The Lugz

Spore was released, and it failed.

In case you don’t know about the game:

Spore is a multi-genre “massively single-player online game” developed by Maxis and designed by Will Wright. It allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its beginnings as a unicellular organism, through development as an intelligent and social creature, to interstellar exploration as a spacefaring culture. It has drawn wide attention for its massive scope, and its use of open-ended gameplay and procedural generation. (Wikipedia)

Sounds cool, right? Wrong.

The developer, Electronic Arts (EA), put something called DRM on it. DRM is “digital rights management.” It’s the same thing that iTunes uses for the songs you buy from them- you can only install it on a certain number of computers. So basically you’re renting the game, you don’t have full ownership of it. You can only install Spore 3 times. If you want to install it more, you have to buy more cd keys.

Excuse me, but I like to think that when I lay down $50 on a video game, I can actually own it.

Bad move on EA’s part- anyone with a developed mind immediately torrented the game for free. As of September 13, the game has been stolen over 500,000 times according to TorrentFreak. If you multiply 500,000 by $50 (price of the game,) the fact that the game uses DRM has cost EA about $25,000,000.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is beyond fail.

But it is a win for us free-thinking citizens.

This shows the world that DRM does not work. Hopefully, media developers will see this, and stop putting gay restrictions on the digital content that you buy. Another step in the right direction for proper media content management, if the media developers catch on.

Help fight DRM by getting Spore here. If you need help installing, read the instructions.