Spore: More piracy because of copy protection?
Spore: More piracy because of copy protection?
The copy protection of EA's newest hit, Spore seems to cause what it should have prevented in the first place: illegal copies.
In the time from September 1 to 11, the game was illegally downloaded 171,402 times via peer-to-peer transfers, according to Big Champagne. The Chief Executive of this aforementioned peer-to-peer research firm, which published those numbers, stated:
This is a very high level of torrent activity even for an immensely popular game title.
On Amazon, the game has received 2413 reviews. 2,163 of these are "one star", mostly because of the protection system. Here is one of them:
This game is great, but I will not purchase it, and you shouldn't either.
Does that mean that all the people who like this game will download their copy to play it? It seems like it. Anyway, Mariam Sughayer from Electronic Arts defends the system:
We simply changed the copy protection method from using the physical media, which requires authentication every time you play the game by requiring a disc in the drive, to one which uses a one-time online authentication.
This is not entirely true, as DRM only allows you a limited number of installations. After these you may not install the game at all, which means you cannot use or resell it.
What is your opinion? Does an unfair system like DRM justify the download of an illegal copy, which is an illegal act? Is it like stealing bread? Or should people just boycott the game completely?
[ Via Forbes.com ]
verbesserte deutsche Version?
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You don't own a game that you can only install 3 times. You do own one that you can install as often as you like. One could even call EA the stealing party... I bought Mass Effect in spite of the stupid copy protection, and I'll probably buy ME2, but I'm definitely not going to buy anything else from EA if they keep this up. I really don't understand how EA can't see that they're hurting their own sales, and that pirates don't care the slightest if paying customers are harassed by DRM or not.
I can faintly remember times when you could make a full install of a game, without even having to enter a CD-key, and then play it, end of story. Nowadays, it seems that you need to download a pirated copy for the same experience. But I suppose it's always easier to blame the other guy... ;)
Speaking of bread, I'm hungry.
Just on a side-note: With ever growing numbers of legal downloading portals like Steam or Direkt2Drive, you should make sure that you differentiate between "downloading" and "pirating".