Spore, the much anticipated evolution game from Electronic Arts, has won high marks from the gaming press but has currently earned only one star out of five from amateur reviewers on Amazon.com.

The reason - unusually restrictive digital rights management software that limits installations of the game.

Spore, released in North America on Sunday, only allows three activations of the game before players have to call EA for permissions to install it again, according to the Amazon protesters.

As someone who has so far installed the game three times - twice on computers that failed to run it - I can understand their concerns.

According to one of the 864 reviewers on Amazon:

“The DRM for the game utilizes securom which is essentially a virus that installs itself without warning when you install the game. There is no way to completely remove it without reformatting and it is constantly running in the background if not removed. Sucking up computer resources.”

Another complains:

“DRM is a show stopper. I doubt this game will work for me after a few years given my habit of new hardware purchases and system snapshots. Like others have said, this game is for rent not sale. The EA Spore DRM is a bit reminiscent of the Sony root kit. It installs software that you definitely don’t want or need.”

Spore has a rating of 87 out of 100 on Metacritic.com based on 25 media reviews but currently has 796 one-star reviews on Amazon.

I have asked Electronic Arts to comment on the claims and will update this post with its reaction when received.

UPDATE: Jeff Brown, vice president of corporate communications at EA, told me on Tuesday that in its last financial year only 0.5 per cent of players activated EA computer games on as many as three machines, with 90 per cent activating on only one machine. He said EA Customer Service would talk through any special circumstances with customers calling to request further activations. He described EA’s SecuROM DRM as standard for the industry and cited Apple’s practice of only allowing downloaded music to be played on three devices. “We are extremely pleased with the popularity of Spore and the critical response to it,” he said.  The latest figures on Amazon are 1,676 one-star reviews out of 1,812.

September 8, 2008 11:39pm in Digital media, Games | Comment