EA Responds to Spore DRM, Faces Lawsuit

Article by Devin Connors

EA has responded to the backlash against Spore and its SecuROM DRM by increasing the number of activations allowed for the title. But now EA faces a lawsuit on behalf of angry gamers.

http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2008/0 [...] m_lawsuit/

Good to hear that they are responding to the pressure and viewing the game as a success.

Off-topic, Rob, I was wondering if you guys could use the PC as the review platform on your reviews of multi-platform games. I'd like to read your opinions on recent games, however every time I open a review I see that it's been reviewed on an Xbox 360 and I almost immediately disregard that article.

I don't mind you guys doing console reviews, but seeing as this is a PC-centric website, one would think that whenever it's possible you'd be doing PC game reviews, instead of choosing the dreaded thumbsticks.

Exactly to the point; people crying about DRM and then asking for more activations or less limits/whatever is an absolutely baked-out way of thinking, for exactly the reason you stated.

I think there is a huge misconception about what/how DRM works and why/why not to be worried about it; to say the least if anyone was concerned about DRM, then they shouldn't even be THINKING about installing a DRM-enforced game today, tomorrow, next week, or next year for that matter because they will always be stuck with the DRM whether they like it or not, and whether its activation is patched out or not.

well... u know, people pay alot to stop virus and spy get into their system. that why norton make so much $$$. its easy stop virus get into your system if you careful, but its extremely hard to clear em out once they do. not one anti virus program can clean em all out, and your system may go down for days.
by that reason, why would you want to put spyware into your system?? to just play games?? the game that you pay for?? does EA pay any damage due to DRM??

spyware aside, do you trust EA enuff to call them once install limit is reach?? i'm lazy guy, there no way i would spend hrs in customer support listen to their music. in my eye "case by case" meaningless, because that mean there no standard policy how they give you more installation.

there alot of title i want to buy from EA. Civ, SIM, RA3 etc.. but guess last game i buy from EA would be warhamma online (no DRM). i dont think downloading is right thing to do, but last thing i can do is vote with my $$$ and EA aren't getting them.

I love the "Misunderstanding" part. That has to be the understatement of the year! This EA guy is the equivalent of the Iraqi Information Minister, when it comes to perception versus reality!

I tried installing on my virtual machine and the game wouldn't run due to the graphics card not being DX compliant. At least with all my virtual machines a generic video driver is used regardless of the actuall video card you are using. You may be able to get around that but seriously if that's the lengths you'd have to go to in order to pirate a game then I think piracy would be seriously slowed.

If the VM uses the actual GPU, then I would guess it probably uses the entire real hardware profile rather than a generic one. In that case the game would detect it as a new system and stop working. Once again maybe there is a work around to this but if piracy were reduced to having to use a different VM for each game I think that alone would stop alot of piracy.