EA’s DRM spyware on the long-awaited game Spore turns out to have an added side-effect: if you live in a household with multiple players, you all have to share the same account. The game’s manual says otherwise, but after repeated queries on the EA forum, a company spokesperson confirmed this. That’s right—if you’re in a household with several potential Spore players, and you want each of them to have their own account, you will have to buy multiple copies of the game.
From page 52 of the manual:
You may have multiple Spore accounts for each installation of the game.
However, here’s what “EA_violet” wrote on the EA forums in response to complaints that players couldn’t set up multiple accounts:
That section in the manual was a misprint and will be corrected in future printings of the manual. There is one Spore registration/account per game/serial code so you are correct in that you cannot make multiple accounts at this time.
We’re among all those people who waited a long time for Spore to come out, and we’re facepalming at how broken it is, all thanks to EA’s misguided DRM implementation. This particular detail is notable for revealing that at some point in the past it was likely that the game allowed multiple accounts, and that this functionality was removed in order to tighten the DRM net.
forum.spore.com (Thanks to Sir Mildred Pierce!)
(Spore creature: Henjoness)
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Typical EA – not that Spore is actually a game worth buying if you’re over the age of 10. The gameplay couldn’t be more boring or repetitive.
If you want to try the game, just DL the creature creator trial – that’s the most interesting part anyway. The rest is filler between creature additions.
@Adisharr:
Except the creator has the same DRM as the game. Don’t bother.
I never thought I’d be the victim of Goatse while reading Consumerist.
I think the question is being asked incorrectly . . .
Each account supports several planets, theoretically allowing each player to play in a lot of places… And allowing each family member to have their own location. The “problem” is sometimes you don’t want your family member to log in and abuse your creatures or game – especially since the save is current state time saves and non-recursive.
EA is probably thinking, “If you have multiple accounts, you can install it on multiple computers! Bad!” But, since the DRM already locks it down . . it doesn’t seem to be needed.
I think there could be a decent accessibility or fair use argument for this – possibly from the “misprint” of the manual. But at most you’ll get a refund.
Honestly, in the end, I could care less about the DRM. DRM is a joke and will hopefully become useless with time, but in the mean time we live with it and it makes some amount of sense when keeping users aware of what is write or not write.
@maztec: The “problem” is sometimes you don’t want your family member to log in and abuse your creatures or game – especially since the save is current state time saves and non-recursive.
Even without the abuse, wouldn’t you miss out on the whole evolution/extinction of your species while someone else is playing?
@MercuryPDX: Uhmmm, No? Put them on a new planet and they can start from scratch without interfering with you. Not sure if your planets can interact at the interstellar point of the game, so not sure what effect that would have . . . But, no, new planets are new planets . . .
@maztec: Maybe I understand the game wrong, but isn’t it about Evolution?
You create a creature on a planet and it evolves. So if your roommate starts your game, picks a new planet and plays there, is time halted on “your” planet while he’s playing on another one? If not then while your roommate is playing God somewhere else, your creatures are evolving (or dying from lack of care) without you.
And this is why I will be waiting for the PS3 release, even if it never comes.
I think this, from Macroy, is the most succinct comment I’ve seen so far.
It’s more like saying that everyone that gets a high score in Pac-man has to use the same initials on the leaderboard.
So you can separate save files, essentially, but everyone shares the same achievements, buddies, and username and pass to log on.
The deal was already broken for me at the mention of SecureROM. But this would definitely get the ol’ Consumerist recommended chargeback from me.
Please excuse any typos; I had carpal-release surgery this morning abnd I can’t type very well
yet.
From reading other reviews, I’ve gathered that EA is not trying to prevent piracy with this game.
It’s the decoy for everyone’s anger in hopes they’ll miss a few other things:
1- Used resales. Not many people will want to buy this game second hand, because:
A- there’s no real way to tell how many activations remain
B- the activation number is tied to someone else’s account; I don’t know how hard it is to
transfer an account to a different email address, if it’s possible at all.
When a game is sold secondhand, EA gets no money. Even if 1/3 of the people who buy Spore would
have bought it resale, that would be a huge loss of income.
2- Longevity. By forcing activation of this game to be online, they can end this game any time
they want to … say, if Spore 2 is coming out, and they want to drive sales to the new game,
instead of seeing people continue to play the first one.
EA’s greed is shown with Creature Creator, which is obviously and necessarily included in Spore.
The sole purpose of Creature Creator is to create creatures, obviously- creatures that are then
used to also populate Spore. Why pay someone to create a 100 different creatures, when the gaming
community can not only be used to create thousands for free, but will pay $10 for the chance to
do it?
Considering how intrinsically this game is tied to the internet, EA could have earned a lot of
goodwill if Creature Creator had been available as a free download. So many more people would
have created creatures that would have been available on game day to stream into the game. And
all of those people woulkd have an EA account already set up and waiting for Spore to come out
and put those creatures into play. An incredible missed opportunity.
