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Spore

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Matthew J

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Unfortunately they did what I feared they would do - The appearance is just that, appearance. No matter how you design your creature - its actual abilities are determined simply by the combination of body elements you use.

What were you hoping for?

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  • 2 months later...

I haven't played it yet but it seems like EA put so much ridiculous DRM on the game that people are pirating it instead. You only get 3 'activations' of the game before you have to contact EA and ask for more. I understand trying to protect your IP, but people have already broken the security measures anyway and treating your customers like thieves doesn't seem to be a good approach. I compare it to a store owner strip-searching all the customers on the way out and then forgetting to lock the door at night so people come steal things instead. Piracy is legally and morally wrong no doubt, but treating your customers like shit to discourage piracy when it's ineffective anyway doesn't seem like the morally correct thing to do.

Look at the Amazon reviews, over 2,000 1-star ratings and most complain about the DRM.

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I understand trying to protect your IP, but people have already broken the security measures anyway and treating your customers like thieves doesn't seem to be a good approach.

I've never felt like I was being treated as a thief when I bought a DRM-ed product. This sounds more like the issue; people "feel" like they are being treated as thieves rather than the company actually treated them like thieves. If a person has a problem with DRM, their response should then be to not buy or steal the product if the DRM issue is important enough to them that they can do without the product.

People seem to constantly forget the power of the consumer side of the equation. No buyers, time to change the product.

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I haven't played it yet but it seems like EA put so much ridiculous DRM on the game that people are pirating it instead. You only get 3 'activations' of the game before you have to contact EA and ask for more. I understand trying to protect your IP, but people have already broken the security measures anyway and treating your customers like thieves doesn't seem to be a good approach. I compare it to a store owner strip-searching all the customers on the way out and then forgetting to lock the door at night so people come steal things instead. Piracy is legally and morally wrong no doubt, but treating your customers like shit to discourage piracy when it's ineffective anyway doesn't seem like the morally correct thing to do.

Look at the Amazon reviews, over 2,000 1-star ratings and most complain about the DRM.

But most of their 'customers' are thieves!

I mean, I don't know if it's normal for 50% or more (i.e. most) installations of a piece of software to be pirated, but it wouldn't surprise me, and I'm sure that happens in many cases.

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Piracy is legally and morally wrong no doubt, but treating your customers like shit to discourage piracy when it's ineffective anyway doesn't seem like the morally correct thing to do.

Uhm... having to log on to the internet every 10 days is "treating your customers like shit"?

Tell that those MMORPG gamers, they have to log on every single time they want to play!

Those who complain have very little respect for the company that produced the item.

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Uhm... having to log on to the internet every 10 days is "treating your customers like shit"?

Tell that those MMORPG gamers, they have to log on every single time they want to play!

Yes, but this isn't an MMO game. This is a single player game. MMO games, by their very nature, require you to log in to operate, as the content is online. Someone who buys an MMO game expects to play it online, and will have a regular internet connection. This, however, is a game that could very well be played single-player, running all content from the hard drive, the only purpose for logging in is to check up and make sure you haven't pirated the game. For someone who isn't going to pirate the game, it's merely an inconvenience, but for someone who doesn't have an active internet connection (think someone in Alaska, or living way in the boonies), it's a complete game-breaker.

That said, my personal beef has nothing to do with the login aspect, as I, like many, have a reliable internet connection. The game-breaker for me is the 3-installation limit. If the game has ANY lasting power whatsoever, it will be installed over and over again, as I upgrade and/or format my system (or if I w ant to run it on my laptop as well as my desktop). Even the MMO Games that you cite don't have an arbitrary installation limit.

This is perfectly within the rights of EA, but it's also within my rights to refuse to purchase. Having to call a company every time I want to re-install the game is enough to convince me from purchasing it.

Edited by Chops
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This is perfectly within the rights of EA, but it's also within my rights to refuse to purchase. Having to call a company every time I want to re-install the game is enough to convince me from purchasing it.

That's a game breaker for me too. I don't want to call them to re-install. It's quite a big file is it not? I might have to take it off a lot to save room for other things.

I actually thinks this makes more people want to pirate it then it is preventing them from doing it.

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I should clarify that the problem I have isn't the concept of DRM per se, it's the way EA is implementing it. They are making it an unnecessary hassle for the consumers who want to buy the game legally when it has already been pirated. I understand that it's well within their legal power but I'm not going to buy a game where they can take away my license after I reinstall the game twice. I'm not willing to put up with that. If other people want to deal with it then they can. I won't.

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So you accept the extra effort / inconvenience if it is needed for the program to operate but you don't accept it if you think it is unnecessary?

Like I said, the internet connection thing isn't a game-breaker for me, but it unquestionably would be for someone who's just looking for a fun single-player game without an internet connection. The game-breaker for me is having to call when I want to re-install, which is guaranteed to happen (In the 9 years it's been out, I've probably reinstalled Quake 3 something like 15 times). I value my time enough to not be willing to put myself through that.

Why don't you simply compare what you get with what you pay for?

Single player games and MMO games are incomparable. With a single player game, you get the game, you play it. No extra connections to get content, no required patch downloads. None of that. With an MMO, the content is online, you pay additional fees for the bandwidth of running centrally maintained servers.

When comparing Apples to Apples, and you have the choice of purchasing a game that 1) allows you to re-install without hassle, or 2) requires you to call customer service and wait on hold for 45 minutes before explaining why you are re-installing (after all, it's totally EA's business that I just got a new hard drive), frankly, I'll choose option (1) - there are plenty of games that don't require it.

My upgrade cycle is between 9 and 12 months. Upgrading either a motherboard or hard drive almost always means re-installing Windows. Which means that a little over once a year, I go through a re-install cycle, reinstalling pretty much all the games I MIGHT play over the next year. If I had to call to re-install every time, there's no way in hell I'd do it.

I actually thinks this makes more people want to pirate it then it is preventing them from doing it.

It does. It inconveniences only the legitimate user - the pirate already has the DRM deactivated, and it's not like they deactivated it themselves. We all know how easy it is to download popular software from piracy sites.

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  • 1 month later...

I have it, I like it, (here it comes) but, it's not that amazing. It takes aspects of many genres in gaming and simplifies them to the point that a preschool child would beat them, and it's so obvious that the game is built around the fact that it won't really be completely fun until and unless all the expansions they have planned for it come out, and you buy them, much like The Sims franchise. If you bought the 10$ creature creator I'd say that's about as much fun as you'll have in the game at present.

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But most of their 'customers' are thieves!

I mean, I don't know if it's normal for 50% or more (i.e. most) installations of a piece of software to be pirated, but it wouldn't surprise me, and I'm sure that happens in many cases.

According to industry wonks, piracy regularly pushes the 90% mark over the lifetime of the game. I think it's lower (I have no idea where the numbers came from, sorry, it's just a routinely quoted figure), but I don't have any hard evidence to support that.

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