While I am intrigued by Spore, despite the mediocre reviews, I won’t be buying it.
Unfortunately, EA has decided to put really draconian DRM onto Spore. Now, I can understand what they’re trying to do (although we all know that every single game that has ever had DRM on it has been cracked virtually immediately), but they’ve taken it one step too far.
When you "purchase" Spore, you’re allowed to install it up to three times, and if necessary, you could possibly call on them for a fourth install. This doesn’t sound too bad, because after all, you won’t need to reinstall it all too often.
However, even if you uninstall it, you DO NOT get an installation back! This is just stupid. For example, let’s say I install it today, and then a month from now, I need to reformat my hard drive (let’s say I want to install Vista). Well, most games will give you back an installation count if you uninstall. After all, they "know" you’re not running it on that computer anymore, so why not? Thanks to EA’s stupidity, they do not give that back to you. So now let’s say you rebuild your computer, install Spore and then it crashes, so you restore from a backup and go back to XP. Gotta reactivate again, thus using up all of your "uses".
I’m guessing EA is trying to prevent resale of the program. It’s a good thing for EA I don’t ever resell my games, but a bad decision by them as I won’t have their game to even think about reselling.
Sorry guys, no gonna do it. I’ll just play games from companies that don’t screw their customers, like Stardock’s Sins of a Solar Empire.