Spore’s DRM scheme has unleashed the fury of some PC gamers. According to Amazon.com’s review section, negative 1-star reviews tally 586 out of a total of 642, at the time of this writing. Amazon has a star product review rating of 1 to 5 stars with 1, being the lowest.
Media publishers will tell you that DRM, or digital rights management, is a non-offensive program to stop illegal copying and piracy. The receiving end of DRM, the users, will argue that it is nothing more than spyware or malware, which invades your computer in order to check what you have on it — legal or otherwise.
Practically all the one-star reviews for Spore were aimed at the DRM, SecuROM, which only allows a maximum of three installations on PCs.
One user described his reaction about Spore this way:
"I was EXTREMELY excited about this game… Then I got on Amazon and noticed that a large number of the forums devoted to Spore were complaining of something called "SecuROM." I did a little digging and discovered that SecuROM is a piece of [DRM] software that is installed along with the game to prevent you from installing the game more than three times, in an attempt to combat piracy.
"I was fine with that. I then read further through the forums and the Wikipedia article and discovered that SecuROM does a number of other things too, including sending mysterious packets of data back to the company from your computer (identity theft, perhaps?), prevents you from using certain programs, such as DVD and CD burners, makes it impossible for you to modify your root drive and, worst of all, will NOT uninstall without the help of a third party application. So I canceled my order…
"I encourage EVERYBODY to not buy this game until the SecuROM Digital Rights Management is patched out or removed from later releases. On a final note, the SecuROM didn’t do a thing to stop the pirates: the day after it was released in the UK, a pirated copy was to be found on the internet, SecuROM and price free."
After the news spread about SecuROM on Spore, some prospective buyers expressed a wait and see attitude, or an outright refusal to buy the game until the DRM is either removed or modified.
The game itself is getting high marks for being fun and is averaging scores in the high 80s.
[via gamepolitics and amazon.com]
