More and more DRM topics have appeared lately, but luckily none of this has to do with The Sims 3. Although Spore Galactic Adventures will be packaged with SecuROM…When will that end!?
On 7 September 2008, EA released Spore, the highly-anticipated life-simulation PC title that allowed players to control the evolution of life from genesis through civilisation and into the space age. Spore’s own life cycle began favourably–the game was named the 20th best invention of 2008 by Time Magazine and sold more than one million copies on the PC, Mac and Nintendo DS in its first two and a half weeks of sale. But things quickly turned nasty, and Spore’s SecuROM DRM system once again caused a public outcry. The game’s DRM required players to authenticate the game online upon installation with the standard three activations per customer rule. EA quickly raised this limit to five activations, but players had already begun to make their displeasure known–according to Forbes magazine and as reported by GameSpot, 500,000 copies of Spore were illegally downloaded from file-sharing networks in its first week of sale. This continued until Spore became the most pirated game of 2008, breaking records and topping BitTorrent-tracking blog Torrent Freak’s list of the top pirated games in 2008 with an estimated 1.7 million copies pirated as of December 2008. On Amazon.com, the game received more than 2,000 reviews, most of which had given it a rating of one star out of five citing DRM issues. But the complaints didn’t stop there–in the same month of Spore’s initial release, gamers filed a class-action lawsuit against EA in the North District of California Court contending that the publisher had violated the California Consumer Legal Remedies Act and Unfair Competition Law by not informing consumers that installing Spore will also install SecuROM.
Interesting article. The massive issue they completely neglected to mention was the fact that SecuROM can mess up the functioning of optical drives, and the firestorm that resulted when Sims 2 players first encountered this behavior in BV.
Sorry… hit “send” by mistake… was just gonna continue that to say that IMO, the activation/install limit issue which so many are focused on is the LEAST of the problems with SecuROM.