Spore DRM

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I would put more faith in microsoft still handing out activations for software in 10 years time than in EA Lets face it they are still releaseing patchs for xp 7 years after it came out. Their system is ANNOYING, but I dont feel that its likely to collapse and dissapear when I want to install it again, I dont feel at all nervous about getting new installation codes for xp anytime soon despite how old the product is. (I do find it damn annoying, and I think it shows a lack of respect for the value of their customers time) I do however have a great deal of difficulty believing in long term support from games companies, which churn out new titles and new versions constantly.

Ive already been stung once buying a piece of software online, which I could just download and reinstall whenever I want, 3-4 versions and a take over later on and guess what? I can no longer download or install the software I paid for, I have a copy of the file backed up but each time you install it, it needs a new code (different code every install), which you could get nice and easy on line - but not anymore... If I brought a physical disk and the software didnt include a nasty bit of DRM that support was dropped for I would still have access to that software.
 
When everything gets heavy, i troll a bit. Don't get too mad you guys, this is the Gaming part of this forum.

I LOVE SECUROM !!!! On, other people PCs.

SPORE is in the list with Bioshock and AC. I want to buy the game, but i utterly refuse to buy something that is that mined.
I have suggestion for your folks !! FREE DOWNLOAD !!!

Come to the Dark Side.
http://www.playdeb.net/available_games.html
 
I'm skipping this game. Similarly to how I passed on Mass Effect on the PC. SecuROM DRM is just as bad as intentionally installing a virus on my computer. Sorry EA, you probably better rush to get that game out to the consoles to make your investment back.

It makes me wonder if you can create "SecuROM sucks" creatures with the game creator and then release them out in the game world...
 
Who exactly are they protecting themselves from with this draconian DRM? Spore was cracked and released on BitTorrent days before the actual release of the game. All this DRM was a total waste and does nothing but annoy their legitimate customers. They're treating the people who buy their games as potential criminals, while having absolutely no impact on the people who download pirated versions. It's ridiculous.

You're not buying the game, you're renting it. The only people who own their copy are the ones who pirate it. Genius.
 
There is another solution that people here are overlooking; unofficial "patches", if you know what I mean. I use them with pretty much all my store bought games. No DRM, no activation or install limits, no hassle and no disc juggling.

Ideally, I shouldn't have to do this, but that seems to be the only way to remove whatever DRM is used, and to own what I paid for without being under the mercy of some publisher to let me play my own damn game.

Either way, I won't be buying Spore as it does not interest me at all.
I also usually don't buy games with extreme anti-piracy measures such as this in the hopes of sending a message to the developer/publisher, but if this type of DRM gets adopted by everyone (hopefully not), then it's going to be hard not to buy some games because of this, which is where my above suggestion becomes especially useful for people who are unwilling to deal with this type of DRM.

 
I would put more faith in microsoft still handing out activations for software in 10 years time than in EA
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Why? EA has been around just about as long Microsoft. You could even argue that it's more likely that EA will stay in the game industry longer than MS will in the OS industry (while a longshot there's long been discussion of MS wanting to move away from Windows as it's key product). The only real difference is in the length of life cycles for games versus an OS, but even that has been skewed mostly due to XP being around so long. The norm for MS OSs has been about 3 years, which is roughly the same for a video game. So if you buy an OS in about 3-5 years it will be outdated (XP is the one rare exception). So it doesn't really bother me if a game that I buy may not be supported or usable in 3-5 years. It's basically the same for a console.
 
being giving a limited amount of unquestioned re-installs of something that you have under limited terms to me is fine enough
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Now it is here where all hell brakes loose. At least in my country. Saying there is a limited amount of installations to any software, removes it self from that category. Software in my country (games in this matter) fall in the same category of movies and music and so forth.

By law, you can impose Licenses, but you MUST give a way to REMOVE the license from the computer. And By the LAW of MY COUNTRY, i am possible being coerced to buy a second license of the same product in the future. The you got Privacy and Private Data law hanging in there if the were to install any Warden program. If ANY decent lawyer pick this i gues sthey can find several loop holes to pursue successfully more aggressive DRM.

Don't come talk to us like ToS (Terms of Use) or Eula (End-User License Agreement) are over the Constitution or the copyright Law. Now, one thing is for sure, i am not an American. You guys are screwed. Law makers, politicians and lawyers are brain washed by the presence of the mighty dollar.
 
Purp.... MS has proven with Windows XP that they will provide, with little hassle, the needed activation code. Their support is about the best in the industry and say what you will about their ethics overall or their product quality, they do a great job supporting their OSs.

