EA’s DRM Backfires, Spore Tops 2008 Most Pirated List
I’m sure that you guys remember a couple of months back when people were raising such a big stink over Spore. It wasn’t so much an issue with the game itself, but rather with the DRM which EA chose to infect protect it with. You see, EA knew this was going to be a popular title, and they wanted to send pirates a message, and did so with this really nasty breed of DRM. Apparently pirates got the message, it just wasn’t the one EA was hoping for.
TorrentFreak has been keeping track of pirated game downloads, and released their top 10 list of the most downloaded titles. I’m pretty sure that you can see where this is going, but I’ll spell it out for you. Spore took the number 1 slot by a huge margin. They’ve recorded over 1.7 million downloads since the game was released in September. Note that it managed to claim the number 1 seat in just three months, while numbers 2 and 3 barely hit over a million downloads each, despite the fact that they’ve been available for download all year. Hit the jump for the full top 10 breakdown.
So what have we learned from all of this? We, as rational customers have likely come to understand that if a company is willing to treat us all like pirates by enforcing strict DRM upon us, we’ll become pirates. Of course, I’m sure that EA learned an entirely different lesson. In fact, I’m sure that at this very moment they are having a special meeting to find more ways to limit our gaming experience and cut down on all of that “fun” we’re having.
