Bang the DRM Slowly

Crispy Gamer examines digital rights in PC games.
10/2/2008 7:12 PM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 3

Erich Remarque of Magnolia, Arkansas is pissed. After waiting three years to play Spore, he's being treated more like a suspect than paying customer.

"[Spore] incorporates a draconian [digital rights management (DRM)] system that requires you to activate over the internet, and limits you to a grand total of 3 activations," he writes in his glaringly critical review of the game on Amazon.com. "If you reach that limit, then you'll have to call EA in order to add one extra activation. That's not as simple as it sounds, since when you reach that point EA will assume that you, the paying customer, are a filthy pirating thief."

Emotion may have got the best of Remarque, but he has reason to be upset over Spore's limited use policy, which is extreme. And he's not the only one who thinks so. At the time of writing, 85 percent of 3,000 user reviews on Amazon.com have given Spore a one-star (out of five) rating, almost all of them slamming the strict digital rights management employed by Electronic Arts.

The livid response was enough to force a quick change of heart from EA, however. DRM is still present in Spore, but EA has increased the number of possible activations from three to five, added activation transfers that allow users to "de-authorize" an existing activation and transfer it to another computer, and promised more leniency in extending additional activations by phone should the need arise.

Will the Spore uproar make publishers think twice about using DRM in the future to deter piracy, or will DRM become business as usual for PC games?

Since the dawn of copy machines

DRM is nothing new. Forms of copy protection have been used to thwart software piracy for decades, through more obtrusive methods than DRM.

In 1984, customers who purchased the seminal space trading game Elite were presented with an on-screen code that was indecipherable without Lenslock, a small plastic lens included with retail copies of the game. Players held Lenslock against their monitors to read and enter the code, which verified their purchase and allowed them to continue playing. (Luckily for Elite publisher Acornsoft, Amazon user reviews weren't yet invented.)

Modern DRM techniques are subtler. The most prevalant technology used in PC games today is Sony's SecuROM, which discourages duplication by limiting the number of possible installations. Major licensees for SecuROM include EA (Spore, select The Sims expansions, Mass Effect, Crysis Warhead and others) and Take-Two Interactive (BioShock on the PC).

But a growing number of consumers assert that SecuROM behaves similarly to malware (a catchall phrase for software designed to affect a user's machine without their consent, such as spyware and viruses), an accusation playing a major role in a recent class-action lawsuit against EA. According to the 36-page document filed by law firm KamberEdelson, Spore installs SecuROM onto users' machines without their knowledge, has adverse effects on their machines, and cannot be easily removed.

And the gaming community's response to SecuROM is almost universally one of outrage. On the official Mass Effect forums, a thread started by BioWare's Chris Priestly outlined BioWare's and EA's official response to the debate over Mass Effect's DRM. It reached 75 pages before being locked and continued in a separate thread.