Applying a Band-Aid to a gaping head wound, Electronic Arts has decided to apply more liberal protections to its hit game Spore.
As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the game maker plans to expand the number of machines allowed under its digital rights management plan:
In a statement, Frank Gibeau, EA game label president, said the company was "disappointed" by the misunderstanding around its digital rights management software and that it would expand the installation limit from three machines to five. He added that EA is also expediting the development of a system that will allow customers to "deauthorize" computers and move the game to new machines, without the need to call the company.
CNET's Jennifer Guevin had noted that the Spore DRM provisions, instead of protecting against piracy, had actually encouraged it. Consumers rebelled against the restrictions. This new policy may relieve some of this piracy, but I concur with Dave Rosenberg's argument that EA still needs to learn the difference between a user and a customer:
If there is one thing that open source has taught us, it's that there are "users," and there are "customers." Odds are that all of your customers will be users first, taking your software for a test-drive and then deciding if they want to pay for it. It's all about getting people to consume your software.
As such, EA really should be thinking differently, allowing unfettered access to the game itself for users--though likely in a crippled form--and then allowing customers to buy their way into the game to get enhanced functionality. This model has worked in open source. EA should be examining its applicability to gaming, too, rather than simply providing a bigger cage in which to imprison customers.
I'm loving Dave Rosenberg's blog even more now that he has "left" open source to contemplate starting a gaming-related company. As he demonstrates in a post about Electronic Arts' DRM shenanigans with the newly released Spore, the lessons learned from open source apply far beyond Linux and Apache:
If there is one thing that open source has taught us it's that there are "users" and there are "customers." Odds are that all of your customers will be users first, taking your software for a test drive and then deciding if they want to pay for it. It's all about getting people to consume your software.
The video game industry remains one of the last hold-outs in the war against consumption. Instead of encouraging more use, EA royally botched the launch of Spore with a seriously misguided DRM choice.
Amen. The first order of business, in any business, is adoption, not protection. Until you have adoption, there's nothing to protect. Intellectual property is meaningless if no one covets the property, which follows adoption.
As Dave suggests, by focusing on protection of Spore to the detriment of adoption, EA has potentially left large piles of cash on the table.
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Perhaps we should have seen this coming. As The Times reports, Electronic Arts has announced that it's going to start giving its games away...for free. What's the catch? It turns out that people spend more on the accoutrements of gaming, given the chance, than on the game itself.
Astute readers will immediately have seen the link to open-source software.
Back to the announcement:
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