Spore: Most Pirated Game Ever Thanks to DRM

L31mr0d

thelordofcheese wrote: »

Why. If someone has taken a copy of something i've worked on, then what else could it possibly be?

I just want to see where you stand on this. If you bought a game and a friend came over to your house for the weekend and wanted to play through that game would you or would you not allow them to?

Maximilian

thelordofcheese wrote: »

I still say the best way to protest is just not to buy it. It's a clear and unambigious message. The other problem with the downloading as protest model is what you're essentially doing is stealing the product and going "i've taken this because i disagree with your DRM but i'm still showing enough interest in the game to download it"

Even if we take everyone who says that the reason they've downloaded it is as protest and that they just deleted it afterwards to be telling the truth, that's still a hell of alot of people who are interested in Spore. Now, from EA's standpoint they don't really have any other option but to look at new ways to make it harder and harder to copy games so that these people will be forced to by games like spore.

I know people would want a DRM free world, but lets face it, This is EA we're talking about, even if they had no DRM then people would just steal from them anyway. It's EA there are a thousand hollow excuses as to why it's ok. "they have plenty of money anyway", "They killed westwood", "Fifa-fucking-street".
What do people expect them to do? just let people steal their stuff and go "ohh, that's ok".

Like i said, if people really wanted to send a message that they're not ok with their current DRM model, not buying spore would send the clearest message.

Not buying sends no message at all. It's a little like not voting except there is usually some record of someone not voting.

Oh, and Steam is vastly superior to EA's DRM.

ShadowHearth

Stev_o wrote: »

I "got" Spore and i have to say its pretty damn awful in terms of gameplay experiences i really only liked the cell stage and sure that would be made by someone into a flash game pretty easily. Creature stage is again okay but extremely repetitive. Tribe stage is the worst stage just completely does my head in. Civ stage is way to easy once you get access to Flying Units you'll win no matter what. Iv only started playing the space stage and its okay but im not far enough in it to make a decision.

Graphics aswell are goddamn awful renders look awful WoW looks better then it which is saying something.

I couldnt imagine paying 50 quid or so for this game which can be finished in less then a day hell you dont even need to complete a stage to unlock the next one you just gotta play it and the next stage will just unlock!

Lol m8, same here. Best part of spore is cell stage. and all whats in it is pure crap. And yes, you finish a game in 1 day...

I whant mine 50 coffe beans back

MooseJam

Anti-piracy measures are 100% ineffective, they don't stop piracy at all, sure just look at microsoft, the biggest software house in the world, thousands of developers and years to develop their product, and what can you download at the click of a button, vista ultimate, yeah if they can't do it I don't think EA will. It just screws paying customers, if anything kills off pc gaming it will be drm.

thelordofcheese

L31mr0d wrote: »

I just want to see where you stand on this. If you bought a game and a friend came over to your house for the weekend and wanted to play through that game would you or would you not allow them to?

I see where your going with this, but i don't think it's comparable. Your trying to equate taking a whole copy of a game to do with as you please vs a playthrough on a friends system.
I can see where you think you've got a cunning trap, but lets be honest here, i doubt there are very, very few people who's primary method of playing through games is to play a friend of theirs like a chump and just living in their house for a weekend playing their games.

If any of my friends turned up to say, sit in my house and play through... say.. Mass Effect i'd tell them to fuck off.
Co-Op gaming or compeditive would be fine, it's an experience that needs two people, but honestly do you know anyone that's that much of a user as to attempt the scenario you described?

thelordofcheese

MooseJam wrote: »

Anti-piracy measures are 100% ineffective, they don't stop piracy at all

Explain Steam then.

Rev Hellfire

People are foolish if they think that by pirating a game they're sending a message to EA that DRM is bad, its quite the opposite. EA will assume that the DRM isn't draconian enough. If I put a lock on my door and someone breaks in, I'd don't go and remove the lock. I put a bigger one on.

I'd agree with max, that simply not buying the game doesn't send a message it needs to be linked to the fact the it is because of the DRM. As a tactic it has some effect as noted by the boycotts of starforce games.

