DRM: why less is most definitely Spore…
I’ve been really looking forward to the release of the game Spore, from gaming genius Will Wright; for those of you who don’t know about it, it’s a “multi-genre “massively single-player online game””(Wikipedia).
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And I would have probably bought it this weekend, except I noticed something in the ‘rapid fire’ post from Jake McKee, titled Backlash: Anti-DRM Protesters Trash Spore’s Amazon Rating…
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I clicked, and read that the DRM which EA have included with the game to ‘prevent piracy’ means you can only register it three times in total; no good if you want to install/uninstall according to system space. As one poster put it “…what they have done is essentially created a rental for the price of the full game”.
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Not a great way to treat valued customers. But the disgruntled customers are no longer stuck in a supply chain where their only recourse is to fire off a letter or phone a disinterested sales support hotline; they can actively (and perhaps rightly) trash the reputation of the game. In protest, there have so far been over2000 one-star ratings on the game’s Amazon profile…
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Although it’s still number one in the charts (being the biggest most anticipated gaming release this week), subsequent sales will be strongly influenced by the feedback that services such as Amazon enable customers to share. Anyone who sees that many one-star ratings is going to investigate.
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It’s sad to see other “information” based industries falling into the same trap as the music industry; instead of alienating customers with a heavy-handed policing system to prevent sharing, working out a way to encourage them to share the game with friends, and then upgrading those people to advanced versions of the game they would have paid a reasonable sum of money for would surely have been more popular…
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…essentially, encourage the spread of the game further through working with communities. Instead, the games industry seems set on taking the same stance the music industry did; if you share it, you’re a criminal. And we know how that’s working out…
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