether people are reporting problems elsewhere on their computers after installing it, and how obvious it is to get rid of all the software it installs if need be.
And none of that addresses how efficacious the protest going on even was. We can look to Amazon for answers on that, too:
Oh.
Well, they tried.
(Link)
Posted by mhall at 3:59 PM | Add Comment
"Most of the low reviews are coming from people protesting the DRM scheme Spore’s publisher’s using. It limits the number of copies a user can have installed at one time, evidently has some unfortunate behaviors on multi-user systems that make playing in the same setting difficult or impossible, and people claim that hardware changes can trigger a need to reactivate the game. If a user goes through the three allotted installations, then a call to Electronic Arts is required for a new activation."
Just to clarify it does not limit the number at any one time . When you purchase this title (Mass Effect as well) you get 3 activations . That means that you could install on 3 seperate machines however uninstalling does not recover an activation . Reinstall/upgrade your OS and you burn an activation . People are not claiming anything as far as the hardware is concerned it has been confirmed by EA Maxis and Bioware that hardware changes will burn an activation on these games . They and Sony (who develop and own SecuRom) refuse to divulge what changes will trigger an activatio to be used , there are reports that adding Ram , installing a second harddrive , physically reinstalling your existing graphics card , installing a new monitor , adding a new cooling unit will all trigger an activation to be used up .After your 3 activations have been used you must contact EA support who will at their discretion provide you with ONE new activation . You will need to do this via email (one Mass Effect user has been waiting 40 days for a response apparently) or telephone (international number for any many people ) which after 30 minutes on hold will have cost you about the same as the game did in the first place .