I am by no means a Microsoft fanboy and I cried foul when the activations for XP were revealed, and I still dislike it intently, however, MS has shown through their actions that they are true to their word.

EA on the other hand has always had notoriously bad customer support and service. They have demonstrated through their actions a complete disregard for customer satisfaction and proper treatment. Just ask anyone for whom Direct2Drive flaked out on. Their technical staff haven't the foggiest clue what they are doing and have no drive whatsoever to achieve customer satisfaction.

Lastly, if I truly had a choice for an alternative OS that I could run all the games I want to play on, I would not be using Windows. The fact that such an alternative does not truly exist forces extra leniency on Microsoft's behalf.
 
Agree with radnor.

ToS, EULA or whatever other legal agreements are found with the product ARE NULL AND VOID, since you are only presented with them AFTER opening the product, which makes it impossible for the buyer to return it if he does not agree to the terms.
It's also the same with this limited activation/installs crap, unless it says so CLEARLY ON THE BOX, where it's visible BEFORE having to open or use the product, they have absolutely no right to impose license restrictions, and it is within the buyer's rights to seek ways to remove such restrictions.

Well, this is at least in countries where law actually makes sense and serves its purpose to protect the people.

 
i don't know why i defend this but it just seems people seem to think things should be as they want it because they are the buying public. there are three choices as the public, don't buy it, buy it, or complain and try and get it changed
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Those used to be the 3 choices, now there's a 4th choice. Pirate it. And this addition of a 4th choice is what's causing all the commotion these days. Now I don't support pirating games, I think it cheats the developers out of well deserved money for a product they created. But this is the reality of the situation. Piracy is not going to go away so long as games are released for PC's. It's impossible to stop it, and any attempts at stopping it are only going to aggravate people who really did buy the game.

The only solution is to offer something that a pirated copy can't, and most of the time this is online functionality. Almost all pirated versions of games cannot be played online, and unlike DRM which is bound to fail, this online functionality can be protected because it relies on the game communicating with servers the developers own and control. The only way to circumvent it is to prevent the game from communicating with those servers, which also prevents the game from being used online.

I'm not going to pay money to be treated as a suspected criminal by the very software I just paid for, and if that means I miss out on some games like Spore then so be it.
There is another solution that people here are overlooking; unofficial "patches", if you know what I mean. I use them with pretty much all my store bought games.
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Problem is by using one of these 'patches' you lose the ability to go online with your game.
 
Their support is about the best in the industry
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Honestly I'm not very well up on which companies offer the best customer support. My opinion on MS was always that they weren't that great if say Joe Schmoe called with a question about why something on his PC wasn't working. But the activation process is pretty simple although I wouldn't call it customer friendly. I wouldn't even consider it customer support. You just call an 800 number, get and automated system to speak a code into and if that doesn't work you get somebody how barely speaks English and you have to spend 5-10mins repeating sequences of numbers. It's certainly not what I would consider good customer service and it is somewhat of a pain but it's fairly simple and works. That's all EA needs to do with it's activations, just make it simple and work.
 
i've done that process about 10 times with microsoft and not once does the automated part work lol. <heavy middle eastern accent> here is your new product key sir!

anyhow... idk what spore is. i'm too busy with WoW to worry myself with anything less then starcraft 2 or fallout 3.

as far as DRM goes... i learned to hate it when i was using (trying to use) netflix to watch movies and tv shows through my computer to the tv... 90% of the time it would say something about drm and yada yada and the only thing on their support page would reference resetting DRM which would not work.

and this points out just like somebody already said, DRM makes a huge hassle for people who are paying for services and games... and people who pirate the same stuff don't have to put up with that
 
EA will never learn, every game that has DRM has been cracked, so why continue to punish paying customers.
If a someone wants to pirate it they will, no DRM will stop that.

I will skip this game just like we have done with Crap Effect (Mass Effect), not going through the hassle of contacting EA support and begging them for the right to play a game i PAID for.
Mass Effect still has the 3 limited installs and it doesn't look like they will change that any time soon, they know its been cracked but they continue to piss gamers off by keeping the worthless DRM that causes more problem then its worth.
EA will do the same thing with spores.This game was cracked before it was released in the US.