Spore is not an MMO; Spore doesn’t even qualify as a multiplayer game- It is a single-player game
that requires an online connection to add and share user-generated content.
However, I’m sure EA will continue to rake in money when they begin to release an “expansion”
every six months, a la The Sims.
EA could have allowed this game to be so much more than it is; it easily could have been the game
of the year, instead of being an interesting and noteworthy game smothered by its limitations.
And I can’t apologize enough for the weird linebreaks, either. I don’t know WTF happened.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I am assuming games like WOW only allow one account per copy to minimize people being able to abuse multiple accounts- whether to aid their own accounts unfairly, or to abuse other players. Basically, limiting accounts has a benefit for the gaming experience
Spore, on the other hand, makes no sense to have limited accounts if you use the ‘gaming experience’ argument. I cannot come up with a good reason other than greed, or lazy ‘anti-piracy measures’.
I’m going to sell you this first aid kit. You are allowed to use it on one person and one person only and must throw it away immediately after opening it. You may not give the first aid kit away as a gift or transfer it in any other way. If you move to a different house, you must throw away the kit and buy a new one. Nobody else may see the kit or know what is inside, but they are legally bound to the rules printed inside the kit.
Also, you may not open the kit at any time for any reason.
(I’m glad the rest of the world doesn’t act like the entertainment industry.)
I will never buy SW that has that DRM on it. Period. Any company that treats their customers like criminals deserves to be boycotted.
OK I could be off here but I think I know whats going on. OK you can have multiple intalls and presences ON THE PC SIDE. but once you hit EA you get ONE “critter” account and ONE sporopedia. SO when 2 people in the house play ONLINE they look like ONE person playing. IE one big sporepedia. They want SEPERATE sporepedia’s accounts online per family member. So sara critters ONLINE are seperate from Billy’s Critters online.
THIS is what EA is not allowing.
This also effects SINGLE USERS. if you create one “universe” with all PEACE critters and one “universe” with all WAR like critters when people see you online they do not see one peace and one war they see a MIX of the two in one account.
FYI: This is how every EA game that has a CD-Key is. You can install it on multiple machines, but can only ‘register’ it to one account. That’s how The Sims 1 worked, how SimCity 4 worked, and how The Sims 2 works.
The ‘activation’ system in Spore is seperate from the ‘registration’ system alltogether.
I was going to buy Spore until I heard about the terrible DRM issues. I have
not purchased the game yet, and I may not ever purchase it. If I did buy the
game, I would surely download a “cracked” exe or installation
to circumvent the annoyances of a legitimate copy. Is that illegal,
considering i would have already purchased the rights to have the game?
You would think they would encourage more than one ‘account’ to be created since they are relying on user created creatures to sprinkle content into their game.
The difference between this and an MMO is that in the MMO the world doesn’t really change so who cares if you have multiple characters, you can still only play one at a time but its pretty hard for one of them to muck up the world for the other.
I refuse to buy any game that has DRM like this in it. The pc game market is dead anyway. The consoles killed it, not piracy.
The limited activation count is to hurt the used game market, not to fight piracy. since they don’t get to see any of that revenue they need to kill it.
just to repeat the DRM is a ruse on customers. EA knows full well it does nothing to stop piracy. Its to force post retail control, and stop the secondary(resale) market.
I’m simply glad they didn’t use a kitten model for the goatse creature. I wouldn’t want my cats to get any ideas (oww! claws – sharp! oww!)…
Everything about this release is fux0rd beyond belief. EA really went out of their way to cripple gameplay in their frantic defense against the imaginary hordes who supposedly want to pirate their games. (Yes, there are pirates — just not anywhere near as many as companies like EA want us to believe.)
Of course, the end result is hilarious: Not only is it simple to pirate the game *anyway*, but now people who would never pirate a game otherwise are pirating this one, because the DRM is a virus/rootkit that’s been known to destroy computers, and getting a pirated copy is the only way to safely install it!
Eris loves you, EA. Nobody *else* does, though.
I think it’s entirely possible that this restriction is a result of them loosening the original DRM scheme. Remember that the first plan was to have the game phone home for validation every time you ran it. This would help them prevent the same serial# from being used on multiple computers, which would make it ok to have multiple logins on the same game.
But people screamed about that DRM being too restrictive, so they reduced it to only phoning home on installation. This makes it impossible for them to validate that you haven’t installed the game on a couple friends’ computers too. So they had to tie the serial# to your online login instead.
It’s not ideal, but I can see their problem. This is the first Massively Online Single Player game, so it’s new ground. People are used to single-player sim games being unbound by online restrictions. With The Sims, my wife and I can share the same game and have our own logins. But we can’t share Spore the same way, so it seems more restrictive.
But we can’t both share one World of Warcraft account because that’s how online games work, so this doesn’t seem so unusual.
