EA Loosens DRM on Spore

The LA Times reports EA has decided to loosen the DRM restrictions for Spore after being stung by a siege of criticism from gamers who took issue with the copyright restrictions the company placed on its Spore game. EA agreed to up the install limit from 3 times to 5, claiming they may also make exceptions in some cases, and also released a patch allowing for multiple user names. While it's nice that the company finally responded, this is still a pretty weak response and doesn't address the core issues. The real problem here is the use of DRM in the first place. Companies should not be treating their customers as thieves and pirates - it only makes the customer want to be a thief or pirate. Cliff Harris conducted an interesting experiment, where he posted an open forum asking why people pirate games. The response? Purchase cost of the game is the first reason, followed by the quality of the game (the less quality, the more likely it is to be pirated instaed of being bought), and third was because of DRM. People don't like DRM, we know that, but the extent to which DRM is turning away people who have no other complaints is possibly misunderstood. If you wanted to change ONE thing to get more pirates to buy games, scrapping DRM is it. These gamers are the low hanging fruit of this whole debate.