Spore – a few days later

I have now played Spore a few days and I have very mixed feelings about it. Unfortunately the most fun so far is the creature creator which was given away free, of course the added context of the game makes it more interesting.

The main drawback as I see it is that I thought the game (ie outside of the creature creator) would have more influence over the options available and that you would have evolution and not simply a re-creation every time you “evolve”. You can throw away any limb for a new better one or totally re-arrange your spine between every evolutionary step! Also the choices you make, how you fight and learn, have zero or no influence on how you choose to evolve. You can very well throw away that beak that have handed you an advantage in every fight so far but now you want something more classy. This isn’t evolution, this is Intelligent Design.

A secondary drawback isn’t really about the game but how Electronic Arts (EA) decided to distribute it. Unaware to me when I bought it I now realize I bought a game that EA can choose to “disable” at 3 months notice. This spurred an on-line demonstration by anti-DRM people to post 1 star reviews on Amazon for the game, at the time of writing the game have 2369 review of which 2133 are 1 star (worst score). Some other reviewers dismiss the complaints as childish but there are some very valid points in my opinion. First off all, you get to install the game 3 times only, after that you would have to contact EA for them to unlock more installations. This means you can only reinstall your computer, buy a new computer or otherwise restore an old backup etc 3 times and after that you can’t play the game anymore. Secondly the activiation service is hosted by EA but they reserve the right to disable it with a 3 months notice. This means that EA can, if they want to, simply disable the service in a year or so and again you cannot play your game anymore. Why would they some ask, a simple answer might be that if they some day released Spore 2 then disabling Spore 1 might increase the sales?

The DRM debate is all over the Internet now and while the intent is to protect against software piracy the effect seems to be just the opposite. We now have a game that is downloaded alot according to several sources and at the same time those who suffer under the DRMs restrictions are those who acctually payed for the game.

As if all this wasn’t enough Kotaku.com recently reported that despite earlier promises of multiple accounts (for family members), Spore does not support this and instead every family member needs to buy their own copy of the game.

As a collector of games I very much fear the turns the DRMs have taken recently, unless the vendors decide to release patches that remove the DRM at the end of the games life cycle I might end up with unplayable games some years down the road. I still bring up ten year old games every now and then, Star Craft, Red Alert (#1), X-com, Sim City… I still reinstall these games and enjoy these games and I really hope I can continue to collect new games and enjoy them for several years to come.