DRM mess damages Spore's sales evolution

by Stevie Smith - Sep 25 2008, 13:00

LucasArts may currently be rolling around naked in the lake of cash produced by the 1.5 million first-week unit sales amassed by Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, but it’s not the only new gaming experience to have posted impressive retail numbers over the last few days.

Specifically, Will Wright’s eagerly anticipated and much-hyped Spore, which has been developed by Maxis (The Sims) and published by third-party behemoth Electronic Arts, has now sold more than one million units since it hit stores on September 07.

And that’s a figure perhaps equating to more commendable consumer attention for Will Wright’s latest gaming opus given that The Force Unleashed is available on all the current home and handheld console formats (360,PS3,Wii,PS2,PSP,and DS), while Spore is only running on major platforms such as the PC and Mac.

Though also available on the Nintendo DS, the handheld Spore Creatures is a significantly scaled down version of the desktop game and is a structured, mission-based adventure as opposed to a massive and open sandbox universe.

The president of EA, Frank Gibeau, certainly seems to think so, claiming that: “Spore is a hit,” while also noting that Will Wright’s latest creation “delivers an incredibly diverse game that appeals to casual gamers and the core alike.”

“We’re off to a great start moving into the holiday season and believe Spore will deliver a platform of creativity for gamers of all stripes for years to come,” trumpeted Gibeau regarding the user-generated content and accessibility of the overall game.

To bolster that view, EA also announced that gamers have already utilised the wide-ranging aspects of Spore’s creature-creation tool to upload in excess of 25 million different usable monsters and beasties to the official Sporepedia online creature index.

It hasn’t all been sunlight and roses for Will Wright’s ambitious evolution-based epic however, with the game coming under severe attack regarding the ever-contentious use of digital rights management (DRM).

Beyond upsetting Spore owners by limiting system installations to just three before locking the game down (this has since been amended to five), EA is facing a class action lawsuit regarding the default installation of immoveable SecuROM copy protection software, which is being labelled as malware and spyware due to it monitoring the host computer to prevent software copying.

With the DRM issue causing such an uproar, Forbes has reported that up at least 500,000 potential Spore buyers chose to forego supporting the game via retail in its first week of release, instead illegally downloading it from online file-sharing networks.

If that download figure is accurate, Spore could potentially have topped The Force Unleashed in opening sales if it weren’t for the unfortunate DRM backlash.

According to the class action allegations brought before the North District of California Court, Electronic Arts “intentionally” hid the freestanding SecuROM software, which is “secretly installed to the command and control center of the computer (Ring 0, or the Kernel) and [is] surreptitiously operated, overseeing function and operation of the computer, and preventing the computer from operating under certain circumstances and/or disrupting hardware operations.”

The suit also claims the covertly installed DRM program utilises some of the host system’s processing resources in order to “transmit information back to EA.”

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