L31mr0d wrote:

If you bought a game and a friend came over to your house for the weekend and wanted to play through that game would you or would you not allow them to?

He would have no reason not to allow them too. The license for the software doesn't restrict who can play it.

Maximilian

I think it's worth mentioning Stardock here and all the various interviews the head of that company has given re. DRM, which were very interesting.

They use no DRM whatsoever and yes, there has been piracy but they have enjoyed healthy sales for their games. I think it is good evidence that DRM achieves nothing. If someone is intent on pirating a game, they will, simple as that. DRM will only delay them or not delay them at all in the case of Spore.

MooseJam

thelordofcheese wrote: »

Explain Steam then.

steam doesn't either, any steam game is available for download

Nerin

thelordofcheese wrote: »

Wow, if *only* there were some way to find out what other people thought of the product before you purchased it, some kind of published periodical on the subject. Or maybe even a website that did that....
Or maybe some kind of place online where people can discuss games that have been recently released and how they feel about them.

Pity none of those exist, because if they did, boy would your argument look stupid......

:rolleyes: some people don't give a toss what other people think.Mainly because when on the internet they can act like pompous self righteous dorks. I wouldn't agree with every review on gamesites or game magazines. Would you? For example,i've a few games for the playstation 2 that people have said are terrible,but i love. Of course i bought them because they were cheap second hand ones. I was going to buy spore straight away without even trying it. Bad reviews,and reports of this drm crap make me edgy. I won't even bother downloading it tbh after all this talk,it sounds like a waste of time. I'll wait for it to be a fiver somewhere.

tman

So my copy of the game arrived yesterday, installed without any issue, created my EA account and away I went. (Pretty damn good game it is too, but that's for another thread...)

While I agree that limiting you to one EA account per CD key is a terrible move, the rest of this is really getting blown out of proportion, mostly by people who wouldn't pay for the game in the first place anyway and are just trying to assuage their guilt.
Who the hell would need to install it on more than 3 PCs? I'm sure EA support could do something about that too if needs be, and I bet that number will be increased ala Bioshock in the not too distant future.

Anybody that's using this as an excuse to pirate the game really needs to cop the **** on and be a bit more honest with themselves.

thelordofcheese

MooseJam wrote: »

steam doesn't either, any steam game is available for download

I don't think you know what DRM is.

Maximilian wrote: »

I think it's worth mentioning Stardock here and all the various interviews the head of that company has given re. DRM, which were very interesting.

They use no DRM whatsoever and yes, there has been piracy but they have enjoyed healthy sales for their games. I think it is good evidence that DRM achieves nothing. If someone is intent on pirating a game, they will, simple as that. DRM will only delay them or not delay them at all in the case of Spore.

Actually, i wonder about stardock (and GOG.com who are also DRM free) and how much of their sucess with a no DRM model can be linked to the fact that very few companies make the kind of games they do (Sins, Galatic Civ) and people support them because they don't want to see those kinds of games disappear.

Sounds silly, but the way i think about it is people can justify stealing a big game from EA or whomever because they have more money than god and they're an evil corporation being all corporation-y.
Stardock are definitely 'the little guys' and people have a harder time justifying stealing from companies that they can't sterotype into a faceless monolith.

That's taking nothing away from stardock, i've enjoyed Sins a hell of alot, but i get the feeling that if they were publishing something with a wider target market and hype (like say, spore) they would not be very happy jump in levels of piracy they'd see.

MooseJam

thelordofcheese wrote: »

I don't think you know what DRM is.

sure I do, it's any technology that tries to limit unauthorised use of the product, whats your point

L31mr0d

thelordofcheese wrote: »

I see where your going with this, but i don't think it's comparable. Your trying to equate taking a whole copy of a game to do with as you please vs a playthrough on a friends system.
I can see where you think you've got a cunning trap, but lets be honest here, i doubt there are very, very few people who's primary method of playing through games is to play a friend of theirs like a chump and just living in their house for a weekend playing their games.

