Will Spore DRM Become EA's Rootkit Moment?

With the news coming out that some purchasers of the video game Spore have filed a class action lawsuit against EA for its inclusion of SecuROM DRM, it's reaching the point where you have to wonder if this is becoming EA's "rootkit" moment. The parallels are there. Both involved an overly draconian form of DRM that severely limited how a "purchased" product could be used. Both involved hidden files installed on a computer -- and both resulted in massive backlash from consumers, and a very slow response from the company. And, of course, the rootkit resulted in class action lawsuits as well. At some point, perhaps, companies will start to realize that treating your customers as criminals is probably a bad idea.

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.

Spore - Day Two

As promised, I played Spore again, yesterday. I played for about six hours total, taking a 5-10 minute break every hour (gotta stretch). Reviewing my first impressions of Spore, I have some updated observations: Cellular - I still enjoyed this level quite a lot, mostly because the game play is different from the other levels. I can understand, though, why they limited the time on this level. However, I still think you should be able to earn some extra DNA after you beat all your goals. Creature - I went the herbivore route today. It's definitely easier to make friends when you are a herbivore. I could have written the Spore equivalent of "How to Win Friends and Influence People". This level was definitely more fun for me the second time through. Tribal - I started right off making friends with the new tribes. I still ended up destroying two tribes, though (they smelled funny :P ). My strategy improved for picking off the opposing tribe. I had improved my stealth rating in the Creature level, and it paid off. You need stealth for food raids. I decided to raid all the food of a tribe, then kill it's gatherers - it was a resounding success. To me, this is still the most difficult level, but I think the funness improved the second time through. Civilization - Because of my previous actions, I started the civ level as a religious city. I found out that religious vehicles can indeed attack military vehicles (but economic vehicles apparently cannot). Because I was social this time through, I made treaties with three other cities. At one point, I had two cities helping me capture a third city. I did find a small bug, though. I had asked Yellow to help me attack the Blue city. Yellow and I both bombarded the city, with my military winning and seizing control of the city. After the cut video, I become the owner of the city. However, Yellow is still attacking the city! I had to install all the gun turrets in the city for defense (I didn't want to directly attack Yellow, yet). My turrets killed the Yellow tanks, and everything went back to normal. Galaxy - I played galaxy for about 90 minutes. This level is very different, but fun all the same. I know understand why you control the spaceship the way you do (using the scroll wheel to ascend/descend). After playing the galaxy level, it makes sense. It's not cumbersome, like I thought yesterday. I didn't finish galaxy. I accomplished 2 of the 10(?) goals. This level definitely needs more time than the other levels. Maybe I still don't quite understand it, but I found making money to be much more difficult in this level. Overall, Spore is a great game. I'm going to raise my rating to a 4.5 out of 5, now that I understand the reason for the decisions the developers made. One final note, about the DRM. I haven't tried to make a backup of the game, yet (I make a backup of every game, in case the disc breaks - I've had several break or become too scratched to use). One thing I did like, though, is that I don't need to have the disc in the CD-ROM drive to play the game. I HATE when the company requires that.

