EA Sued Over Spore DRM

[NuclearShadow]

Since this is a class action lawsuit anyone who bought the game should be able to join it correct? Any idea how I can join it? I bought Spore the day it was released so I should qualify.

 

[duzcizgi]

If they made the games $5 instead of $50, nobody would think about downloading a pirated copy, but go and buy a legit copy. It wouldn't in fact decrease their revenue, as their sales would skyrocket and no piracy at all.

 

[Yuka]

I'm not defending EA here nor the way SecuROM does it's "thing", but...

Isn't SecuROM just another "piece" of software? If there's a way for it to be installed, there has to be a way for it to be uninstalled, right? If EA provides a tool for it's removal, it shouldn't be much of an issue here, am i wrong? Or at least the "true" developer for it (Sony?).

Esop!

 

[cl_spdhax1]

I just joined the suit, but I'm settling for free EA games instead of money. lol.

 

[wasteoftime]

Games are a luxury not a right. I don't go out and steal a ferrari because I can't afford one. If the price is unreasonable you have two options. A) Make more money. I know it seems difficult but even on my salary I can swing a game or two a month. B) Wait until it comes down in price. Believe it or not, after the market is saturated most games come down in price.

And if they made games $5 instead of $50 the gaming industry might not be worth as much as it is, the quality of productions would go down, etc. It's not realistic to sell the product at such a reduced cost if there's demand at the higher cost. If there is a way to make more money, then the video game companies will exploit it just like any corporation.

Also any ideology where someone says "I wouldn't have paid for it anyway so it's not really stealing" is completely false. If you're not going to pay for it anyway, just don't play it. If you really want to play it, pay the people that created it for their labor.

And....Steam rules. I just wish that they sold X-Com that would work in Vista

 

[dihydroman]

I thought spore was a really dumb game. I was hoping drm would crash its sales and it would flop. It's like a real time 3d children's version of civilization. But I didn't like civilization either.

 

[Vikingex]

Wow alot of you sure fell for that bait.

 

[nekatreven]

What Crytek and EA and other companies (and most of you people here) do not seem to understand is that there are still a lot of games that sell like crazy that have little or no DRM.

I'm pretty sure Sins of a solar Empire had none, and it was big. Even if they have some light DRM...you don't see crap this extreme with WOW, or most of blizzard's other stuff (they probably think this is hilarious). These games still get pirated but they are still profitable, because they are ACTUALLY GOOD.

Its real easy to bitch about piracy ruining your sales, but you just look stupid when you're one of only a handful of publishers where its that big of a deal. If they'd just shut up and spend all this time and effort making better games they wouldn't be in this boat.

REGARDLESS of the crap they want to make up about piracy making them have no sales. If that was true, every other company would be in the same boat, and they aren't. EA is a joke.

 

[wavebossa]

[citation][nom]bounty[/nom]WaveBossa, you're missing the point. It's not about piracy. Read the other comments and your own... SECUREROM did NOTHING to the pirates, never had a chance. If it's true there were "Half a million downloads before it came out" you've proven my point. What it will do is prevent resale, screw up a few PC's and piss off alot of paying gamers.[/citation]

No bounty, i'm not missing anything. I know that securerom did ntohing to stop pirates. I even said that if you would have read my post.

I guess i gotta repeat myself. EA is at fault for what they've done, but THE FACT THAT SECUREROM EVEN EXIST is evidence that piracy is out of control. so while your bashing EA, don't forget to bash the pirates as well.

And thank you WasteOfTime for respoding to Balshoy idiotic comment for me. My God, this is the age we live in. An age where people feel entitled to software because they can't afford it and they have an internet connection.

EA = Fail
Pirates = Fail
And sadly computer gaming might follow suit.

 

[noobe1981]

Lmao WOW.. Wave you just eat the stuff EA tells you don't you? This had nothing to do with priracy in the first place. Online cd checking that had to do with piracy, and it actually worked. You can hardly find any good game and play them multiplayer unless you have a legit copy now days.

Securerom is simply to stop reselling. That is its only purpose. And to install anything on somebody elses computer without that person knowning is wrong, and that is what EA did.

In my mind EA has just proven itself to be just as bad pirates, and I hope they get burned for it.

