EA Serves Up Some Spore Flavoured Irony

EA is claiming that piracy didn’t hurt Spore sales, lauding the 1 million plus copies sold since release compared to the rumoured 500,000 torrent downloads. EA has long claimed that torrent downloads and other forms of piracy have been eating into their bottom line big time. EA’s corporate communications officer Mariam Sughayer had something interesting to say on the subject.

“We’ve talked to people that made several unsuccessful attempts to download the game and ended up with incomplete, slow, buggy or unusable code. In one case, a file identified as Spore contained a virus.

“To say that every download represents a successful copy of the game–or that there’s been more than 500,000 copies downloaded–that’s just not true.”

“Stepping aside from the whole issue of DRM, people need to recognize that every BitTorrent download doesn’t represent a successful copy of a game, let alone a lost sale,”

Step on the breaks here. A torrent download does not equal a lost sale? But for years the game industry has been claiming that every single one does and that’s when DRM is necessary in games. In fact, EA made that vary claim just last week! I can’t help but find that statement to be a little ironic. This begs the question as to whether piracy really is costing the gaming industry as much as they claim and whether the forms of intrusive DRM used in games like Spore are even necessary. Maybe EA is referring to all those people who bought the game and then downloaded it to obtain a working copy. Who knows. Still, this is a startling revelation strait from the horse’s mouth. We’ve long suspected that the publishers have been jacking us legitimate gamers. This seems to be the proof.

Source: CNET

After September’s Spore fiasco, I thought I’d put this question to October’s survey. Do the new intrusive DRM measures used in PC games effectively stop piracy?