Gamer backlash against Spore DRM
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
AAA games as we know them will peak and then decline. The PC is inexorably moving towards a fully open-standard platform on which DRM-laden products cannot work. Consoles don't suffer the same problem, but by cutting themselves off from an open world and locking the hardware specs at a fixed low level, they force development costs considerably higher. The Wii points to a future console market that seeks disruptive hardware innovations over a market-share battle, but development costs mean that third parties will have few incentives to participate in such a market.
Also, games with a large engineering scope have an astonishingly poor track record. Games with a high content scope are much more likely to succeed.
You've gotta wonder - how do game developers write code BLIND?! Because they obviously all are, as they don't see how much people hate DRM, and that pirates crack it every time! Though I've gotta find out how to do it, I could work in the day - and contribute to open source projects at night while I'm asleep! Woah!
However, before judging on the qualities of game developers one should better understand the world that they live in. They live in the world of 20th century show business, not your 21th century web development world. That's the world where channels are narrow and the technologies involved are expensive. That's the world of "short tail".
There is a real need in at least two distinct parties: developers and publishers, and maybe others such as producers. As computer technology marches forward, it gets more and more expensive to master, which means bigger budgets, which means both smaller number of games and larger audiences needed to make a game profitable. Bigger budgets and larger audiences makes publishers increasingly more cautious, so they pressure developers harder and harder to subdue to their perception of mass appeal. On the other hand, publishers, in their effort to protect as much of their revenue as they can, enforce copy protection on the games they release, including DRM.
I think the developers in general are not fond of DRM, but it's not them who decide. The developers would also be happy to make richer games, but they get pressured into diluting their product so that it would sell. The Maxis Software and Will Wright have an outstanding track record of making innovative games that sell well, so they should have had as much freedom as it gets in negotiating terms with the publisher and developing the product the way they want, but if you followed the development process from the prototypes you will notice how it got diluted too.
Bottom line: given the current state of the industry, we should be happy to get what we get. DRM sucks and I hope that the publisher will remove it if public resentment weighs something (which I doubt), and it is certainly out of developers' reach.
You have to prove your point if you want it to be taken seriously.
The advantage of highly multiplayer-centric games is that they are easier to protect against piracy; either by requiring an account to play online (which can be terminated) or by preventing identical CD keys from playing simultaneously. This can be circumvented by playing on a LAN or using Hamachi, but both solutions only work well with a specific coordinated group.
Spore's creature sharing multiplayer is easily sidestepped by piracy; it's possible to download all the user-created creatures via torrent post release. As that's the only multiplayer component of the game, there's very little difference in terms of piracy between Spore and any other single-player focused game.