Will DRM Exterminate Spore? [Slashdot]

[DP ServBot]

AC Dude writes "Will an anti-DRM flash mob that's determined to give EA's latest sim game Spore a rock bottom rating on Amazon.com sink the game, or will Spore evolve and shed the DRM? Is this the beginning of the end for DRM-laden games? 'Over the past few years we've focused a lot on the music industry and how it has attempted to use DRM to control distribution. While DRM in this market segment has been unpopular, anti-DRM campaigns have largely fallen flat when it comes to attracting widespread public attention because of the fragmented nature of music. Games are a much easier target given the monolithic nature of their release — campaigners only need to spread the word on a handful of specific online outlets to reach a wide audience. A quick read through the Amazon reviews of Spore seems to suggest that the negative comments are already putting people off from buying the game.'"http://games.slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rss&op=image&style=h0&sid=08/09/08/1613250 (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/08/1613250&from=rss)
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[MrSparkle]

the lost sales will be a drop in the bucket nothing compared to the total sales. I pretty much played through this game the first day it hit a certain torrent site. So if anything kills this game its going to be the underwhelming length and the fact that once you get to the space stage of the game its just really not that fun anymore. I absolutely hate drm and refuse to buy drm'ed digital music. However games have had copy protection schemes since the 80's if its just hitting home now you may have bigger problems than drm (mental retardation?).

[Poofta!]

the lost sales will be a drop in the bucket nothing compared to the total sales. I pretty much played through this game the first day it hit a certain torrent site. So if anything kills this game its going to be the underwhelming length and the fact that once you get to the space stage of the game its just really not that fun anymore. I absolutely hate drm and refuse to buy drm'ed digital music. However games have had copy protection schemes since the 80's if its just hitting home now you may have bigger problems than drm (mental retardation?).

i agree. however its funny that in the end, DRM doesnt stop shit. as you pointed out (and i shared your experience) those who want to pirate, will. all DRM does is piss of people who legitimately buy and play games. i buy many games i pirate (in most cases cause i love them - i pirate for two reasons: to try it and to try it before it hits shelves). spore really isnt all that good to be honest, and this is just funny to me.

[Oobgarm]

Music DRM is easy enough to get around. DRM on games, not so much. I hope it makes someone take notice that this program is not going to fly with gamers who pay upwards of $50 a copy for the software and are granted nothing but a mere rental with their hard-earned cash.

[chicnstu]

I looked up DRM so are they saying that the game comes with a protection that keeps you from installing the game more than a few times? I also read the amazon review that said the game installs something that messes with your computer's performance.

These aren't problems for me because I'll be getting a console version unless it's much worse than PC, if so I won't get the game at all. But, this still seems stupid.


So if anything kills this game its going to be the underwhelming length and the fact that once you get to the space stage of the game its just really not that fun anymore.

I figured the game would be like that after seeing how quickly the first stage ended.

[heybtbm]

its funny that in the end, DRM doesnt stop shit. all DRM does is piss of people who legitimately buy and play games.


This, This, THIS!

[SpasticFuctard]

No, What DRM does is present a slight barrier to the casual thief. It is those inventory control wands at the doors of your shop. It's not going to stop a real thief, but it will keep asshole kids from lighting out with your product. Yes, they're sometimes annoying because they go off because someone had a gum wrapper in their pocket, but generally they reduce shrinkage. Anti-DRM is not a tenable position, it's a rationalization for people who want to steal shit and don't want to be thieves.

Make something at the cost of millions of dollars that people steal, and your position will change.

