spore

It's been a week! A full week! Where the hell were you? Nobody could get anything done, the place is a mess! ITS ALL FALLING APART. WE NEED YOU!

That's what you guys were saying, right? Right?

I would have a long string of excuses here about my lazy, lazy neglect, but I used to hate that when my favourite webcomic artists would do that. You think oh my God, an update, then you click, then you see a black screen (or even worse, a photo of their face bloated with a flu or something) and some long-winded literature about how they fell over the veranda while fighting terrorists on a plane filled with snakes and gosh, just couldn't update. Which is what I'm doing now, really, but shh.

Sorry, Mr. Old Lady

Some stuff about Spore after the click.

Great. Just as I posted the discussion about Spore DRM below, EA just had to come and announce a lot of changes and info about Spore DRM. Bleh.

Most significant change seems to be that EA is allowing 'de-authorisations' to make the installations limit more flexible. Which is great! But when they provide stats to show that most people never activated ME or Spore on more than one computer, well... firstly, maybe they are a lot more wary about activating elsewhere because of the limit? And secondly, if it were me, my source of activations wouldn't come within the first few weeks of the game's release. It would come after months and years. Their stats are bereft of logical context, and thus are misleading - to EA's benefit of course. Standard PR stuff.

Furthermore, EA refused to answer questions about why you couldn't buy a copy of Spore for your family and make multiple accounts for your family members. Essentially, while EA has made some good changes and must be credited for that (you have to suspect that the online protests had some hand in this), the core problems do, by and large, remain. The depressing part is that many people will, again, 'latch on' to EA's soundbite stats about "less than 1% wanting more than 3 activations" or their partial concessions, and extrapolate that to say that all future criticisms of EA and its DRM are unfounded. We're going to see arguments of "shut up about the DRM now, EA fixed it" and "nobody wants more than 3 activations anyway", when neither of those are necessarily true!

And that's the power a major corporation still has, no matter what anyone says about the 'democratic' nature of the internet. A carefully worded press release can work wonders (For them).

I promised, right? Here we go, back to Spore. I'll get off my ass and continue that Fallout 3 series (number one and number two) later this week, as well.

So the other controversy regarding Spore was with its DRM. I shouldn't need to go over the basic facts. EA releases Spore with an 'upgraded' version of the Securom DRM, which limits paying customers to 3 installations (before they have to call to 're-authenticate', whatever that involves), and replaces the cd-check with a one-time online activation. Reviewers get concerned; people get angry. Angry enough to refuse to buy the game, and for +6000 people, angry enough to leave lengthy 1-star reviews on Amazon. Phooey.

While a visual representation of DRM would be appropriate, that was too hard. So, spore!

So the dust is finally starting to settle on one of the biggest game releases this year - Spore. Two controversies came to the fore: regarding the supposed 'lack of depth' in Spore, and regarding publisher EA's 'upgraded' version of the SecuROM DRM. In an ingenious twist, I believe I will talk about the first one first, then the second one second. I hope we can all keep up. Edit: Actually, the first one got pretty long. So I guess DRM talk comes in a couple of days.

So, how good is Spore? While many came up with the predictable rounds of praise for the game, some reviews were unusually critical for a game such a high-profile (and commercially successful) game. The argument is that the game, being divided into five stages, necessarily ends up a series of shallow 'mini-games' that lack depth, and thus replayability. This, of course, was conflated with the ongoing debate about the 'casualisation' of the industry (see here): from what I've heard and read, a number of 'hardcore' gamers (by which I mean gamers who are very involved in the culture) do think that Spore was made for a more 'casual' audience, and that's the reason it's not going to satisfy them.

All Spore tribes come in tiny little octagonal packages. I suspect IKEA.