We found it utterly ironic when Tobold complained about EA releasing Spore sans DRM via Steam. That’s because Tobold’s complaint is rooted in the fact that he was a “good little customer” who bought Spore upon release, whereas the Steam-distributed version doesn’t contain the DRM that critics of the brick’n mortar distribution had to deal with.
…please, if you remove DRM from your games, make that valid for *all* customers. Offer a patch for Spore, Mass Effect, and the other games which removes SecuROM from the original version. Otherwise you’re just teaching people to not buy your games when they come out, but wait until you publish the more consumer-friendly version.
This is where the irony comes in. Tobold loves World of Warcraft (WoW), and his chief passion is blogging about it and other MMOGs. Yet WoW is arguably the biggest offender in the current MMOG offering in which players who bought the title at release end up with a very different product than they have today. This hails not only from the base gameplay changes that occur when one moves from a solo leveling game to a group-based raiding game, but also from the drastic differences in class design. Not only does a class rolled today play different when it hits end-game, but the core concepts behind some classes have changed entirely since WoW’s release. Some classes were nerfed, others buffed, but in the end, player experiences with WoW in 2004 are very different than what they are today.
So Tobold, if you can deal with WoW’s changes after having spent many hundreds of dollars on the game, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to shrug off any annoyance at the new, DRM-free Spore.
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