Spore seeds rootkit

Fans up in arms, and an array of other evolutionary limbs, over DRM.

It seems more than one unhappy gamer has joined the rebel alliance against EA’s Spore, and voiced their opinion on Amazon’s customer review section of the game’s page.

The main reason behind this demonstration is the install limit that EA has set in place, limiting consumers to just three installs. If you install/uninstall games frequently, have a laptop or simply own more than one computer to game on, you can imagine you’ll be dialing up EA to ask them to reset the install counter, despite the fact you paid top dollar for the game.

Spore is guaranteed to be on its way to becoming a hit, whether you like it or not, but things are going into overdrive. As of the writing of this article, almost 2,000 malcontents have demonstrated their complete insatisfaction with the SecuROM infected game on Amazon.com by scoring the game with a prominent '1-star' rating.

Not only that, but each rebel has voiced quite eloquently the reason they feel so strongly about it, which considering how lazy most of us gamers are – that’s a feat in itself.

Spore is probably the most heavily contested DRM infection ever to walk this Earth (pun intended), it will be one of the most heavily pirated games ever just on a matter of principle. Speaking of which, check out that most infamous of torrent sites, ThePirateBay... what’s that? 7089 seeds, 22062 leeches? *cough*. We can only wonder why...

People who disagree with the DRM infection will simply rip the game, and those who’ve already bought it will want to hang on to cracks so’s they can re-install it as many times as they want.

Sony’s SecuROM has been creeping its way into several EA franchises such as The Sims, Mass Effect and BioShock and will continue to do so, if the EA Support Forums are any indication of the company’s blind belief in SecuROM.

However, cracks of the game were made available on a number of sites an entire week before the official release date. No matter how 'good' Sony claims SecuROM to be, it’s been cracked over and over, and isn’t doing anything except messing with your system registry.

We won’t even go into the reported foul-ups where SecuROM crashes a system entirely or circumvents administrator privileges and security policies without your knowledge. The existence of SecuROM is omitted from the game’s EULA if it’s been purchased on-line and downloaded, because:

“We don't disclose specifically which copy protection or digital rights management system we use - in this case, SecuROM - because EA typically uses one license agreement for all of its downloadable games, and different EA downloadable games may use different copy protection and digital rights management.”

If you’ve purchased the box you simply don’t get an EULA, says the SecuROM FAQ at Spore Customer Help.