While quite a few people thought it would never happen, EA made good on its word and has just released a de-authorization tool for Spore. While the five installation limit is still in place, the tool allows you to deauthorize one of your copies to free up one of your five slots.
Unfortunately, the tool is currently only available for PC, so all you hipsters running around with different color Macbooks for each day of the week are out of luck.
While it's nice to see that EA is slowly learning that DRM doesn't work, we can hope that eventually they will abandon install limits altogether. Although, considering how many copies of Spore were pirated, it's easy to see why companies and executives have a knee-jerk reaction to shove restrictions into all their games.
The tool is available now and can be downloaded from the offical Spore Web site.
[Via bit-tech]
Jonathan Ross is an Associate Editor in Los Angeles who is obsessed with capybaras. Like, seriously, obsessed. If he's not playing Team Fortress 2 or getting into arguments about why PC gaming is superior, he's either off having a fancy dinner with lots of expensive wine, or sitting on the Destructoid IRC complaining that's he's not off having a fancy dinner.
Likes: Chrono Trigger, Street Fighter, Steam, everything Blizzard and Valve have ever made, playing Angry Birds on the toilet.
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Contest:
6:00 PM on 12.18.2008
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Glad to see Ea is kind of listening.
So, the DRM is in full affect while playing the game... this just allows you to authorize more than five machines total (but still not more than five can be authorized at a time)
Its not ideal but a step in the right direction.
So now its pretty much like iTunes accounts which I think can also be active on 5 computers and can be resettet.
I just hope Capcom stays with the disk check for Resident Evil 5 / Bionic Commando. I really want to buy both.
Also, what EA did was not fix the problem, but give the gamers more work if they wanted to fix it. :P If I were a PC gamer, (which I'm not) I'd be pissed that now I have to download a "tool" to fix something that should have not been a problem in the first place! :(
fuck securom and fuck ea
Yeah, because the insane pirating of Spore had NOTHING to do with its DRM! Spore was just the best game ever made! Dude, I win with sarcasm!
Glad EA got so ripped off.
btw, I was wondering. Of course every person that pirated the game would not have bought it if they could not have acquired it for free. What percentage of pirated copies equal actual lost sales? I figure its around 15%.
You're putting the cart before the horse.
Mass pirating of Spore didn't cause EA to slap draconian DRM on it.
The DRM caused the pirating.