Starhawk Drives the Offensive
17 hours 10 mins ago
Along the lines with my previous article about EA customer support- it seems that gamers are not as happy with spore as they thought.
You are required to activate the product over the internet, and if something goes wrong- you have to call EA (we all know that will be a joy).
The game is barely pulling 1 star reviews on Amazon (With over 1200 1 star reviews!) Not bad for a game that has been filled with anticipation for almost 10 years now.
Right now the game has 222 customer reviews, with 194 of them giving the game one star. The game also has nine five-star reviews, two of which were written in 2006, while the other reviews spend significant amounts of time complaining about the one-star reviews. The game's rating sits at 1.5 stars as of this writing.
So what are the people complaining about? Taking a look at the review Amazon tagged as "the most helpful critical review," it's pretty clear. "First of all, the game incorporates a draconian DRM system that requires you to activate over the internet, and limits you to a grand total of 3 activations," the disgruntled user wrote. "If you reach that limit, then you'll have to call EA in order to add one extra activation. That's not as simple as it sounds, since when you reach that point EA will assume that you, the paying customer, are a filthy pirating thief. You will need to provide proof of purchase, reasons why the limit was reached..."
Additional sources:
- Spore's DRM: EA versus the used game market (neoseeker.com)
- Spore, Dividing Cells and Opinions (washingtonpost.com)





Comments
While not actually commenting on the game.
DRM is great for some applications, poor for others. I have no doubt that the game is decent but there needs to be better ways to stop pirating.
http://www.gamegrep.com/news/12323-developers_want_to_learn_from_pirates/
Albeit, EA's been really good lately with listening to the community and changing things they've been doing wrong. I don't know why they just don't get consumer feed back on things like this to begin with so they can avoid 1300+ 1 star reviews, bad press, etc.
of Spore than anything pirates could ever do. I know I won't buy the game until they remove the DRM. Hopefully the Wii version will turn out to be a decent game.
That being said most people shouldn't need four activations. Unless they're sharing with they're friends. Which is what this is meant to prevent in the first place.
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