 

[onearmedscissorb]

[citation][nom]duzcizgi[/nom]If they made the games $5 instead of $50, nobody would think about downloading a pirated copy, but go and buy a legit copy. It wouldn't in fact decrease their revenue, as their sales would skyrocket and no piracy at all.[/citation]

If only someone would just TRY this for once...

Considering that a fair portion of what you are paying when you buy a game (or any sort of physical media, really) is the cost of packaging it, shipping it around, and then with those costs taken into account, reseller markup added on top of it, and that games are still often sold for $10 this way, why in the world couldn't someone offer direct downloads for at least that price, if not less?

Because companies like EA are just that greedy. Please stop buying their games. Even though they somehow get their grubby little hands on a whole lot of big name titles, I can't remember the last one that wasn't a disappointment. It's not worth it.

If the PC game industry is dying, then LET IT DIE. Bury it already, and start over. I am tired of not only the DRM, prices, and companies like EA bitching and moaning about piracy when they clearly bring it upon themselves by screwing over paying customers to no end, but most of all, THE CRAPPY GAMES THAT AREN'T WORTH IT TO BEGIN WITH. That's the real problem.

 

[Kami3k]

Only a idiot could actually think this would go through, PC gaming is dying, Piracy is bad and hurts sales, and that feet size is connected to penis size.

 

[Kami3k]

Also only a idiot would actually think DRM does anything to stop piracy. It only promotes it.

The best way to stop piracy is simply to connect games to accounts. Make the account do something, like track stats or something.

 

[wasteoftime]

"Considering that a fair portion of what you are paying when you buy a game (or any sort of physical media, really) is the cost of packaging it, shipping it around, and then with those costs taken into account, reseller markup added on top of it"

A more than fair portion of what you are paying for is the cost to actually develop a game. This is not a music album where you only have to hire an artist, some sound engineers, and a marketing crew. The average video game these days takes a much larger production crew of writers, software engineers, testers, marketing, etc.

WoW doesn't have copy protection? Wow, what about the ACCOUNT that is tied to the NUMBER that is included with the CD? I guess that's not copy protection at all.

Try to burn a copy of Diablo II and tell me they didn't include some level of copy protection....

This problem has been around since the beginning of PC gaming. It doesn't matter how great a game you produce, on some level you want to keep people from stealing it. Remember Tie Fighter? It had a really rudimentary copy protection that pissed me off every time I loaded it (you had to flip for a key-word in a book). Any popular game might have great sales without DRM but a lot of those games are stolen at an alarming rate.

Crysis is a great example of that. Maybe the only people that stole it were people that wouldn't pay 50 bucks for it. Maybe a few of those people that would have paid saw they could torrent it and decided to save their money. At some point, when enough people do that, games become less profitable. No one will put the investment into something that isn't going to be as profitable as they like. Don't forget these people are in business they aren't offering up happy good times for free. These are not just money investments, but time investments.

 

[onearmedscissorb]

[citation][nom]wasteoftime[/nom]"Considering that a fair portion of what you are paying when you buy a game (or any sort of physical media, really) is the cost of packaging it, shipping it around, and then with those costs taken into account, reseller markup added on top of it"A more than fair portion of what you are paying for is the cost to actually develop a game. This is not a music album where you only have to hire an artist, some sound engineers, and a marketing crew. The average video game these days takes a much larger production crew of writers, software engineers, testers, marketing, etc. [/citation]

I didn't say they weren't expensive to produce. I said games are sold for $10, boxed up and marked up in a store. Do they make as much money as when they're sold for $50? Obviously not, but it's still worth bothering, apparently.

Selling them for $5, as someone else suggested, at least as direct downloads, isn't impossible, and that's ONE TENTH of what games cost when they're new. If someone would try it with something on the level of Spore, what is really the risk? They have to make several times as many sales to break even with what they'd have made were it sold for $50 in stores when it comes out, but it would not be 10 times as much. And the games don't stay $50. Especially with computer games, the prices drop VERY fast, and repeatedly. Why not just offer the low price that they can clearly get away with at the start? There's no telling how many more people would buy it until someone tries.

Downloads are the future for EVERYTHING, anyways. It's going to have to come to that at some point, and the sooner, the better. But somewhere in the process of selling all types of media, a bunch of greedy and out of touch old farts manage to hold it back and screw everyone over.

