As many I have been eagerly awaiting Will Wright's new game, "Spore". Since its unveiling at GDC 2005 the media has been buzzing all over each new bit of information about it. Curious, because the "unveiling" itself was 30 minutes long and it only seemed to scratch the ear of the beast.
It was, without a doubt, the most ambicious videogame I have ever heard of.
(I am considering those games I believe will be finished, not some newbie Wow-killers or anything ridiculous as that. Those don't usually leave a sheet of paper or a couple of text documents.)
Then, the Creator Creator demo came out and amazed a huge amount of people due to the weirdness of some characters, the likeness to other well-known ones or even the insane amout of Spore-made penis monsters. The term "Sporn" was coined around these few days. Maxis must be having a blast trying to stop those from populating the other players' galaxies.
Then I had the luck of being in the portuguese lauch of the game but I don't usually pay more than 30€ for a game so I didn't buy it. I'll save my speech on game prices for some other time. Anyway, I have been talking to some people who bought it and reading online reviews and checking Amazon and this was what I found:
I tried to understand why this was happening. While some people were raving about it, a whopping lot of people were giving it negative reviews.
Well, it seems the copy protection sistem included with the game is really, really agressive. You have to connect to the internet during instalation and you only have the permission to install it 3 times. 3. You paid full price for a game that will evaporate rather quickly.
Some people are defending that you should buy the game if you really want it and then download a copy without those protections and play it as you wish. Other people are saying they should simply boycott it and leave it in the shelves. The most otpimistic say you should buy the game, don't open it and then return it saying the reason is the horrible copy-protection system.
These measures are making me think twice about buying the game, even when it gets to the 30€ price tag which is a pity, I wanted this game to have the success I believe it deserves. Why couldn't this happen with the next WWII shooter?
These are sad times.
The people who atually buy the products still have the "YOU WOULDN'T STEAL A CAR" ad thrown in their faces when they try to play their movies or go to the movies and gamers have measures that stop them from playing the games they bought or even slowly destroy theyr machines. Remember Starforce? Excuse me while I throw up, I shouldn't have thought of it after eating.
[edit:] These polls say a bit more about DRM than I did. If you want to know more about this subject, check this out.
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Spore: Is piracy justified?
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3 comments:
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/09/p2p-wins-battle.html
I didn't read the article, but there was this one sentence that captivated me:
"Piracy is habitual, cultural and convenient."
I find those anti-piracy campaigns a big fat joke. Sure it's only fair to pay to those who made the products, but it's like trying to scare a child with the boogeyman's story, when she's used to cartoons with monsters.
I was never got by the Spore hype. Whoever, their campaign was...interesting. In Porto, I managed to collect two free postcards with Spore's advertising. I never saw any other videogame hand out postcards.
But that security system is ridiculous, in the sense that if I format my laptop frequently, I'm throwing 30€ away because I can no longer install the damn game! So it's spreading online, on torrents, etc, what is the problem? There are still those who pay for your products, do you still need to torment them with these useless protection plugins that only ruin the fun?
Same thing with Adobe. They released a mandatory patch that broked the all copies of their software, so no pirated copy would work, but soon, even those who paid more than 2000 euros for the software bundle suffered the consequences, and wasted precious time trying to install the damn thing!
I agree with the "buy the game, then return it due to incompetent extra software installed" strategy. They need to be aware that you can't toy with costumers just like that.
Double-posting, but what the heck. You mentioned StarForce, and I found this:
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3148721
"Our primary weapon to fight piracy is through rewarding customers through convenient, frequent, free updates. If you make it easy for users to buy and make full use of your product or service legitimately then we believe that you'll gain more users from that convenience than you'll lose from piracy."
And from a irc channel:
"that's the annoying part about DRM; it doesn't stop things from getting pirated; and the pirates remove it; it only inconveniences legitimate customers"
At the first day of the semester, i was talking with a friend of mine, and i asked which games he played in the summer, and in the middle he said spore, and the next thing i asked was : "You know, you can only install 3 times the game", and then "Really ?, the crack for game was released right after the game release"
A HUDGE LOL!
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