So, days before Spore hit store shelves, with its controversial DRM, it’s been cracked. Whoops.
To continue to harp on a previous point of mine, the Games Industry needs to figure out how to better commodify their art (that being ‘interaction’.) Gamers, moreso than any other group of media consumers, are technologically savvy. TV, film, music… Every other group’s lower savvy presents, relatively, a higher collective barrier for its consumers to partake in piracy and the likes. Gamers? We STARTED this shit by downloading shareware off of BBS’. Torrents are as easy as a TV remote, p2p is laughable, and even newsgroups are child’s play, to be honest. If you want to stop gamers from pirating your product, then you have to figure out a way to make games impiratable, (yes, I just created a word (at least in the English language.)) Good luck with that.
On the other hand, consider how many gamers have heard about Spore’s DRM and will now say “Eh, I’ll just pirate it.” I mean, the online component of downloading animals can be ‘gotten around’ by just downloading the thumbnails of pals’ creations anyway. It’s silly, how developers insist on shooting themselves in the foot like this.