If any of my friends turned up to say, sit in my house and play through... say.. Mass Effect i'd tell them to fuck off.
Co-Op gaming or compeditive would be fine, it's an experience that needs two people, but honestly do you know anyone that's that much of a user as to attempt the scenario you described?

I'm looking to see where your grey area is, everyone has one, especially in regards to piracy. What you have done is take my question and change it via hyperbole to suit a criteria which you would be happy to disagree with.

First instead of being one game that your friend requested to play you have made it their "primary method" of playing games, ergo, all the games they play will be owned by you or another of their friends. Next you have used "Mass Effect" as an example of a game, a game which you know to be very long, so therefore would be unreasonable for them to play it over the course of a weekend. Then you have purposely not answered the question and instead have turned it around so that you now expect me to answer my own question.

Let me be more precise. If a friend, who has not played any games previously with you, came over to your house and wanted to play through, lets say, a short game, like CoD4 (you could easily complete this game in a weekend) would you allow them to? It's a simple yes or no question, would you call your friend a thief for not going out and buying the game themselves and instead looking to use your copy of the game to play it?

MooseJam

thelordofcheese wrote: »

I don't think you know what DRM is.

O I get you, when I said any steam game is available for download you thought I meant through steam lol, I meant through bittorrent

0ubliette

Rev Hellfire wrote: »

People are foolish if they think that by pirating a game they're sending a message to EA that DRM is bad, its quite the opposite. EA will assume that the DRM isn't draconian enough. If I put a lock on my door and someone breaks in, I'd don't go and remove the lock. I put a bigger one on.

I'd agree with max, that simply not buying the game doesn't send a message it needs to be linked to the fact the it is because of the DRM. As a tactic it has some effect as noted by the boycotts of starforce games.


He would have no reason not to allow them too. The license for the software doesn't restrict who can play it.

but it does restrict you to ONE account per PC. So if your sister/mother/brother wants to play, they have to pick up YOUR game and play that

Rev Hellfire

0ubliette wrote: »

but it does restrict you to ONE account per PC. So if your sister/mother/brother wants to play, they have to pick up YOUR game and play that

So? They're still allowed to use it via your account, hardly justification of piracy.

The only real issue here is in terms of reselling/second-hand games as far as I can see.

thelordofcheese

L31mr0d wrote: »

Let me be more precise. If a friend, who has not played any games previously with you, came over to your house and wanted to play through, lets say, a short game, like CoD4 (you could easily complete this game in a weekend) would you allow them to? It's a simple yes or no question, would you call your friend a thief for not going out and buying the game themselves and instead looking to use your copy of the game to play it?

No i wouldn't.
Not for piracy reasons primarily, but mostly just because that's fucking rude.

If you want to play through a single player game (i actually picked mass effect because it's got no multiplayer, as an aside. But the point is still valid) go buy your own fucking copy.

Nerin

thelordofcheese wrote: »

No i wouldn't.
Not for piracy reasons primarily, but mostly just because that's fucking rude.

If you want to play through a single player game (i actually picked mass effect because it's got no multiplayer, as an aside. But the point is still valid) go buy your own fucking copy.

:rolleyes:
so you wont give a friend a lend of a game?
ok. either youre just saying that to make a point or you really are on the extreme side of the argument. which makes you the same as the pirates on the extreme side of their arguments for pirating games.

thelordofcheese

Nerin wrote: »

:rolleyes:
so you wont give a friend a lend of a game?
ok. either youre just saying that to make a point or you really are on the extreme side of the argument. which makes you the same as the pirates on the extreme side of their arguments for pirating games.

L31mr0d asked what would happen if a friend of mine turned up to my house and wanted to play through my copy of CoD4 on my machine one weekend.

I know i might come across as odd, but i'd never consider doing that it's so damn rude it's mind-boggling.

Nerin

thelordofcheese wrote: »

L31mr0d asked what would happen if a friend of mine turned up to my house and wanted to play through my copy of CoD4 on my machine one weekend.

I know i might come across as odd, but i'd never consider doing that it's so damn rude it's mind-boggling.

how about if they asked for a lend to play on their own machine?

