[Source Kotaku]

EA Respond To DRM Complaints

Electronic Arts have sent us a statement regarding their roundly-criticized Spore DRM policy.

In it, EA Games Label President Frank Gibeau states that the company assumed consumers would understand the need for DRM because "if games that take 1-4 years to develop are effectively stolen the day they launch, developers and publishers will simply stop investing in PC games" but concedes that a number of customers have strong objections and that EA need to adapt their policy to accomodate them.

Full details of the changes can be found after the jump, but it is worth noting that Gibleau does not address the concerns that many gamers have about the choice of SecuROM as Spore's copy protection in particular.

Two weeks ago EA launched SPORE – one of the most innovative games in the history of our industry. We’re extremely pleased with the reception SPORE has received from critics and consumers but we’re disappointed by the misunderstanding surrounding the use of DRM software and the limitation on the number of machines that are authorized to play a single a copy of the game.

We felt that limiting the number of machine authorizations to three wouldn’t be a problem.

· We assumed that consumers understand piracy is a huge problem – and that if games that take 1-4 years to develop are effectively stolen the day they launch, developers and publishers will simply stop investing in PC games.

· We have found that 75 percent of our consumers install and play any particular game on only one machine and less than 1 percent every try to play on more than three different machines.

· We assured consumers that if special circumstances warranted more than three machines, they could contact our customer service team and request additional authorizations.

But we’ve received complaints from a lot of customers who we recognize and respect. And while it’s easy to discount the noise from those who only want to post or transfer thousands of copies of the game on the Internet, I believe we need to adapt our policy to accommodate our legitimate consumers.

Going forward, we will amend the DRM policy on Spore to:

· Expand the number of eligible machines from three to five.

· Continue to offer channels to request additional activations where warranted.

· Expedite our development of a system that will allow consumers to de-authorize machines and move authorizations to new machines. When this system goes online, it will effectively give players direct control to manage their authorizations between an unlimited number of machines.

We’re willing to evolve our policy to accommodate our consumers. But we’re hoping that everyone understands that DRM policy is essential to the economic structure we use to fund our games and as well as to the rights of people who create them. Without the ability to protect our work from piracy, developers across the entire game industry will eventually stop investing time and money in PC titles.

Mariam Sughayer

Corporate Communications

Electronic Arts

Hopefully this will shut up some of the people needlessly bitching about the Spore DRM. Personally, I think it's pretty nice of them to raise the install count from 3 to 5 and encouraging to hear that they're working on the system to deauthorize install.

Hopefully once the iTunes-esque deauthorization station is in place people will completely stop bitching (but of course we know that will never happen).

 It shuts me up.  I think 5 is completely fair.  Ideally I shouldn't have any limit but the odds of ever using more than 5 is pretty darn slim.  

The fact that the game was up for download... without DRM before the game released pretty much shuts nobody up if they feel like complaining about the DRM's limited intalls policy.

The only thing in the DRM that makes any sense is only letting one game be online at a time.

There entire line of reasoning is complete bull until the DRM actually stops someone from pirating... which, it doesn't since it's already out for download.

My problem is that only 1 online account can be used

Ha, nice thread title ("issue" in quotations).

This is great - "if games that take 1-4 years to develop are effectively stolen the day they launch, developers and publishers will simply stop investing in PC games." I guess developers and publishers continue to invest in PC games because they're stolen BEFORE they launch? 

The DRM issue is quite amusing, I'm curious how and when they'll finally settle this with customers...

The most important sentence of that is:

"...it is worth noting that Gibleau does not address the concerns that many gamers have about the choice of SecuROM as Spore's copy protection in particular."

SecuROM is still there.

I think their real goal is to kill the used games market, not to stop pirating. I wish they would just come out and say it. At least I could respect them for that.

Spore is £35 in the UK, so for starters how about not ripping us off to install it on one machine.
How about a cheaper version at £20 ish that allows you to play it on one machine and the ability to buy further licences online that allows you to use the same disk on other machines.

They can cry about it, but that still doesn't dispute the fact that the game was available for download without any DRM restrictions before the game was out for purchase. It's a step in the direction to lessen how restrictive the DRM is that's already in place for the game, but launching the game without that crap would have been better.

When it comes to the 'issue' as Twestern puts it, it's obviously a big 'issue' considering the amount of attention it's getting and the amuont of crap people have had to put up with not only for a game like Spore, but numerous other games that have software that can screw with your computer... the paying customer's computer.

You mean you'd like additional accounts to play at separate times?  Or you'd like accounts that can be played at the same time?  Because the latter is totally bad.