Plenty of people have downloaded Spore using BitTorrent, but EA doesn’t seem too concerned. Because on Earth 2, where EA is apparently based, people downloading torrents of the game doesn’t necessarily mean that the game is being downloaded.
Nope, that makes no sense to us, either.
Says an EA rep:
Stepping aside from the whole issue of DRM, people need to recognize that every BitTorrent download doesn’t represent a successful copy of a game, let alone a lost sale…. We’ve talked to people that made several unsuccessful attempts to download the game and ended up with incomplete, slow, buggy or unusable code. In one case, a file identified as Spore contained a virus.
Well, I’d like to meet, interview, then tease the person who’s not able to hop on The Pirate Bay, type in “spore,” then have a fully working copy of the game in a few minutes.
Perhaps EA should re-consider using SecurROM, lest it run into more of this piracy nonsense.
Hmmm, my bootleg copy of Spore works great, that doesn’t however change the fact that Spore sucks.
El Beetorren en espanol!
The pointless FUD that EA is trying to suggest here about the torrent aside, they are completely correct in that not all or even a significant portion of down loads translate into a loss of sales. There is no way to say that if the torrent did not exists that the pirates would not pirate it some other way and never buy it, nor that joe consumer torrent and not buy. Equating downloads with lost sales is the same smoke job that the RIAA and other dirty dirty names have been blowing for years. Many studies have shown just the opposite, that wide illegal distribution has actually created revenue by generating a larger base.
Course EA would probable have sold more copies vs. torrents if they had not put on the heavy handed DRM to annoy direct customers, something the torrent dose not suffer from :p. Proving once again that DRM is dumb and only costs customers and companies and does nothing to block illegal distrobution.
Yet sales of spore have been great, despite hte torrents and despite EA trying to shoot themselves in the foot with DRM. Go figure, a good game a good movie, good music will always win. It’s only crappy releases that don’t.
This is boardroom politics at work. Some exec somewhere made a case for DRM and won, it`s impossible to back down now because of pride. That`s where EA`s `policy` comes from and is why it is so disconnected from the real world.
EA made a mistake and lost a lot of sales, because someone didn`t have the guts to admit they were wrong. Many people who might have bought this game will spend there disposable income elsewhere.
DRM is a failure for EA, all you can argue about is the magnitude.
Where can i get a bootleg copy?