Is it just me, or is calling this about \u201cpiracy\u201d missing the point here? (and, in case this isn’t obvious enough: yes, this is a deliberately very flippant post, but the points are serious :) )<\/p>\n
EDIT: just for the record, I actually bought and played the game<\/a>, quite a lot. Although don’t expect a professional review there :). But here\u2019s the funny thing: the DRM mechanisms that EA put into Spore IMHO have almost nothing to do with piracy. As has been pointed out – many<\/a> many<\/a> times by now – the pirates had a copy of Spore *before the game launched*, and only the \u201cnormal customers\u201d were affected by the DRM.<\/p>\n EA\u2019s not stupid. They knew perfectly well that this would happen. So, why did they do it?<\/p>\n Well, there\u2019s one possible answer that leaps to mind: it\u2019s actually to prevent second-hand sales of the game. This is a place that EA is losing money every year and really wants to cap. As many have observed, many of the \u201cpirated downloads\u201d of normal games are by people who would never pay for the game instead. It includes people who download a game in order to \u201ctry before they buy\u201d, and people who never pay for anything. I\u2019m not defending either behaviour, but \u2026<\/p>\n \u2026 the second-hand retail sales market is one where every purchaser is handing over real cash when they get the game. And not a single cent goes to the publisher (EA). You can argue all you want over the \u201ctrue cost of piracy\u201d, but the \u201ctrue cost of 2nd hand sales\u201d is well known – it features in the annual reports of all the computer-games retailers, who proudly talk about how many bajillions of dollars profit they\u2019re currently making out of 2nd-hand retail sales.<\/p>\n Many of my esteemed industry colleagues believe the solution is simple, yet unpalatable to many a publisher who finds \u201cgreed\u201d is part of its corporate mantra: they need to stop overcharging for 1st-hand (new) retail games. None of us expect EA et al to do this for a long time, not until they lose masses of market share more than they have already, because they would presumably see it as throwing away money. (I think the rest of us see it as \u201caccepting that a disruptive change has happened in the market and that if you don\u2019t change you WILL go out of business, so its best to change sooner rather than later\u201d).<\/p>\n Instead, I suspect that some clever people at EA thought they had a \u201cbetter\u201d solution that would avoid having to lower their prices to a level that the market considers acceptable. They would limit the number of installs you could do of each game. To three. Including hardware changes – like upgrading your graphics card. Hmm.<\/p>\n This is a war.<\/p>\n Phase one – Lawyers: \u201cEULAs declare that you don\u2019t own stuff that you legally own\u201d (failed) I wonder what\u2019s next? Perhaps:<\/p>\n Phase four – Denial: \u201cRIGHT! That\u2019s IT! We\u2019re not making any more games for you ungrateful bastards!\u201d<\/p>\n No?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Is it just me, or is calling this about \u201cpiracy\u201d missing the point here? (and, in case this isn’t obvious enough: yes, this is a deliberately very flippant post, but the points are serious :) ) EDIT: just for the record, I actually bought and played the game, quite a lot. Although don’t expect a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n
\n(For the 1% of the population who hadn\u2019t noticed, Spore has become – in a very short space of time – one of the most pirated games of all time<\/a> [c.f. piratebay top list<\/a>]. Certainly, the most rapidly, prolifically, and unapologetically pirated. And, to make it more interesting, a very large number of people paused long enough to comment – publically – on why they were pirating it<\/a>, with many of them saying they WANTED to purchase it (or, in many cases, in fact HAD purchased it), but were refusing to because EA had put a nasty DRM solution in there.)<\/p>\nArr!<\/h4>\n
CLUE!<\/h4>\n
WTFOMGBBQ!<\/h4>\n
\nPhase two – PR: \u201cSecond hand market is as good as theft; don\u2019t buy second hand games\u201d (failed)
\nPhase three – Technology: \u201cWe\u2019ll prevent you from using the things you\u2019ve already paid for\u201d (unknown, but \u2026 doesn\u2019t seem to be going so well, judging by Spore\u2019s Amazon reviews)<\/p>\n