Spore backlash!

Scott Airth — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:24:30 GMT

10 years in development, and it seems Spore doesn't quite deliver in the final product.

It's a pretty sad story as Spore is a great concept, and for the first time in a while my attention was actually drawn to a game due to it's uniqueness and potential. For a hardcore gamer a little over 30 hours gameplay is not much return in change, and will leave you slightly disappointed with the lack of depth in the game despite its several stages of evolution to complete.

What's more surprising is the once again badly thought out and poorly implemented DRM that's wired into the game. Does anyone seriously think this is a good idea? Pirates will (ironically again) have the best copy of the game free of this DRM and play it how they wish, whilst a paying customer can quite easily be frustrated and locked out of a game they paid with their hard earned money! DRM might seem a good idea on paper but I've yet to see a version that's acceptable and would rather see the idea consigned to history that allow companies to install various rootkits or any other software activation just to prove I've bought something.

Such a decision has actually spurred on quite a backlash, where angry gamers have been deliberately rating spore 1 out of 5 on amazon leaving it sitting at around 1.6/5 in overall rating, surely enough to deter the casual gamer and make them skip over this title

I'm a developer too and naturally I would like to protect my IP, but some things are just taken too far when your legitimate customers are the ones who are suffering most. EA are not exactly in my good books having swallowed up most of the good game developing talent in the world in the last 10 years, and they see fit to churn out the same games with updated squads for an extortionate amount. I hope some common sense returns to this world before the PC gaming industry goes the way of the dodo.

- Scott

Signals company blog - DRM

Spore backlash!