EA Loosens Up Spore DRM, But is it Enough?

Early last week, I posted about how Spore’s asinine DRM protection wasn’t paying off. After all, despite the fact that Will Wright’s game has become a relative masterpiece, for the past two weeks it’s been best-known for being the “game with DRM”, which isn’t good at all. It was immediately found out that gamers were none-to-pleased, and who’s to blame them? Not me, as I’ve made clear way too many times.

Well as surprising as it may be, EA has heeded the call of their customers and decided to lighten up the harsh restrictions the game carried. Instead of being required to call EA after every three activations, they increased the count to five, which they consider to be way more than enough. According to their internal statistics, only 0.4% of Spore gamers have tried to activate on more than three machines.

That in itself is valid, but the fact of the matter is, the restriction shouldn’t be there in the first place. If you boot up to play a game, you shouldn’t feel like you’re being watched over, especially after you paid for the game with your cold-hard cash. What’s ironic might be the fact that the people who aren’t dealing with the pesky DRM are the ones who’ve downloaded the game off of torrent networks – the non-paying customers. The paying customer sure has reason to feel special, aye?

All that aside, what is important is this quote: “If we were to ever turn off the servers on the game, we would put through a patch before that to basically make the DRM null and void“. Good to know.

While these movements into less-restrictive DRM are nice, the game has already lost quite a bit of momentum, not to mention good will. Gamers made this displeasure clear by carpet-bombing Amazon.com with one-star reviews, and the install limit of Red Alert 3 has also been receiving negative press. Even worse for PR, the name Spore now has many negative connotations, very few of which have anything to do with the game, aside from the install restrictions.