[MrSparkle]

There used to be a thing called fair use. It had to do with the rights you as the consumer had in relation to the product you purchased. That is the argument, when their anti-thievery restrictions inhibit the use of the product you legitimatly paid for then you have a real problem on your hands. Luckily for us consumers the major media conglomerates (RIAA, MPAA, ESA and a whole host of others) have managed to squash the consumers rights through the lobbying of government and passing of legislation stating that, we don't care if you paid for our product its OUR product and even when you purchase it you don't have the right to do anything with it if we don't like it. You buy a cd well i hope you like cds because your not allowed to transfer it into another format. Original is busted up no problem just buy a new one because your no longer entitled to back up the material you paid for (the music not the damned cd the cd is essentially packaging for the data contained within it). Good thing the current formats for the release of these types of products are indestructible.... or was it that they're incredibly frail...
So if you don't mind being walked all over by industry feel free to think that this is protecting the defenseless media distributors.

*EDIT* OH AND FURTHERMORE, there is a HUGE difference between stealing physical property from a physical store and digital piracy! One of them doesn't deprive the original owner of the property in question. As an avid collector i buy most of the games i pirate, what i don't buy is absolute crap. Is spore absolute crap, no. It isn't what all the hype made it out to be (go figure right an over-hyped game who's ever heard of that) but it still has its good points. Do i feel its worth the full retail price, once again the answer is no. Would I have been disappointed with my $50 purchase had i opted to make that before trying it out, yes i would have. Did i run into a store jack it off the shelf knowing that the store had paid for the copy to be there and expected and relied on the sale of the item to recoup its investment, no i did not. I did however buy the spore creature creator as soon as it came out (now there was a complete piece of crap product), and when i see an affordable copy of spore I'll grab it up.

[SpasticFuctard]

Fair-use has absolutely nothing at all to do with this discussion, that has to to with the reuse of intellectual property in parody and other similar derivative content types, it is very much alive and well.

And as to the transfer of media from one format to another, you are absolutely entitled to so long as the piracy protection remains in place. And that you are not redistributing. Also, it is very much about ensuring that the defenseless media distributors and content producers aren't being robbed constantly. It only exists, btw, because the media consuming public has routinely proved that it fucking steals whatever isn't nailed down /ALL THE TIME/ whenever they can, as fast as they can. Packs it into their van and masturbates all over the pile of their accreted loot while simultaneously standing outside of the manufacturer's offices shouting down their attempts to stem the tide of theft with pickets and signs and bullshit strawman arguments that don't address the central tenet, which is that DRM makes it slightly more inconvenient to them to violate their Terms of Service.

[MrSparkle]

Fair-use has absolutely nothing at all to do with this discussion, that has to to with the reuse of intellectual property in parody and other similar derivative content types, it is very much alive and well.

And as to the transfer of media from one format to another, you are absolutely entitled to so long as the piracy protection remains in place. And that you are not redistributing. Also, it is very much about ensuring that the defenseless media distributors and content producers aren't being robbed constantly. It only exists, btw, because the media consuming public has routinely proved that it fucking steals whatever isn't nailed down /ALL THE TIME/ whenever they can, as fast as they can. Packs it into their van and masturbates all over the pile of their accreted loot while simultaneously standing outside of the manufacturer's offices shouting down their attempts to stem the tide of theft with pickets and signs and bullshit strawman arguments that don't address the central tenet, which is that DRM makes it slightly more inconvenient to them to violate their Terms of Service.

Of course if the DRM is designed to stop you from transferring it from one media format to another (such as a weak encryption of the content in question), which it commonly is, then attempting to do so will require the use of what is known as a circumvention device (as defined under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act). Notable is the case of DECSS which was used to decrypt the content of dvds DECSS (or another program fulfilling the same function) was REQUIRED at the time to watch them under Linux which at the time had no DVD playing software which was officially licensed to natively decrypt the dvds contents rendering it capable of being played back. Could this also be used to rip the content off of a dvd and redistribute it, yes it could infact. The possibility to commit a crime does not in itself constitute a crime. For example a great many objects within my vicinity could be used for murder (scixors, a pencil, that old 3 wood in the closet) however they are not inherently illegal without being used in an illegal manner. When it comes to IP rights however this is not the case, they consider anything that can be used for ill purposes to be solely for that purpose.

