Spore getting 1-Starred on Amazon due to DRM

Spore, by Electronic Art (EA) and Maxis may be suffering from bad PR just out of the gate.

I was actually looking forward to it. It looks like it would be fun to play, probably even with my kids. But Wow. As of right now on Amazon, 1,928 people gave Spore 1 star because of the DRM. That's Digital Rights Management for you older folks. Usually you hear about it in the context of buying songs off of iTunes, but it's reared it's ugly head in the gaming world too.

A couple of months ago, I purchased a couple of new games so that I could give my new PC (a.k.a. The Mothership) a hearty workout. I purchased Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, and Mass Effect.

Mass Effect is also released by EA, and it's got the same DRM. You HAVE to have an Internet connection to activate the game. If you don't, you can call EA, wait 30+ minutes to get through, and hopefully they'll be able to find the place on their scripts where they can help you. Plus, you're limited to 3 (three)(tres) activations. Just for yuks, I checked Amazon's page for Mass Effect to see if it generated a similar negative vibe for having the same type of DRM. Nope. It got 3 stars. If you actually read the reviews, you'll see that the most recent DO complain about the DRM, and those are low-star rated (some 1 star, some 3). Maybe Mass Effect didn't generate the bad buzz because it was initially released for box platforms, and just came out for PC recently.

So why is Spore getting the big fat single star treatment? I haven't figured that out yet. Mob Mentality maybe? Sure, the DRM annoys me. It annoyed me in Mass Effect, but I wanted to play, so I dealt with it. I understand their reasoning for using it, to prevent piracy, and I'm OK with preventing piracy. They put a lot of time and money into creating the game, they should get paid for it.

For most people, I think the game's DRM will only become a hindrance if they get a new computer, or replace their hard drive, of decide to stop playing and pass the game on to the kids. I've lost a hard drive or two, and experienced the pain of having to restore everything from backup, and dealt with the pain of having to track down the original CD's or CD boxes for authentication keys etc. Not to mention those people who don't have computers that have the Internet "always on" (can you say 'dial-up'?)(poor saps).

For some, DRM hating is a matter of principle. I get that. Maybe someday when you buy a game, it will get digitally encoded with your ID, and they'll be able to track pirated games back to the pirate. Ew, that just opens a whole 'nuther can of worms.