L31mr0d

thelordofcheese wrote: »

No i wouldn't.
Not for piracy reasons primarily, but mostly just because that's fucking rude.

really? I've been a gamer since I could use my opposable thumbs and it has always been the case that when I would go over to a friends house I would play through whatever games they had, and they would do likewise when they came over to mine. Last weekend a friend came over and he played through Conan while I watched and gave him pointers. My young brother-in-law was also staying for a week and he played through all my games on the PS3, Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Burnout Paradise... etc, because back at his house he only has a Wii.

Not once did I think of my friends or myself as a thief, and I don't think you would either if a young relation/friend of yours that was staying with you wanted to play through one of your games while you where at work.

Sure they got full use of the games, played through them in entirety and would probably never buy that game in the future because of it. But would I class them as thieves? No. Would I think it "rude", no I'd think of it the same as if a friend came over to my house and wanted to listen to one of my music CD's or watch a DVD in my collection. Clearly what you consider "rude" I'd consider normal social interaction and sharing of media

thelordofcheese

L31mr0d wrote: »

really? I've been a gamer since I could use my opposable thumbs and it has always been the case that when I would go over to a friends house I would play through whatever games they had, and they would do likewise when they came over to mine. Last weekend a friend came over and he played through Conan while I watched and gave him pointers. My young brother-in-law was also staying for a week and he played through all my games on the PS3, Ratchet and Clank, Uncharted, Burnout Paradise... etc, because back at his house he only has a Wii.

Not once did I think of my friends or myself as a thief, and I don't think you would either if a young relation/friend of yours that was staying with you wanted to play through one of your games while you where at work.

Sure they got full use of the games, played through them in entirety and would probably never buy that game in the future because of it. But would I class them as thieves? No. Would I think it "rude", no I'd think of it the same as if a friend came over to my house and wanted to listen to one of my music CD's or watch a DVD in my collection. Clearly what you consider "rude" I'd consider normal social interaction and sharing of media

*shrug*
I can't explain it, but i'd think someone coming over to just use my stuff while i sat about twiddling my thumbs would be rude and of course, vice versa. Now, multiplayer and co-op stuff, that's all cool, because then both of us can play the game and nobody's being left out. Maybe i have an overactive sense of fairness, who knows. In the same vein if someone is over and i'm playing a single player game, i'll quit and save it for something multiplayer instead.
Maybe i am mental, who knows.

Cd's and DVD's are different though, i'd feel what with them being a passive medium and one where you don't have to select a different mode for more than one person to enjoy it.

L31mr0d

thelordofcheese wrote: »

Cd's and DVD's are different though, i'd feel what with them being a passive medium and one where you don't have to select a different mode for more than one person to enjoy it.

So you are ok with the piracy of DVD's and music CD's then? Would you acknowledge that by allowing a friend or family member to view a DVD that you have bought you are robbing revenue from the people who made that movie by allowing people to see the movie that have not paid to view it?

Are you not now a thief yourself by allowing others to listen to your music or watch your DVD's?

Krieg

I love bashing EA
Bit hypocritical in my case, since many titles I own have the EA logo somewhere. Im sure a lot of people are the same but won't admit it

OT: Spore was what I consider the most over-hyped game in gaming history. I played it for 5 hours and left it, truly disappointing. The DRM thing doesn't bother me too much. Bioshock was the same, but at least they gave you 7 installs. They don't affect me since i don't often need to uninstall games, therefore im basically getting full life out of my games. 3 installs is laughable tbh and there must be some breach of legality on EA's side, since they don't mention it anywhere on the box.
Punish the paying customer? wtf. Anyway everything I believe has been mentioned in this thread and the spore thread so I feel no need to repeat over them.

