Class Action Filed against Spore DRM

It’s kind of old news that the latest Will Wright game, Spore, got slammed for its Digital Rights Management (DRM) measures — it’s got nearly 3,000 Amazon reviews as I write this, and the average rating, which had dipped to one star, is still a measly 1.5 stars.

The newer news (as of Sept. 23, to be precise) is that a class-action suit has been filed against Electronic Arts, the publisher of Spore, because of that DRM.  (Here’s a PDF of the complaint, courtesy of courthousenews.com, if you’d like to read it.)

The complaint itself is focused around the presence of the DRM program SecuROM — that it’s a separate program on the game disc, that it’s installed without consent, that it gives itself high-level permissions, that it can interfere with other programs and otherwise impair the computer it’s installed on, that it’s uninstallable, and that EA doesn’t at any point disclose any of this to people who buy the game.

Among the questions put forth in the suit are “whether [EA] violated consumer protection statutes and/or state deceptive practices statutes” and “whether [EA] concealed crucial details” regarding SecuROM and its operation from the public.

It’s quite an interesting complaint, really.  While I’m not a lawyer, it seems to me that if the case goes forward and is won, then this style of DRM in general will need to change.  At the very least, there might need to be disclosure and consent — even something as simple as another of those “I agree” dialogues.  The trick, of course, is what happens after the purchaser disagrees.  The DRM and program wouldn’t be installed — but computer games can’t usually be returned to the store for a refund.  I suppose it’d need to go through the company, sort of like disagreeing with a EULA does now.

Of course, that’s a whole lot of assumptions.

It’s academic to me.  I didn’t buy Spore.  I would have — I’d been looking forward to its release for over a year — but I’d heard about the DRM after the release of Mass Effect, and I choose not to deal with that hassle.  So I’m kind of hoping this sort of DRM becomes a thing of the past.  (Hey, I can dream.)  As a creative sort, I can understand the reasoning behind DRM, and I sympathize with it in the abstract — but it’s going too far, becoming too intrusive and detrimental.

See, in addition to the SecuROM (as if that’s not bad enough), Spore also requires online activation.  The system Mass Effect used, and Spore was slated to, tried to reauthorize itself online every five days.  If ten days passed with no reauthorization, it locked you out.  Amid a mass of protests, EA patched that part of the system — it now “only” reauthenticates after you patch the game or download new content.

But that’s not all.  It also only allows you to install it three five (now, following more protests) times.  No big deal, right?  Who installs a game multiple times for legitimate reasons?  Well, if your hardware configuration changes sufficiently, that counts as an install.  And it’s not clear what, exactly, is “sufficient.”  Buying an extra hard drive because yours is getting full?  Putting in another gig of memory?  Upgrading your graphics card?  Do you reinstall Windows yearly to clean out all the crud in your registry?  That could be your four extra installs right there.  Better not upgrade to Windows 7 when it comes out, or your game could stop working.  And you can forget installing it on the new computer you’re going to buy three years down the road, you filthy thief, you.

But, hey, there’s no reason anyone would ever play a game that’s that old, right?

I stopped into a GameStop today.  I almost never buy anything there, but I wanted to check on this, and it checks out:  Diablo Battle Chest is still on the shelves.  That contains the first Diablo, which was released January 2, 1997, making it a little shy of 12 years old.  I’ve got the sequel, a 2000 game, on my computer.  I also have Arcanum (2001), Fallout (1997), Baldur’s Gate (1998), Civilization (1991 — although I much more often play the sequel, Civ IV, these days), Pool of Radiance (1988), Might and Magic (1986), and The Lurking Horror (1987).

All of them still work.  Not all of them are “out of the box” any more — some tweaking’s necessary sometimes to get the older titles to run on a modern system.  But they don’t fail because the company’s shut down a server or because, over many years, I’ve installed the game more than three times, or five times, or two dozen times, on various systems.

Roleplaying games in particular have a lot of replay value.  By their nature, I’d argue.  Simulations, similarly.  I’m not too bothered about graphics — if the game’s good, it’s good.

Okay, so modern games for the most part bring a ton of DRM baggage that comes with them.  It’s necessary to stop the pirates, right?

Nope.  Spore was cracked before its street date.  All those hoops you, the honest customer, need to jump through to play the game you bought?  They didn’t stop a single copy from being pirated.  And the pirates don’t have to deal with all of that stuff.  They got a superior product, and they got it first.

I don’t mind admitting that this sort of thing really tempts me to pirate games, sometimes.  You know, you’d think it was a better business decision to give the paying customers the superior product…

Fortunately, there are at least a couple of companies that think that way.  Stardock, makers of Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilizations II, have managed top-selling (and favorably-reviewed) games without the DRM — they provide all sorts of free downloadable content with a registration, instead.  I ordered Sins based in large part on that, in fact, and while I’m still working on picking up the game, I’m favorably enough impressed to recommend it.

Hell, even if it weren’t my thing, I’d find the purchase worth it just to reward a computer-game publisher for actually treating me like a customer.

Anyway, for those of you still following… the next post in the mystery series should be coming before Monday, unless some other story comes up as this one did.  I may have one more post before it, or I may not, depending on how easily the various ideas come out.  The next Battlegrounds article will be some time next week.

Related posts:

1. Out of the Bargain Bin: Sly Cooper
2. Dramatic Timing: The Action Cache