You probably know the story, but I'm going to hit the main points quickly: EA released Spore. It got good reviews. People bought it. Some people were disappointed in the game, but also, many people hated the aggressive DRM.
Then it got interesting.
In what I believe to be the gaming community's first act of powerful and organised protest, gamers went to the game's page on amazon.com, and wrote genuine, well-justified and heartfelt one-star reviews focusing on the game's burdensome DRM and the lack of advance disclosure of its limitations. Breaking no rules, giving no grounds for Amazon to take down the reviews, coordinated but individually, gamers posted their opinions of the product in their own voices. Hundreds, then thousands of one-star reviews, completely eclipsing the small number of favourable ones.
Meanwhile, Spore was readily available on torrent sites, as it had been since several days before its street date. In other words, the game could have been released with no copy protection at all, and it would have made no difference to its availability on pirate trackers. Spore's DRM was oppressive only to paying customers. It was no inconvenience to a pirate.
Amazon is one of America's largest game retailers, and as most of the reviews remained (they did, fairly, take down obviously bogus ones, or those that broke rules), it became clear that they had no intention of censoring the opinions of customers. And as the days went by, it also became clear that EA could not wait this one out. They were losing business, and losing face. They would be forced to respond, and we all waited with interest to see what the response would be.
Might they possibly back down on DRM, acknowledging that their current arms race was not, in any sense, working, and salvaging a huge amount of goodwill from their customers? Or would their response be a reaffirmation of their continued commitment to DRM, even under intense pressure to do the opposite?
Here was their answer. Don't be fooled by RPS's uncharacteristically uncritical write-up (Walker, what the hell were you thinking?). The facts:
- Activation: still present.
- SecuROM: still present.
- Install limits: still present.
- Having to make a goddamn PHONE CALL when you run out of licenses, and being reliant on the competence and good faith of an organisation which is infamously incompetent and acts in notoriously poor faith: still necessary.
By handling it in the way that they have, they've succeeded in convincing some people that they've done us a big favour. But this was a token climbdown. The copy protection that they have stepped 'back' to is still extremely draconian, and a mere two to three years ago, would have been unthinkable on a game.
If you take one point away from this blog entry, make it this: EA's reaction to the Spore controversy is an unambiguous indication of their future intentions for DRM. They took two weeks to consider it — they made their choice carefully and, we must assume, with little chance that they will reconsider it again any time soon. This response is, without a doubt, a statement of the way things will be for the next couple of years at least. It is this, above all, that has made me angry.
So, as EA decided to escalate a war against piracy in which they have lost every single battle, a war which drives up development costs, and which has now dragged their paying customers into a world of undisclosed install limits and unreasonable demands, I've decided that I'm done with this fatuous company. I don't want their games enough to make the sacrifice they ask of me in order simply to play them. And it's bad enough to be treated like a pirate, but I'm damned if I'm going to be treated like an imbecile as well.
Gamers, we are so much smarter than this. I'm not going to ask anyone to join me in a boycott. That's everybody's individual decision and I'm not interested in advocacy. But here's my personal promise. I wholly reject EA's patronising, anti-consumer bullshit, and from right now until they remember how to treat customers respectfully, the few EA games I play will be borrowed, rented, or purchased second-hand. I will buy no games and no DLC from them, and EA will not see another penny of my money.
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