Spore - First Impressions

Yesterday, I played Spore for about seven hours total, mostly straight through. I took an hour break about four hours into play to eat and do some household chores. Spore has five levels of evolution: Cellular, Creature, Tribal, Civilization, and Galaxy. Each level has a series of goals you must accomplish to reach the next level. I completed the first four levels, and played about five minutes in the Galaxy level before I had to quit. Spore is definitely a different game. I found it to be quite fun, and think this is one of those rare games that would interest both boys and girls. I especially enjoyed the creature creator, and having the ability to design and modify my creature. Below are my impressions of each level: Cellular - For me, this was one of the funnest levels, but also the shortest. I completed the cellular stage after about 25-30 minutes, and now that I know how to do it, could complete this much sooner, I think. This is unfortunate, because I thought the cellular level was very enjoyable. My only other complaint is that once you reach your evolutionary goal, you stop being able to collect DNA points. You can still hunt/eat and you can mate, but anything you kill or eat does not go to your DNA bank. However, this appears to only be true on the cellular level. Creature - Once I understood what needed to be done, this was fun, also. I spent about 10-15 minutes trying to understand how to make friends with other creatures. In this level, you either need to make friends with creatures or make them go extinct. As you progress in this stage, you gain intelligence. That increased intelligence allows you add one or more creatures to your party. These can be creatures from your nest or from the befriended creatures. My creatures were more specialized for combat, which made befriending other creatures a little difficult. I made a few friends early on, but afterwards my dancing/posing/charming skills weren't high enough. When you try to make friends, you have to repeat what the other creatures does. For example, the other creature might do a little dance, so you push the dance button. Each creature in your group does the dance, and the more who dance the better you impress the new creature. However, I noticed that as I progressed, the new creatures would call his nest-mates over to dance with him. This makes it more difficult to impress them, because you need a higher skill of dancing to impress 2, 3, or 4 creatures. Don't get me wrong, this level was a lot of fun. You definitely should explore the map, as I picked up a LOT of body parts. I played this level for about thirty minutes more after I reached my goals, just so I could find new body parts (and earn more DNA points). This is the last level you can modify the base creature, so you want to find everything you can to make him the best. Tribal - This is definitely the most difficult stage. You start with a tribe of five creatures. You must make peace with or exterminate five other tribes. You must also assign food gathering tasks to some of your tribesmen. Finally, you must construct buildings so your tribesmen can use weapons, musical instruments (for making peace), and fishing tools. The first time I tried to make peace with another tribe, I found the instructions VERY confusing. The in-game instructions really did not explain to me what I needed to do. To make peace, you need to construct buildings that make musical instruments (horns, marachas, and pipes). You bring the chief and at least one tribesman with an instrument (best to bring all three types) to the new tribe. The new tribe will tell you (with pictographs) what they want to hear. Once you understand how to do this, it's very easy - much easier than making friends at the creature stage. I befriended three tribes, but two tribes tried to steal my food, so I decided to wipe them out. This is a LOT more difficult than you think. Each tribe has basically the same number of people. When I started my war campaign, we all had 12 people. The problem for the warrior is that you must leave at least one person (two is best) to do fishing and food gathering, and at least one more to protect your food from wild creatures. So, now you are invasion of 9 (at best) against 12. I found two strategies that seem to work for this. The first one is send people, one at a time to raid the food of the rival tribe. You want to send a stream (like five), one after another (not all together). Expect the first one or two to die - they are the diversion anyway. Tribes need food to create new people and to buy/repair buildings. I also found that during combat, you can send someone to raid the food, and the raider will be successful 90% of the time. The second strategy is one of attrition. I created two groups of warriors. The first group being the largest (five or six). Send the first group to the edge of the tribe. When a tribesman comes near, begin the combat. You want your five or six to distract the tribe, so let them fight all the people. Next, send your remaining soldiers to attack a building (or raid the food). The goal is to destroy the chief's hut, but the hut is very strong. One tribe I fought, I had to destroy the secondary buildings first to wear down the tribe's food supply. When they were finally broke, I was able to destroy the chief's hut. Civilization - Once you get use to the camera controls, this stage is more like an RTS (real time strategy) game. I found this level to be very fun. I played it for quite a while, mostly to experience the different methods of taking over the other cities. For this stage, you must unite the planet, which is covered by your race. You can convert the city by religious, military, or economic means. Economic takes the most time, but works best because there is no damage done to the new city (and you earn more money in the process). Religious works second best (and was a lot of fun to watch in progress). Religious takes the same time (or maybe faster) than military. However, a religious vehicle cannot fight a military vehicle. So, if you keep military vehicles around your cities, you can ward off a religious attack. Also, religious attacks don't harm buildings, except for the entertainment structures. The military attack is your standard military campaign. Build five or six tanks, send them to bombard the next city. However, you destroy all the buildings in the city. Sometimes, you even destroy city land, which means less space available for your structures, when you take over the city. Once you take over all the cities on the planet, you advance to... Galaxy - I only had a few minutes on this level, so not many thoughts. I went through the ship flying tutorial and started on the tractor beam mission before I had to stop. Flying the ship is not as easy as it could be. You control the ship with the mouse, but to ascend/descend, you use either the scroll wheel or the +/- buttons (btw, + goes down, - goes up). Maybe I will understand the reasons for this as I progress into Galaxy, but for now I'm wondering why the ship can't be controlled like the flying mounts of WoW - mouse point up to ascend (or press jump). Overall, Spore is a great game and a lot of fun to play. I'm giving it a 4, out of 5. I'm wondering how re-playable this is (for adults) once you complete the galaxy stage. I may amend my score based on what I find. Read my follow up post - Spore: Day Two

Spore

Woot! Spore finally arrived! I'm driving my wife crazy talking about how I'm going to spend the weekend playing Spore. I installed Spore, this morning. Installation went very smooth. Took about twenty minutes. I did notice after the install that I had an icon on my desktop for the EA Downloader, but the icon for Spore was missing. Huh? I actually had to browse to the install folder and manually add the Spore icon to my desktop. Maybe it's just a problem in Vista? I know a lot of people have rated this 1 star on Amazon. If you read the posts, you'll find the reason is because of the draconian DRM. I agree that EA should never have DRM'd Spore. In doing so, they are actually inviting crackers to circumvent the DRM. I've heard that the DRM crack for Spore is now the #1 download on the Pirate Bay. Maybe other companies will take notice.