 

[duzcizgi]

[citation][nom]onearmedscissorb[/nom][/citation]
Well, in fact, the market that I am working is sales of mobile games. We don't have DRM. We don't even have "Forward locking" mechanism in our games that we sell. But we sell them for $2-$3 range a piece, so nobody cares about pirating them. We just sell and make profit out of it. Yes our games are direct downloads and yes our games are small in size, but from that $2-$3, 50% goes to the mobile operator. 20% goes to taxes. 15% goes to publisher of the game. And in reality, we have about 15% of it left. And we are still profitable with that 30-40 cents per download. And this is only a single country with only a single operator, out of three operators.

My point is, instead of increasing the costs and end price of the games, (DRM also has a price tag included),they should work on cutting costs and delivering the game cheaper to people, so a 15 year old boy won't think about buying the game illegally. You can't tell a teenager who has a pocket money of less than $100/month to go and buy a game for $50 and cut on everything for a whole month just for the sake of being "honest and support the industry". All he cares is, he doesn't earn money. His money is limited and he wants to maximize whatever he can buy with that money.

 

[badboy4dee]

STFU wavaboss & ungabunga , Valis2345 & noob1981 you go boyzz!! Wava and upabunghole or whateva you guyz need to get a real job! Your prob some corp weenie sitting behind some desk makin 50K+ living with your MOM! Get a grip on reality boyz, if pc games die it cuz corp weenies with their HUGE salaries and bonuses and senseless management of corporate expenses. EA needs a kick in the nads if they had any. You should know that DRM doesn't effect sales whatsoever ...noob. WAVA & Bungahole or whatev do us all a favor and get out of the PC world. It's obviously not for you anymore.

TSM.

 

[wasteoftime]

"I didn't say they weren't expensive to produce. I said games are sold for $10, boxed up and marked up in a store. Do they make as much money as when they're sold for $50? Obviously not, but it's still worth bothering, apparently."

Yeah, it's worth bothering when demand has gone down to a point that warrants it. By the time the game is marked down it's usually recouped the costs of making it. Every once in a while a game might be great but not sell a lot of copies for whatever reason. The price point and demand are perfect at 50 dollars for the company to make substantial profit. Profit is that thing that businesses are interested in. They're not developing your entertainment just so they can break even.

The 15 year old example is still weak. Should we lower the cost of nice cars so that 16 year olds won't be tempted to steal them?


"Selling them for $5, as someone else suggested, at least as direct downloads, isn't impossible, and that's ONE TENTH of what games cost when they're new. If someone would try it with something on the level of Spore, what is really the risk?"

Demand might not rise. Most CDs can be had for around 10 dollars and people would still rather pirate music than pay the 10 dollars. For some pirates the cost doesn't matter it's simply getting the game without cost. Even in your 5 dollar model people will still be tempted to steal because 0 dollars is still less than 5 dollars. The problem might not be the cost of the game but the free alternative existing.

Also demand would have to be 10 times as high to make the same amount of money (that doesn't include distribution costs) and you will go from a profit per item that's actually pretty good to a profit per item that's nearly non-existent. So if your game doesn't meet demand you have no money with which to develop the next game or even to recoup the debt you incurred to make the first game.

Bottom line on Steam is that Steam has not lowered the price of games at all. New games that come out are sometimes marked down 10% and eventually marked down more but a lot of them start out full price. There is still a cost associated with transmitting the information, storing it, and keeping servers maintained, etc. What happens if Comcast, Time Warner, etc decide to institute bandwidth limits? Steam becomes a lot less attractive when games are getting close to 2gb-3gb a pop.

Still I love Steam, I don't want you to think that is an anti-steam comment. Their service is top notch and it's a wonderful service. I'm just saying that box games still have their place.

 

[Guest]

I am new to gameing but loved the Sims games so when Spore came out my husband bought it for me as a gift. I've owned it for TWO WEEKS and have only been able to play it ONE time, I thought it was my computer now I'm finding out that's not the case. Very dissapointing!

 

[Baka To The Future]

badboy4dee -- since when is $50k a year "HUGE"?

Also, DRM does indeed affect sales, but not in the way most seem to latch on to.

bounty1981 has it right -- whatever EA is claiming these days, its DRM is effectively aimed at hampering resellers, e.g. GameStop, and casual piracy (a physical duplicate copy).
Piracy, whether it's happening or not, is just the buzzword of the times.

To conclude: EA sucks. But then, I've been nursing a vicious hatred for them since they dissolved Origin, so what do I know?