BioWare’s spiritual successor to the Baldur’s Gate series, Dragon Age: Origins, will ship without the unpopular SecuROM digital rights management and copy protection software that has been attached to previous Electronic Arts games. More »
If only that were a joke headline. When we told you yesterday that Activision had left the PC Gaming Alliance, we were told that other parties had at the same time signed up.
Publisher Electronic Arts has released a De-Authorization Management Tool for PC gamers afflicted with one of its many catalog titles packaged with SecuROM for digital rights management. This is for you, disgruntled Mass Effect owner.
For many of you (not many of everyone, if you look at the sales charts), Spore’s iron-fisted DRM was a big turn-off. Well, after promises, now EA have delivered, freeing up the game’s installs.
I’ll say this for Rockstar – they do like a controversy. Usually, though, they go in for cool controversies like sexy mini games or the sensationalised depiction of car crime and bullying.
For a while there, the whole SecuROM thing overshadowed the actual release of Spore. Which when you consider how high-profile a release Spore was is kind of a big deal. As a result, your thoughts on DRM are clear. But what about EA’s thoughts? Well, according to EA boss John Riccitiello, the number of people who even noticed it, let alone cared about it, was minuscule. We implemented a form of DRM and it’s something that 99.8 percent of users wouldn’t notice. But for the other .2 percent, it became an issue and a number of them launched a cabal online to protest against it.
When Spore owners were silenced by forum moderation staff for posting one too many SecuROM/DRM complaints on the game’s official message boards, the internet-going masses were worked up into a lather. “Censorship!” they cried. “Business practices to which I don’t agree with!” they shouted. A vague warning about your Spore user account being banned in conjunction with your forum account likely didn’t help matters, giving the impression that loose talk about copy protection could render your game useless.
More responsible forum moderators tried to clear the air yesterday and EA itself let us know that the warning was completely out of line and, more importantly, totally inaccurate.
Whenever you find large numbers of unhappy people, you’re bound to find a lawyer. In this case it’s Alan Himmelfarb with KamberEdelson of Vernon, California, who has filed a class-action suit against EA over the DRM in EA’s Spore. The suit, filed Monday with the Northern California District Court on behalf of plaintiff Melissa Thomas and “all consumers globally who have purchased the Spore computer game”, addresses complaints that consumers are not fully aware of what exactly SecuROM does on their system, and also cites a separate program that installs on the control centre of the computer and can disrupt system functions. Plaintiffs demand disgorgement of unjust profits and damages for trespass, interference, unfair competition and consumer law violations.
You can see the full suit in PDF form over at Courthouse News. It’s rather lengthy, containing excerpts from EA’s FAQ as well as quotes from Amazon.com reviews, oddly enough. Looks like someone’s done his homework. EA might even have to assign two lawyers to deal with this one.
‘Spore’ Hijacks Computers, Class Claims [Courthouse News via GamePolitics - Thanks Brendan]
