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Star Raids. If a company is pissing off a bunch of customers and refuses to change some aspect of their product, some consumers are finding it effective to band together and thrash the product's rating. An avalanche of "zero" ratings can make a ratings score plummet, and turn away potential customers. The fall-off in sales will definitely grab their attention.
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spore
Earlier today, about 2200 reviews of the game Spore disappeared from the product page on Amazon.com, almost all of them negative. Did Amazon censor the reviews because of their
anti-DRM nature? Amazon says no, that it was a technical glitch, and they restored the reviews by the end of today. An Amazon spokesperson
told Ars Technica, "Amazon doesn't censor or edit customer reviews based [on their content] and we'd only remove a review if it fell outside our guidelines." Spore's rating is back to a single star, and it's #5 on Amazon's video games chart.
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ea games
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.
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backlash
Spore, the long awaited new game from SimCity creator Will Wright, has been
critically well-received, so what's up with its Amazon.com score? As of this posting, the game, despite being #1 on Amazon, has 1,494 one star ratings from gamers who are upset about the game's DRM. Here are some excerpts from the angry reviews:
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