Reddit mentions of Spore - PC/Mac

I direct you to the original Amazon.com page for Spore. While many of the complaints are about gameplay, almost all reviewers mention the DRM as a negative aspect of the game. Once again, a cracked version of Spore appeared within days of the game's release that didn't limit you to three or four installs per purchase.

And don't forget about the Amazon backlash. Over 1000 1-star reviews and counting!

The recommended daily dose of disappointment is approximately 100 microspores. Any less and you risk going into shock when you inevitably get exposed to the disappointment equivalent of the ending to Battlestar Galactica at .25 spores and above.

The packaging here is incorrect, however. Mass Effect 3 actually contains 5 gigaspores. This is well beyond the recommended daily dose.

Well, that's the thing, Spore was never advertised as a cutesy simple game. Sure, it has some cute elements in terms of the art, but the actual game was supposed to be multilayered and complex. That was the entire point and why they wanted to have those stages. Then they didn't at all deliver on that promise.

The result: http://www.amazon.com/Spore-PC-Mac/product-reviews/B000FKBCX4/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1

How could it be improved? By, I don't know, making the actual game. Since there basically was no game in the end (the dumbed down thing we got wasn't what anyone expected Spore to be), I can only guess, or come up with my own ideas as to how such a game would function, but that has nothing to do with Spore at that point.

I think this is moving away from your core question, though.

In the context of Spore, I'd say simplicity and Spore's original goals were not compatible. For Spore to even remotely make sense, it would have to be fairly complex to combine all the stages well across the board. It'd need a fairly elaborate equation system to calculate various results, no less complex than the itemization and skill system one sees in many ARPG's.

I just wanted to point out that scathing reviews can truly hurt a game's success AND its resale value, preventing a game from being profitable in the future. I think the best examples all come from Amazon.com, because Amazon actually uses a voting system for reviews.

Metacritic doesn't tell the whole story, and here are some examples.

• Look at Bioshock 2 for PC. The top two reviews are one star; resale value is SHIT. Metacritic: 88.
  
  
• Spore. Top reviews are overwhelmingly 1-star. Metacritic: 84
  
  
• Assassin's Creed 2: Top reviews are all 1-star, huge problems with DRM and phoning home. Resale value of the game is shit. Metacritic: 86.
  
  As a counter-point, why does it matter if some games you hate are incredibly successful? I never liked Modern Warfare, CoD, whatever... first person shooters on consoles aren't for me. But their success doesn't hurt me at all. I say, just be happy that big games like that are winning over the masses to appreciate gaming.

All right, I'll try to summarize the issues for you.

First off, EA buys up great game developers and kills them. Maxis, BioWare, Westwood, Mythic, and DICE were all acquired for their intellectual property and their employees split up and laid off. Basically, EA lets the market work out which properties are successful, then they buy them and milk those beloved properties for years without adding anything original. They make several such acquisitions annually.

But Valve buys up great game developers and pays them to work on their properties. They hired Minh Lee (dev of Counter-Strike) to work on CS 1.6. They hired the Narbtacular Drop devs to work on Portal. They hired Robin Walker (dev of Team Fortress) to work on TF2. They hired the authors of the Alien Swarm mod to work on Alien Swarm for Source. They hired on Turtle Rock Studios to add DLC to their game and work on L4D2 after Turtle Rock made Left 4 Dead.

They also make shit games. They release the same sports games year after year with minor improvements, and sell them for $50-$60 over and over. With this massive influx of revenue they can control the rest of the market that we actually care about, by buying out competitors and snatching up the best talent to work on their horrible sports sims.

And, again unlike Valve, they're infamous for abusing their employees with overwork and manipulating vulnerable artists and programmers into working inhumane amounts of overtime without compensation. Workers are promised a short crunch time and then vacation, but after months the crunch never ends; they're just sent to a new project. These workers consider themselves working a dream job, so they don't quit, but the reality is that EA is exploiting them. If you really want to understand why people are angry about EA, read the famous EA Spouse blog; it'll make your blood boil.

DLC is another problem with EA games, especially day-one DLC. People who buy their games find that they need to make additional purchases to get the full experience. The worst part is when you preorder a game and only find out on launch day that part of the game that you paid for will be withheld as premium DLC. If a game has 7 areas, EA will give you six and charge you extra for the seventh, even though it was finished by and budgeted under the release date. Meanwhile Valve has never charged for DLC despite making huge updates to TF2 and L4D and L4D2, and also content updates to CSS and Portal 2.

Finally (and this is what makes me furious) is their DRM. A lot of people, including myself, take this issue extremely seriously, as you can see by the Amazon review breakdown for Spore on the PC. EA continually pushes the envelope for more and more restrictive DRM, standardizing the practice of requiring you to call customer support to get a new activation key when you upgrade your hardware for example. They love coupling your EA account to your games so that you can't play even singleplayer games that you buy used (since EA gets no money for used game sales).

Oh and /r/gaming is super sensitive to EA right now because their support for the Origin platform is godawful. 1 2 3 4

http://www.amazon.com/Spore-Pc/dp/B000FKBCX4/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=videogames&qid=1220936162&sr=8-1

Look at the amazon reviews. 99% 1 star ratings.

Ouch.

The Spore debacle actually led EA to drop most of the most aggressive forms of DRM. No additional DRM for Steam titles and install limits or any such thing from The Sims 3.

Life is what you make it. In my opinion it's about falling in love is the best thing ever. Here it talks about it, but you know, if you kept going down and down and down levels, eventually you'll hit nothingness. So cells i think made up humans in the beginning. Like spore, but more realistic

Oh, what short memories we have...

Let's start with ea_spouse. EA worked the guy into the ground and very nearly destroyed his marriage with 85-hour work weeks, and didn't even have the decency to pay overtime (or comp time!) for the favor.

I hear that's better now.

Or we could talk about Spore. This was far from the first game EA tried this form of DRM on, but it took a serious rating campaign on Amazon before they seemed to even notice that this was pissing people off. At this point, it would be prudent to remember that the DRM in question is called SecuROM, so as to avoid it when other companies license it, but that hardly excuses EA from responsibility for buying into it and for using its activation limit feature.

The EA games I've bought recently on Steam have had only Steam's native DRM, and I'm ok with that.

So now we find out that EA has absolutely fucking terrible customer support, even in an industry which isn't often renowned for decent customer support. But if you think that this is the only problem anyone ever had with EA, you haven't been paying attention. It's not just "a few people" who got burned, it's pretty much every EA employee, enough customers to give Spore a 1.5 star rating on Amazon, and now customers in need of support.

I don't know about you, but I'm seeing a pattern.

Am I going to stop buying EA games? Maybe. At the moment, I do want to reward them for "getting it" about DRM. I made this post about three years ago, where I essentially told them:

> I live in a small town, with low cost of living. I'm single. I make a reasonable wage, so I have a ton of disposable income.... You have lost me as a customer because of DRM.... If Mirror's Edge comes, say, as a Steam game -- not like Bioshock, but actually just a Steam game, with no additional protection -- I'd buy it in a heartbeat. On opening day. Make it DRM-free, and I'll consider preordering.

And, you know, maybe my purchase doesn't make a dent one way or the other, but once EA started doing Steam right, I did buy Mirror's Edge, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

But they just keep fucking up. Maybe it's time to go back to indie games.