They will never know how many people pirated this game, downloading the torrent file doesn't mean the person downloaded it, most of the time people give up waiting for it to download and cancel the whole thing.
I don't feel sorry for EA one bit, they bring this on themselves, flooding the market with buggy games and not supporting games like they should, they always want to charge us for the littlest thing they make for a game. (look at BF2/BF2142 booster packs, new maps should be in patches for free instead of charging us for it)


 

Not necessarily so.
I actually haven't experienced any games not working online with a valid CD key.
A couple of games off the top of my head that work just fine online are Crysis and GRID (doesn't use a key, but works regardless). Spore, as long as we're on topic, is also reported to work just fine online as long as you're using a valid key.

 
as far as DRM goes... i learned to hate it when i was using (trying to use) netflix to watch movies and tv shows through my computer to the tv... 90% of the time it would say something about drm and yada yada and the only thing on their support page would reference resetting DRM which would not work.

and this points out just like somebody already said, DRM makes a huge hassle for people who are paying for services and games... and people who pirate the same stuff don't have to put up with that
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Actually I think Netflix is a great example of DRM done right that benefits both the buyer and the seller. I love the "Watch Instantly" of Netflix and have never had an issue with it's DRM. Without such DRM you couldn't even possibly have such a service. Yes there are both cases where it can cause issues and it can be cracked, but as long as the majority of customers are unaffected and paying it works great for both the consumer and the seller.
 
In a somewhat related topic, apparently you can now get all of unreal including UT3 on Stardock's Impulse and they are pulling in more and more developers lately. I can't hope that EA will ever be willing to use their service, but a lot of the other developers seem to be coming to the conclusion that it really is the way to go.
 
Just as an example, I legally bought Silent Hunter III for PC (another DRM, but same story) and after one year of pain, "patched" it with a crack so I didn't have to a) insert the DVD on the drive and 2) deal with DRM.

And my copy is legal, I can take a picture of the box, the DVD, manual..... I shouldn't had to do this, but that game's DRM prevented my DVD recorder from burning DVDs! So it was really no choices left to me.

Before I "patched" the game, whenever I wanted to burn a DVD, I had to uninstall the DRM (via a utility Starforce created to do so), remove my DVD device from the device manager, reboot, wait for the DVD be recognized by Windows, THEN burn my photos, files, and so on, onto the DVD.

Of couse, next time I wanted to play Silent Hunter III, it reinstalled the DRM and rebooted my machine. :ange:

And I paid money for it. While I was doing all that just to burn a DVD, pirates around the world were laughing and playing the game and at the same time burning 10 DVDs.

I'm so upset, because I didn't bought BioShock because all the DRM buzz, which is really bad because it seems that BioShock rocked.

I just love Valve's Steam system, it's clean, updates your game frequently, adds new features, and it is safe for you and for the developer. It allows the developer to give better prices on the titles, since there are no distribution, packaging, manuals to deal.

In my opinion, the future of PC game distribution belongs to systems like Steam.

 
The future of PC gaming belongs to Stardock, Valve, and Activision. EA is still the 800 pound gorilla but it is the 800 pound gorilla with tourette's yelling at the kids to stay off of it's lawn while it's competitors actually adapt to the changing market.
 
It looks like you can't link to the Spore forums through the main EA interface. However if you look on the right you can see Spore is the most active forum. My guess is they're going to censor any post in regards to secuROM or DRM in general since I would think that would be a logical place to post up any DRM complaints.
 


I've had no luck with Netflix DRM. I have a video card and monitor that both tout HDCP support, but the only way I can get Watch It Now to play is to switch to a VGA connection. I'm not too worried since most of the selection isn't something I care to see and I'd rather have higher quality, but I play by the rules and it doesn't work. Netflix support people are nice, but can't tell me why my setup shouldn't play the movies. (I don't believe Netfilx uses their own DRM, but MS's.) My concern is what this will do in the future when Internet distribution is more the rule than the exception.

When Half Life 2 came out, there was a Steam outage for a day or so and I couldn't even play the single player campaign. I think they've addressed that now, but it was pretty scary when you couldn't play the game you bought--licensed, excuse me.

I've had to repurchase some songs because of some DRM activation issue, (I tend to reinstall computers every year or two), or I forgot the buy.com / Musicmatch account details I used to purchase a song, (and no longer had the email account associated with it). When Musicmatch was first telling people it was going away, I think they just said something like "we're *trying* to make sure you'll still be able to play your purchased music." For a little while, I figured I was going to lose all those songs.

I can't build my ultimate SageTV-based Blu-Ray HTPC because of DRM.

DRM limits competition and consumer options, and doesn't stop those who want to pirate.
 
Oh for sh*t's sake....

News just broke that Red Alert 3 will also have SecuROM. Fantastic. I should have expected as much since it's an EA title, but still, I was holding out hope...
 
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