Slightly off-topic, but still bashing EA
EA are *****, not just on a customer basis, but also business-to-business level too. I worked for a game shop sometime ago, which involved ordering games in. The main distributors of games in Ireland are a company called A1, after them Nintendo provide distribution as well as Sony (but not to a big extent AFAIR). Lastly, EA provide distribution of their own games.
EA would continually change their pricing. The way it worked was they would release a game at high price (higher than the other distributors btw) and if the game didn't sell well they would slash the price by 50/60% for less than a week and then immediately throw full price back on.
This sounds like normal business and ethical, but they would delay the orders from retailers intentionally, until the full price kicked back in, THEN add the retailers order.
Now this didn't happen often, but a guy I knew who was in the same position as me, experienced the same thing on occasion. In fact they would often be putting price up and down what I can only call completely random. They might throw €2 on or take €5 off and then back again next week, never made any sense to me, but its possible theres nothing too sinister going on.

There were a few other little things with EA. All their reps were Pricks imo. Every other distributor would send us thank you letters or small gifts around xmas time every year, EA gave retailers the steam of their piss.

Another minor annoyance regarding their games. When you start a game up, it starts off by running through all the developers logo/ad's which is fine, since they can almost always be skipped, Except the EA logo/animation. I don't know why but this pisses me off rightly. I wouldn't mind if it was the developers logo you couldn't skip, hell they made they game and probably deserve some praise, but the fact that the EA logo can't be skipped sickens me.

tl;dr: EA are *****

Maximilian

tman wrote: »

Who the hell would need to install it on more than 3 PCs? I'm sure EA support could do something about that too if needs be, and I bet that number will be increased ala Bioshock in the not too distant future.

I can see somebody installing it on two machines if they had a laptop. Possibly 3 if they had another work PC (on which they presumably shouldn't be playing games!). I don't think that's really the issue though. The issue is if you ever lose the game due to an O/S upgrade, virus, or low disk space or whatever, then you could quite easily find yourself in time not being able to play a game you legally bought. It also means you basically cannot sell the game on second hand.

I have probably hundreds of games. I can think of quite a few I have installed, deleted and re-installed many times over the years. Planescape Torment I have probably installed & played about 6 times. Thief 2 probably the same.

It's true to say a lot of people won't be affected by the install limit but many will.

thelordofcheese

L31mr0d wrote: »

So you are ok with the piracy of DVD's and music CD's then?

Holy leap of logic batman!

L31mr0d wrote: »

Would you acknowledge that by allowing a friend or family member to view a DVD that you have bought you are robbing revenue from the people who made that movie by allowing people to see the movie that have not paid to view it?
Are you not now a thief yourself by allowing others to listen to your music or watch your DVD's?

Look i know where you're trying to go with this, but lets assume that, for the sake of argument, i pirate music and DVD's like crazy. I don't, but lets go batshit loco here for a second.

Does that mean that companies involved are wrong to attempt to protect their products?
And more to the point can i really have any justification for stealing the DVD's and movies?

I really don't think there is and that's pretty much the bulk of my point, if you want something but can't afford it then tough, you can't have it. Save some money or wait untill it's cheaper.
If you disagree with a companies business practice, don't buy their product and definitely don't steal the fucking thing and claim you're making a point.

Maximilian

It's different with DVD's & CD's, I don't think they merit comparison.

DVD/CD's don't limit you to being allowed play them on just 3 players. You are free to use them for life.

BadCharlie

I agree with thelordofcheese point of views to some extent, but I also think his a bit to extreme. The part I find extreme is when friends come over and want to play or use my stuff. I will let them... and they would do likewise when I call to their house. I would not find that rude nor they, and if they did then i would not call over to play/use their stuff.

Also what if their was 5 brothers in a house. Should they buy 5 copies of the game so each can experience it.

thelordofcheese

BadCharlie wrote: »

I agree with thelordofcheese point of views to some extent, but I also think his a bit to extreme. The part I find extreme is when friends come over and want to play or use my stuff. I will let them... and they would do likewise when I call to their house.

I think i've not represented myself very well on this point, it's not that i wouldn't let them use my stuff, it's that i wouldn't like it if someone came into my house with the sole intention of just playing through a single player game on their own.
Like i said, multiplayer, co-op, alt-turns it's all cool. It's personal preference, i think if you're going to someones house then they should be at least included if you start playing games on their shit.
Is that really so strange?
Jesus, i'm a tyrant if you lot are to be believed :P