I have little doubt that EA is making good money off the new game Spore http://tech.blorge.com . They should, it is a fun game and the first day I played my legal copy I didn’t get to bed until 1:30 AM. This was when I was trying to both fly the space ship and keep from falling off my chair asleep. I actually ended up buying two copies of the came so I could put it on a number of machines I travel with and play it on the road. But most folks, apparently, didn’t want to buy multiple copies, in fact, the 500,000 that apparently downloaded the game from Pirate Bay and other Torrent sites apparently didn’t pay EA anything.

In addition, the game has a one star rating because over 2,000 people on Amazon gave the game one star because of the DRM scheme that EA used. I put an estimate of the cost of the DRM to EA at about $25M (500K x $50 a game) making this one of the most expensive additions to a game I’m currently aware of. And, the game is still new and proliferating and some expect, given the current rate of pirating, this will be the most pirated game on BitTorrent ever. Lost revenue could exceed $100M before this is done. So what happened?

Rationalizing Theft

If you’ve ever been in law enforcement, and I have, you learn really quickly that if you give thieves a way to rationalize a theft, or you make stealing easy, you will get a lot of thefts. This is because most who steal don’t think of themselves as thieves. They are opportunists and they simply don’t think that what they are doing is stealing. In the current case these people aren’t stealing, oh no, they are protesting. While many probably don’t realize their form of protest isn’t legal, they are (in their own minds) doing something good.

We put on top of this the ease in which products can be stripped of their DRM and then put up on sites like Pirate Bay and you get the sense that EA’s using DRM coupled with an installation limit was not only not preventing theft, it was providing incentives to steal. And steal people did.

RIAA and MPAA Slowly Learning

This is a lesson the RIAA and MPAA have been learning very slowly. Recently they started a process to develop Domain based DRM which would allow people to use the media they purchased on the variety of devices they owned. This likely will do more to curtail theft than all of their prior efforts combined because one of the main rationales to steal a song or a movie is you can do more with the stolen media then you can with the one you purchased. In fact, unlike almost any other product, a stolen movie or song (until just recently) was actually worth more, because you could do more with it, than a legal one.

EA and Others Need to Finally Learn This Lesson

The same thing is true of the DRM scheme in Spore, an illegal copy can be put on all the PCs you have while a legal copy can only be put on 3. This makes the illegal copy more valuable in the eyes of the purchaser and instead of making the thief look stupid it makes him or her seem smart and the poor sap who bought the game look stupid (recall I bought two copies).

Wrapping Up

DRM, as it generally has been implemented, has been a bigger boost to pirates by far than a defense against them. The reality is DRM makes legal buyers of products regret their purchase and feel stupid. You can’t get people to do something you want if you penalize them for doing it. That’s a lesson many in this industry need to learn faster.