How Spore ruined Christmas (or, DRM fail!)

Posted by james on Dec 9, 2008 12:00 AM

I found what I thought to be a great gift for this coming Christmas. It's a video game called Spore by the creator of Sim City and other games. It's been highly anticipated, and some friends of mine told me how fun it was to play. You can guide the evolution of a single celled organism all the way up through civilization and space exploration. Sounds awesome and interesting. But I'd also heard some issues with the DRM it uses, so I decided to research it.

Turns out Spore uses a DRM technology that means you have to authenticate it on the internet in order to play it. Originally they wanted to authenticate all the time, and if Spore was unable to contact the authentication servers for 10 days then it would disable itself. This is a horrible idea. Granted, many people will play online and wont have to worry about this. But there are plenty of times you might want to play disconnected, and how awesome would it be to play the game on a plane or at a house without internet only to have it shut off. Lame! They loosened that so now you only have to authenticate when you install and when you play online. Still a stupid idea. If you have to reinstall and don't have internet at the moment, you're screwed. They also limited the installs to 3 times. 3!!! When you run out, then you either have to call them up to ask them for an extra authentication (which they may or may not give, at their discretion), or you're screwed. Again. After a lot of controversy, they upped the limit to 5 installs. Yeah, great.

Besides the idiocy of the Spore's DRM scheme to begin with, the bigger concern here is the longevity of Maxis' (Spore's publisher) authentication servers. What happens when Maxis turns the server off? The argument they would make is that they wont turn the servers off. But that's a load of crap, not even they can guarantee that. They could go out of business, or more likely after a while it wont make business sense to keep the servers running. So they notify all users, "Thanks for playing our game. Now buy something else, 'cause we're turning it off forever." And then you're screwed.

Many people would argue that a "big company" like Maxis won't turn off the servers anytime soon, that that would be commercial suicide. And yet, it's happened with companies like Walmart, Yahoo, and Microsoft. All of those companies have had DRM authentication servers online for just a few years, and then decided to turn them off. "Thanks for paying us for music. Unfortunately, you wont be able to listen to it anymore. Have a great day!"

While those companies have made decisions to extend deadlines or offer gift certificates to reimburse users, the point here is that you cannot count on a companies servers to be online forever, even a company as big (and seemingly permanent) as Microsoft. Many people have stated that you cannot buy DRM'd content; you are only renting it. And I agree with that statement. If another company has control over whether you can use the content you "bought" from them, then you're really just renting it until they see fit to remove your access. And there's no guarantee that you'll be given any kind of reimbursement.

Maxis has stated that they hear their customer's frustrations but hope customers understand that DRM is a necessary part of their business model. I'd say "we don't", but I can't really include myself in "their customers." I will not be buying Spore, for myself or anyone else, so I'm not really one of their customers. I've decided that I wont be buying any kind of DRM'd content that has these problems. Those companies simply do not deserve my money, and do not deserve to profit off their rental content masquerading as content you can buy. Quite simply put, it's just a lie they tell to make a sale. I've talked to car salesmen before and I've had enough of that, thanks.