"The tighter you squeeze, the more slips through your fingers."

It's pretty sad, really; they just don't seem to understand that they're shooting themselves in the foot here. Lots of people who would normally buy it want nothing to do with the insane DRM, and either don't buy it or even pirate it instead. It's literally having the opposite effect that DRM systems are intended to have.

The end result is in a year or so , Blizzard/Activision will be the new #1.

EA's Rail Simulator works the same for its add-ons that have been released.  Only three installs before you have to buy them again.

Please not here  I cant read anyting on the spore UK fourm without seeing something to do with DRM or how EA (half the people have it in their sig) somehow sucks. but at least you can descuse it here without people comeout with complet rubbish like "EA should have said it might not work on laptops" when it says so on the dam box that it might not work or "the DRM is causeing this random crash in the game" I am on the verge of ingoreing and classing them as people who want to just complain for no reason and not that they actually belive what they say.

*checks to make sure the black hole thing has not gone wrong*

must be a joke the worlds not ending and someone is saying Microsoft is not the most evil out there. But you can in theroy call up EA in years time and get spore working

PS the stardock bill of rights was posted on the UK spore fourm before spores release and I posted a link to that priacy & gaming thing yesderday (my time)

Fifty cents that by now, Spore has been cracked, making its DRM not only unpopular, but worthless. Stick away from EA. They can't do anything right.

What do you mean" by now?" Spore's DRM was cracked before the game was even released in the U.S. That's the most riotously comical thing about all of this, really. They pissed off (and pissed on) their customers and got nothing out of their efforts.

Wrong, they got EXACTLY what they wanted, to destroy the resale market of their games. AND to force their most die hard fans to buy their game multiple times. (dammit, out of activations, i need to buy another copy...)

Ofcourse, I hope this is the end of EA, because EA is so evil, but I somehow don't think that is the case. The audacity of it all, is that they are playing it as if they are the victems trying to protect themselves from piracy (which has nothing to do with activation limits)

"it was released in Europe before the US"

Not all pirates work with US copies of games. And due to when the main games shop in the UK sends out its online pre orders it would have arived a few days early (unless the post is slow) So technically it had been sold by a "high street" shop

If you're reading obssesively about this, there's a new column in the Wash Post today. The author seems to have a middlin' opinion of the game himself, sees the DRM kerfuffle as an EA error, has some friends who still think the Sims is better, but like me, he is very interested in how this "massively single-player online" thing might work out in the long haul.

Last chunk in the article: "Already, I'm a little tickled to see that people are using the game to poke fun at itself. Some joker, for example, has created a species named EA's DRM Policy. While I can't tell for sure what it's supposed to be, it looks kind of like a creature with its head parked up in its hindparts."

A quote from the article GW Swichord linked to:

Great comparison EA - let's see, what happened to DRM on music? Oh yeah, that's right. It totally flopped. Sony had their rootkit fiasco, Steve Jobs wrote a letter denouncing DRM, EMI went DRM free on iTunes, and later all of the major publishers released DRM free music on Amazon and other music services. Great analogy, EA, great analogy!

Neither. Firstly if a game crashes you have no way of knowing why it crashed. usually.

And there is a good chance that a game that crashes OFTEN has multiple causes for the crashes. Some are graphic, some are DRM, etc... it is annoying that there are any DRM related crashing though.

We are talking specific instances though. There are DRMs that are known to cause specific problem. There was the broken rootkit fiasco, there was the 1 minute load time (cut down to under 5 seconds by the crack) in some FPS game, there were specific known crash scenarios.

The complaint here is that EA is using a known culprit. Securom.

I love spore it is a great game. I want to buy it but my biggest thing is, I DO NOT want to support there DRM ideas. I love the way Stardock does it, ive actually lost hard copies of there games. But since i had the serial number linked to my name in my email, i was able to download the game back on to my computer and play it. No needing cd's, no third party DRM crap, its kind of hard now to support the companies that try so hard to protect there games from the legitamit buyers.

The funny part is that game makers, publishers, gamers, etc.... knows that there is a pirating problem for computer games and there has not been a single piece of software to stop it. Why do they think that doing all of these DRM rules will help the problem, when it is so easy just to go and download their game with out their DRM's on them. My thought is that if you get rid of the DRM's and lower the prices a bit ( you wont need to pay for the DRM software), you WILL see a dramatic reduction in pirating.