Spore's DRM being protested on Amazon

[Xiahou]

I'm kind of surprised Ars didn't run the experiment under real-life conditions. Install the game on machine A. Install the game on machine B. Update graphics card on machine A. Add memory to machine B. Change hard drive on machine A and install. Downgrade B from XP to Vista and install. Upgrade A from Vista to XP and install.

These are the types of things that gamers do over the lifecycle of their PCs.


The fact that your ability to play the game is slaved to the activation server, which may or may not be running 5 years down the line when you dust off the disk, is the main "philosophical" controversy in my mind.

Yeah, I skimmed the article and the author came off as a bit dense. Everyone who is at all "techie" should know that reinstalling the game on the same machine without any other changes does not use up an installation allotment. I thought the best line was the one that they made so little of:

he quickly determined that there was a network issue on their side; Spore's authentication servers were down.

Having a single-player game installed and not being able to play it due to remote server problems is completely outrageous imo. That was what soured me on the online activation approach to DRM way back at HL2's release.