Gamer backlash against Spore DRM(arstechnica.com)
arstechnica.com
Gamer backlash against Spore DRM
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080908-gamers-fight-back-against-lackluster-spore-gameplay-bad-drm.html
5 comments
Meanwhile, Spore was cracked on the day of release, and pirates are enjoying DRM free Spore!
You've gotta wonder - how do game developers write code BLIND?! Because they obviously all are, as they don't see how much people hate DRM, and that pirates crack it every time! Though I've gotta find out how to do it, I could work in the day - and contribute to open source projects at night while I'm asleep! Woah!
You've gotta wonder - how do game developers write code BLIND?! Because they obviously all are, as they don't see how much people hate DRM, and that pirates crack it every time! Though I've gotta find out how to do it, I could work in the day - and contribute to open source projects at night while I'm asleep! Woah!
I fully understand your grudge towards DRM.
However, before judging on the qualities of game developers one should better understand the world that they live in. They live in the world of 20th century show business, not your 21th century web development world. That's the world where channels are narrow and the technologies involved are expensive. That's the world of "short tail".
There is a real need in at least two distinct parties: developers and publishers, and maybe others such as producers. As computer technology marches forward, it gets more and more expensive to master, which means bigger budgets, which means both smaller number of games and larger audiences needed to make a game profitable. Bigger budgets and larger audiences makes publishers increasingly more cautious, so they pressure developers harder and harder to subdue to their perception of mass appeal. On the other hand, publishers, in their effort to protect as much of their revenue as they can, enforce copy protection on the games they release, including DRM.
I think the developers in general are not fond of DRM, but it's not them who decide. The developers would also be happy to make richer games, but they get pressured into diluting their product so that it would sell. The Maxis Software and Will Wright have an outstanding track record of making innovative games that sell well, so they should have had as much freedom as it gets in negotiating terms with the publisher and developing the product the way they want, but if you followed the development process from the prototypes you will notice how it got diluted too.
Bottom line: given the current state of the industry, we should be happy to get what we get. DRM sucks and I hope that the publisher will remove it if public resentment weighs something (which I doubt), and it is certainly out of developers' reach.
However, before judging on the qualities of game developers one should better understand the world that they live in. They live in the world of 20th century show business, not your 21th century web development world. That's the world where channels are narrow and the technologies involved are expensive. That's the world of "short tail".
There is a real need in at least two distinct parties: developers and publishers, and maybe others such as producers. As computer technology marches forward, it gets more and more expensive to master, which means bigger budgets, which means both smaller number of games and larger audiences needed to make a game profitable. Bigger budgets and larger audiences makes publishers increasingly more cautious, so they pressure developers harder and harder to subdue to their perception of mass appeal. On the other hand, publishers, in their effort to protect as much of their revenue as they can, enforce copy protection on the games they release, including DRM.
I think the developers in general are not fond of DRM, but it's not them who decide. The developers would also be happy to make richer games, but they get pressured into diluting their product so that it would sell. The Maxis Software and Will Wright have an outstanding track record of making innovative games that sell well, so they should have had as much freedom as it gets in negotiating terms with the publisher and developing the product the way they want, but if you followed the development process from the prototypes you will notice how it got diluted too.
Bottom line: given the current state of the industry, we should be happy to get what we get. DRM sucks and I hope that the publisher will remove it if public resentment weighs something (which I doubt), and it is certainly out of developers' reach.
Interestingly my father brought up the Spore DRM in conversation last night. He plays games but isn't a gamer in the sense that he follows online news or current industry events. It was from a more mainstream outlet that he heard about the DRM backlash on Amazon.
It isn't the developers who make the call on DRM, by a long-shot. Had it not been for pushback from EA developers the DRM on Spore would've been much harsher.
There's lots of other speculation about why PC gaming is on the way out. Shamus Young (http://shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/) generally has the view that PC gaming was killed by a) Excessive focus on graphics (which he has termed "bling mapping"), and b) Overly byzantine DRM. But mainly a, although the response to spore seems to indicate that people gasp actually like owning the things they buy.
PC gaming is not on the way out any more than the cinema is on the way out.
Top-shelf PC games without an integral multiplayer component are dead. It's getting to the point now that sales barely justify straight console-to-PC ports, much less expensive titles like Spore.
Spore is not your average game. In fact, I would say that Spore doesn't fit into current classification of games as single-player vs multiplayer; thus brings state of the industry a step further. I.e. you can play your game in single-player mode just fine, but you also can publish your creatures with a press of a button so that they will be saved on game servers, other players can comment them on the Web and may encounter them in their games.
You have to prove your point if you want it to be taken seriously.
You have to prove your point if you want it to be taken seriously.
Spore's specific combination of single and multiplayer content makes it a prime piracy target.
The advantage of highly multiplayer-centric games is that they are easier to protect against piracy; either by requiring an account to play online (which can be terminated) or by preventing identical CD keys from playing simultaneously. This can be circumvented by playing on a LAN or using Hamachi, but both solutions only work well with a specific coordinated group.
Spore's creature sharing multiplayer is easily sidestepped by piracy; it's possible to download all the user-created creatures via torrent post release. As that's the only multiplayer component of the game, there's very little difference in terms of piracy between Spore and any other single-player focused game.
The advantage of highly multiplayer-centric games is that they are easier to protect against piracy; either by requiring an account to play online (which can be terminated) or by preventing identical CD keys from playing simultaneously. This can be circumvented by playing on a LAN or using Hamachi, but both solutions only work well with a specific coordinated group.
Spore's creature sharing multiplayer is easily sidestepped by piracy; it's possible to download all the user-created creatures via torrent post release. As that's the only multiplayer component of the game, there's very little difference in terms of piracy between Spore and any other single-player focused game.
That game was sooo overhyped. It takes you about 3 hours total to go from the spore to the space age, and at the space age it gets very boring.
AAA games as we know them will peak and then decline. The PC is inexorably moving towards a fully open-standard platform on which DRM-laden products cannot work. Consoles don't suffer the same problem, but by cutting themselves off from an open world and locking the hardware specs at a fixed low level, they force development costs considerably higher. The Wii points to a future console market that seeks disruptive hardware innovations over a market-share battle, but development costs mean that third parties will have few incentives to participate in such a market.
Also, games with a large engineering scope have an astonishingly poor track record. Games with a high content scope are much more likely to succeed.