All of the people who follow the gadget/gaming world know how much of a public backlash EA received after introducing a Spore, a game with months of hype leading up to release. The only problem is they laced Spore with a new type of DRM that they were hoping to incorporate into all of their future products – and the public didn’t take too kindly to that. You see, Spore’s DRM required online activation before it would work and only allowed 3 activations before you would have to physically call EA and talk to a real human being in order to state your case as to why you needed another activation. After all of the negative media attention and consumer angst that was vocally voiced all over the web, it seems as if Atari either doesn’t own an internet connection or read any type of news, or is trying to go out of business with a bang as they are adopting a very similar method of DRM.
Atari recently released a game titled “Chronicles of Riddick” as a follow up to a more or less successful movie starring Vin Diesel. And just like EA did with Spore, Atari has laced “Chronicles” with an invasive form of anti-consumer tech called DRM. And just as happened with Spore, customers are not happy as reviews on Amazon aren’t exactly rosey. Hey, you never know, maybe Atari wanted to see if they could get more negative reviews than EA. We know how competitive big corporations can be.
Time and time again whether it be game developers, music labels, *insert business model here*, they all seem to NOT learn from the others’ mistakes. In this case DRM. It is creeping into many different markets and is time and time again showing that it will fail. There is no way that DRM will win. As mentioned before the people that want to get around it will and very easily while the real bread and butter fan base of that particular product will be left out in the cold wondering why this $50 piece of plastic they just bought stopped working because they have 4 kids and 4 computers – then they realize the 3 activation limit. There is not a single thing that could more effectively ruin a user experience and destroy a customers view of a company then encountering an invasive form of DRM as found on Spore (originally) and now Riddick.
Will Atari be facing a class action lawsuit just as EA did over Spore’s original DRM scheme? I surely hope so. These idiots running these companies need to know DRM is not the answer. It only hurts the legitimate users while the pirates will have the DRM cracked in a matter of days.
Source: Tech Dirt
