September 7, 2008
Spore gets hammered on Amazon for DRM
Will Wright's Spore was released today and the reviews on Amazon are abysmal. When I checked, 38 of 47 reviews gave it one lonely star. I'm not particularly interested in games, but what's fascinating here is that the dominant reason for the low reviews appears to be that folks are really ticked off by EA's use of DRM. This may be a genuine expression of outrage from disappointed buyers or (more likely) it may just be the fad-du-jour to post a hostile comment - I don't think that the original motivation matters much. Fact is, any visitor to the product page is currently overwhelmed with angry negative posts in the comments; any other comments about the game itself are easily lost in the noise.
As any small independent publisher can attest to, early reviews on Amazon are hugely important for raising awareness at the long tail end of products. Books have been written about how to promote your self-published tome by eliciting good reviews. Do these strategies matter for big sellers at the head of the curve as well? How much of an impact will all this negativity have on EA's bottom line? Enough to start rethinking DRM? The game did immediately capture the #1 sales spot in games, so folks are clearly still buying.
Here are some screenshots in case the negative reviews mysteriously disappear, as apprarently happened on amazon.co.uk:
Update#1: Looks like others have picked up on this as well.
Update#2:Now that it's Monday the rest of the working world of online journalism is covering as well. We're up to 650 comments and a one-star average. The backlash-to-the-backlash is gathering momentum as well, with some people complaining that they can't find any useful information in the forums with all the DRM screaming going on. That makes it more likely that in the near future something will happen with the review page (wiping, locking it down, ...?). Some more captures:
Monday, 9am PST:
Monday, 12:30pm PST:
Update #3:
Keeping count of the 1-star reviews stopped being interesting at the time those comments hit 1k sometime yesterday. But here's a wrinkle to file under there's-no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity: I kust came across the following ad that Amazon is running on Google. Search for spore drm and you'll get the following sponsored link:
