What Would Matt Do

I know your stunned that EA would continue to say or do dumb things, even when Sony has the patent on making random dumb statements, but yet, they do:

Riccitiello said he felt the controversy was blown out of proportion, but he does acknowledge the inconvenience to users that DRM creates. "We’re still working out the kinks. 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. I personally don’t like DRM. It interrupts the user experience. We would like to get around that. But there is this problem called piracy out there."

Let me translate for you… "If I lie straight faced, people will believe me. I mean hey, it works for McCain."

Yeah, piracy exists, but we’ve talked about that and the realities of the situation. Not to mention, it seems like putting DRM on Spore might have been counter productive:

It is expected to sell 2 million copies in September alone, and is currently the No. 3 best-selling game on Amazon.

But it also has one of the worst ratings on Amazon (2,016 out of the 2,216 ratings are one star) because of a concerted campaign by fans protesting its DRM. It has also been downloaded an estimated 500,000 times on BitTorrent, and is well on its way to becoming the most illegally downloaded game ever.

So Spore is going to get high sales, even though it’s the most likely going to be the most pirated game ever. Wait, lets say that gain… The game that is well on it’s way to becoming the most illegally downloaded game ever also sold around 2 million copies in September alone.

Well fuck me. Doesn’t that just prove everything about DRM is plain wrong? That if you release a game people want to buy, they will? That illegal downloads aren’t actually lost sales and that EA is dumb. That one’s hell of a way to prove yourself idiots, EA.

The question becomes then, who is the DRM punishing? If the game can be downloaded from any number of torrent sites without the ever annoying DRM in it, who’s being affected here? That’s right, honest customers that purchased the game. Wow.

Well, maybe they could have done something differently to affect the piracy numbers and still not punish the customers who paid cash money for their products (from the WP article again):

The silliest part of this whole affair is that EA has a much more effective weapon against piracy than the DRM: the game itself. Many of Spore’s most interesting features, such as the ability to upload characters you create and explore worlds created by other players, have an online component. These are integral to the gameplay. All EA needs to do is to turn these features off to anyone who cannot prove that they’ve actually purchased the game. Then no self-respecting gamer will want that pirated copy.

Well, that’s nice to say and all, but it’s just the Washington Post. They aren’t really known to be gamers and can be play daft sometimes. Who else could we ask? What about Rob Pardo. That guy seems to know something about games, what being the VP of the most successful game dev house ever and all:

Pardo: The thing that I think helps us, is that since our games have such a huge multiplayer component, Battle.net really is our most effective DRM. If you wanna play online on Battle.net with other players you’re going to have to have a legitimate copy. That’s really kinda been the thing that’s always saved us from a lot of the PC piracy that I think hurts a lot of other single-player-only games.

Wired: You’re not going to have something where the game has to phone home every time you turn it on?

Pardo: No, there’s no particular plans for that. We do now have the online store where we’re doing digital distribution on your account. In those particular cases you have to be online to actually download the game, but once you have it, you’re fine.

I think our approach — if you want to use an analogy — we take an approach that’s more similar to Steam than EA, let’s say.

Huh. He evens mentions EA specifically.

It’s too bad EA has their heads so far up their own asses they have no idea what’s going on in the real world. For instance, I’m not planning on buying Far Cry 2 either, since it has the exact same god damned DRM bullshit in it! Exactly the same!

Matt to EA, why you dumb?

What Would Matt Do: I’d love to sit down with EA and explain the reality of the situation to them. Instead, I’ll just give a shout out to Bruce Shelley. You know why!