Did DRM Make Spore 2008's Most Pirated Game?
While Spore boasted some of the most controversial (and obnoxious) DRM of the year, EA's anti-piracy efforts seem to have been confounded. While Spore's DRM effectively angered a wide swath of gamers who actually did purchase the game, that same DRM apparently did little to prevent Spore from being the most-pirated PC game of 2008. By a long shot.
Under the threat of a class-action lawsuit, EA tried to minimize Spore's piracy rate, but TorrentFreak's statistics speak more clearly than EA's spin:
When we posted about the impressive download rate on Spore - inflated due to the DRM that was put into the game - EA doubted our statistics. EA's Mariam Sughayer said that every BitTorrent download was not a successful copy, and that several downloads didn't work, were buggy, or contained viruses. We wont deny that on badly moderated torrent sites, malicious torrents probably can be found. However, this constitutes less than 1% of the available torrents, and they are not added to our statistics.
The list itself:
- Spore (1,700,000)
- The Sims 2 (1,150,000)
- Assassins Creed (1,070,000)
- Crysis (940,000)
- Command & Conquer 3 (860,000)
- Call of Duty 4 (830,000)
- GTA San Andreas (740,000)
- Fallout 3 (645,000)
- Far Cry 2 (585,000)
- Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 (470,000)
What do we think? Some say that Spore's evil DRM drove otherwise square gamers to piracy; others say a popular game gets pirated more because it's popular. I'm of the opinion that it's a mixture of the two, but that Spore's DRM made it much, much easier to justify piracy.
Spore Tops List of 2008's Most Pirated PC Games [GamePolitics]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, In the News on 9 December 2008
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: ea, piracy, spore, torrentfreak
3D iPhone glasses. Why?
I would also add that Spore had been hyped for many years, and the final product wasn't as impressive as at least I had hoped, so there's probably a good rate of try-before-you-buy underlying those statistics.
That's the most elusive and potentially useful figure I'm interested in: Of the people who torrent a game, how many keep it and use it? How many try it and delete it? How many end up buying the real thing, and how many bought the real thing beforehand but went on to download a hacked copy just to get rid of the DRM?
I bought Scrapland years ago, and downloaded a StarForce patch for it somewhat more recently, but I still haven't touched the dumb game because I can't trust it and the hacks look like a pain. DRM destroyed that game for me.