I don’t bootleg stuff, but if I ever purchase Spore I’ll probably open up the box, and then download a bootlegged version from The Pirate Bay.
Steam from Valve might be DRM, but at least you can install your games on as many machines as many times as you’d like and just have to remember your username and password.
I’m still not sure if I understand what the limitations are on the game. Can it be installed and used by more than 1 user on the same PC but only using a different user signon or do you have to buy a 2nd license for that? And is that 2nd person’s play independent of your own if you don’t have to pay? I haven’t bought the game yet, not even sure if I will. Just asking as there are alot of conflicting statements here.
The difference is that I can install my World of Warcraft on as many different machines as I want as many times as I want.
I can log on from ANYONES copy of WoW with my account info, so I can play at home, then login from a laptop, travel to grandma’s and play there, or whatever.
Spore has the double whammy of restricting your accounts AND your installs.
Let’s step back in gaming history shall we?
*whoosh*
1990: Dragon Warrior 2 is released in the US, allowing up to three different “saves” at once. My brother, myself and best friend all get our own!
1990: Final Fantasy 1 is released in the US with one save for the whole cartridge. My brother and I try sharing but eventually resort to buying a second copy.
1991: Final Fantasy 2 is released in the US with FOUR save spots. Square learned their lesson and we can all play without paying $70 a pop! Hooray!
2008: Spore released lacking critical feature which has existed in nearly all games with saved state for almost 20 years!
My copy of the Collector’s Edition arrived yesterday from Amazon. I didn’t get a chance to install it last night.
After giving it some thought, reading the reviews of the game saying it’s somewhat disappointing, and the ongoing saga with this DRM virus shit, I said “screw it” and returned it to Amazon.
It’s a faulty product, IMHO.
I’ll either warez it or just wait for it to hit the $20 bargain bin in 2 months.
Amazon.com recently deleted all user reviews of spore. =(
@yakkowarner: They’re back. It was a “glitch”.
I just wanted to bring to everyone’s attention that in WindowsXP, if you have multiple users, each user gets their own set of worlds to play with, my sister has her own user and i accidentally discovered this by trying to play my world while on her username, it didn’t exist as an option untill i switched users, and her world didn’t exist under my user, so yes, each person can have their own set of world, though not seperate sporepedia accounts, have fun
The game SPORE is great but the DRM on it is absolute shit.
For example, uninstalling apparently does NOT give you another computer to install on. I have three computers and one of them didn’t work well with the game but I can’t install again. Same thing with separate EA accounts. Hate it.
Spore is good, but FUCK SecuROM and EA.
It’s sad that people have to buy the game and then pirate it when the DRM gets in the way.
This has got to be about the most disappointing moment in gaming for me so far this year.
Actually played the game and love it to death (haven’t had a game make me feel this way since the early 90′s,) but now that it’s out and we’ve picked up a copy and registered it with my girlfriend… Well, now I can’t even have my own Sporepedia entries or achievements, which greatly takes the edge off of creating things in general for me. I actually regret spending money on this and will be seeking a chargeback/refund in any way possible.
What’s really sad about this story is that a really decent game will suffer the most because of DRM fears.
Pooh to EA for being an 800-pound gorilla and ruining everybody’s fun. Casual gamers will become apprehensive about this game because of all the shop owners/hardcore gamers will reactivate their paranoia with this DRM fiasco.
The bastards.
If EA offers a patch and bashes this baby I’ll chuck a party at my flat. Who’s in?
Worse yet, as you can’t associate one copy of the game with two separate keys, and you can’t install two copies onto one computer, you have to buy an entirely separate computer in order to allow two people to play on two separate accounts.
Apparently, EA hasn’t learned a damn thing over the past couple of years. The experiences with Sony’s rookit DRM, and the Bioshock fiasco should have taught these companies that DRM is inherently bad for the consumer. Sure, people will still buy the crap, if it’s good crap (sorry Sony), but they will cry bloody hell over it.
DRM only dissuades the most technologically inept of pirates, yet it harms the experiences of even the most devout purchasers.
EA and the continuation of draconian DRM = FAIL. I was considering picking up Battle for Middle Earth II, but not now. EA won’t see a penny of my money until this is fixed.
I know this is old and I’m waaaay behind the times. But, if Spore really contains DRM, I’d like to know where.
The CD doesn’t need to be in the system when you run the game. I installed it and shelved the CD. Never been prompted for it again (I promise – I didn’t crack it).
Multiple people can actually play the game. The login to the Spore server isn’t for DRM – but for saving creations (creatures, buildings, vehicles, etc…) Any merits you earn are tied directly to the game itself – and I think you can have six or seven saved games (probably more if you do some fiddling with the files). If you delete the game, you erase your merits *earned* with that particular game.
This whole DRM scare is simply that – a scare. People who didn’t know what they were talking about spread this rumor.
If you choose not to purchase a game only because it has supposed DRM, then fine with me. I don’t see the problem with a company trying to protect their intellectual property.