Spore, as a game has been a success, its received good reviews and the people who have bought the game have been happy with the way it plays and the enjoyment they get out of it.
There is another side to this game though that has hundreds of users unhappy and they are using the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon, to show EA just how unhappy they are.
The issue in question is the anti-piracy measures EA have put into place on this game which only allows users to install the game three times before they would have to phone customer services and ask very nicely that they allow them to install it again.
At the time of writing, there are 128 customer reviews on Amazon, 110 of which are 1 star ratings. There are only six 5 star ratings, three of which were written in 2006, way before the game was even released.
The majority of the users feel as if they are renting the game at full retail price and I tend to agree. How can EA dictate how many times you can install a game that you paid for with your hard earned money. It is yet another instance of the honest consumer getting stick with problems because of piracy.
So has it at least worked? Not at all, cracking group Reloaded had already cracked the game on release day. Every single torrent site on the web has spore torrents up. So after all the hassles EA have caused the honest consumers problems and their piracy measures didn’t even do their job.
EA better sit up and take notice, this isn’t just consumers complaining on an Internet forum anymore, this is now very much in the publics eye now and could easily hinder their sales. It will be interesting to see if EA address this now or if they just pretend it isn’t there.
Source: Kotaku
Last Updated: September 8, 2008
Banana hammock
September 8, 2008 at 14:40
The only way the little guy can win is if he get’s all his little guy buddies and they join together to make a BIG GUY statement.
Kudos to all those who posted, that’s how you change the world. EA you fail big time on this, if you are going to hurt the consumer at least make sure the reason you’re doing it works.
Syph1n
September 8, 2008 at 15:21
I bought the game for R350 on friday for the wife and im not gonna play online due to cap restrictions. My friend downloaded torrent today and has exactly same game as me with unlimited reinstalls… This is the reason i dont buy pc games anymore…
Brett
September 8, 2008 at 16:06
Exactly, and now you lose R350 and your friend is the happier.
I gave up on pc games a long time ago and its stories like this that make me glad I did.
Bretts last blog post..Castle Crashers Getting Additional Content
Nick
September 8, 2008 at 19:06
Its sad when the pirate gets the better package…
jak
September 8, 2008 at 19:24
True but there is nothing you can do about it.
Vamp
September 9, 2008 at 09:30
I could never understand how somebody could think that limiting
someone that actually PAID for the product out of their own free
will, when they could’ve just as easily pirated it, is even
REMOTELY close to a good idea? Surely there must be some better way?