Spore And The Great DRM Backlash

By Erick Schonfeld Sunday, September 14, 2008

If we can learn anything from the troubled launch of Spore, a videogame many people have been looking forward to for years, it is that binding products with digital rights management (DRM) restrictions hurts more than it helps. Spore, designed by Sims creator Will Wright, went on sale a week ago. It is expected to sell 2 million copies in September alone, and is currently the No. 3 best-selling game on Amazon. But it also has one of the worst ratings on Amazon (2,016 out of the 2,216 ratings are one star) because of a concerted campaign by fans protesting its DRM. It has also been downloaded an estimated 500,000 times on BitTorrent, and is well on its way to becoming the most illegally downloaded game ever. The DRM that comes with the official game only allows customers to use it on three machines (after that you have to call EA for permission to activate the game on additional machines). This is nothing more than an inconvenience.

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