Now I'm going to argue that this is very much a fair use issue. fair use can be defined as such "Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. It is based on free speech rights provided by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution." -wikipedia article on fair use. Now the case of Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation set the precedent for fair-use and digital content. In this case the full work of a digital image was reproduced as a thumbnail. Normally fair use does not allow for the full reproduction of the cited work, however in this case it was determined that this was indeed fair use by the four-factor criteria for legal fair-use. Copy protection that inhibits your ability to transfer a digital work in its entirety from one media to another under the doctrine of fair-use is a clear violation of that doctrine.

[TonyTheTiger]

DRM reminds me of the few games on the Playstation that had mod chip lockouts. There weren't many games that had it. Vandal Hearts II, Dino Crisis, I think Tomba...

My friend had a modded Playstation, got a legitimate copy of Vandal Hearts II, and couldn't play it. I'm all for copy protection, encryption, requiring the CD to be in the drive, etc. But when there is a method of protection that actively screws over legitimate customers all that does is piss people off and, ironically enough, encourages people who bought the game to go online and find exploits. What the Vandal Hearts II protection did was encourage my friend to go get a pirated copy with a protection override. So who really won there? My friend lost. Konami lost. The people who won were the guys who distributed the exploit to my friend.

You can put any legalese mumbo jumbo to the side because it doesn't matter. It's just a backwards system. DRM encourages piracy and makes the "take it or leave it" pirate more driven to become better at it.

[Poofta!]

first of all, you wont be able to play spore on consoles.

secondly, DRM doesnt slow anyone down, few (probably less than 1%) pirate modern pc games by simply 'installing' them on thier friend's pc. that shit never worked cause you still needed a crack.

with this DRM, nothing has changed, you still download a crack, and voila! its installed. NO ONE WAS THWARTED EVEN FOR A MOMENT. in fact, the hacked version has been out for about a week before the game. this will never change.

however, im sure there are plenty of people who BOUGHT it and had it not run due to the fact that they have CD imaging software installed on their machine. or have it run like crap because they owned a borderline powerful pc which was crippled due to the monitoring apps installed by spore to make sure youre not emulating (hackers got rid of this shit quick...).

also, hundreds (if not thousands?) of people will not buy spore for the whole reason that it has these lockouts. so now people who wouldve bought it legitimately, didnt. the ones who were gonna pirate it? already did. so tell me, please, who really 'won' here? i see EA worse off than before because of people not buying their shit out of principle, i see regular users suffering, and i see people who were gonna pirate it - already did.

another funny thing is, if they were unable to truly pirate it, they wouldnt buy the damn thing to begin with since its usually people's financial situation that makes them pirate. even if they wouldve bought it, it would be after the game is budget or at least on a second hand market (which EA STILL GETS NO MONEY OUT OF!).

[Kitsune Sniper]

I avoid games with Securom because I like to use virtual drives to play CDDA in my older games (among other things).

I've said this before - copy protection is fine with me, but when they dare to tell me what software I can or cannot have installed on my PC, well, they can go fuck themselves with their discs.

[heybtbm]

I guy I work with was laughing about this whole DRM situation today. Apparently, he downloaded the game (a pirated copy) last night and said on his version there's no DRM software at all. He explained how it was easily removed from the program and his friends do this type of thing all the time. This guy is pretty computer savvy (his life revolves around these types of things), so I believe what he has to say on the matter.

In short, the DRM software only impacts the legal purchasers because the pirates already have a work-around.

[Poofta!]

I guy I work with was laughing about this whole DRM situation today. Apparently, he downloaded the game (a pirated copy) last night and said on his version there's no DRM software at all. He explained how it was easily removed from the program and his friends do this type of thing all the time. This guy is pretty computer savvy (his life revolves around these types of things), so I believe what he has to say on the matter.

In short, the DRM software only impacts the legal purchasers because the pirates already have a work-around.

have i been talking to air this whole time?

but anyway, yes, thank you for your (re)explanation.

anyone on these forums could have a complete, working, free copy of spore on their harddrive in :30-6 hours depending on connection/sources

[dao2]

I certainly will not buy any game with DRM in it.