LGR - Darkspore - PC Game Review

Games as service, or those which are intimately tied into an online component scare me. Both as a player of games, and as a maker. I think this last decade (or so) of gaming is the first true generation we're going to see things lost - from mobile ones which die as devices upgrade. This was a great piece in that - sure Darkspore's kind of mediocre by the sounds of things, but it's a high profile release, that I hope there's more people who start to realise how increasingly dangerous things are getting in that regard.

Rob Caporetto

This is the kind of thing that keeps archivists like Jason Scott awake at night. I think part of the problem is that video games as a medium evolved so rapidly compared with others, that the industry is only starting to think about games as art rather than games as a product. And obviously, there are plenty who don't think about this at all. How ironic that a company called "Electronic Arts" that was founded in part due to a desire to make game design more respectable and artistic has sunk to this. Living long enough to become the villain, indeed.

And I agree. That's why I put together this video: informing consumers who didn't know :)

LGR

Big name companies won't change their policies so long as people continue to give them money. To create this level of change, the consumer absolutely MUST be informed and needs to want to make decisions based on these things. Fortunately, in today's day and age, social networking can have a massive effect when a company screws up badly enough, thus allowing people to be more informed than ever before about this kind of stuff. The best recent example I can think of is the launch of the PS4 and X-Box One. The restrictions in place on the XB1 compared to the PS4 induced so much rage and hate in the consumer base that it scared Microsoft into changing their approach. THAT is the power of well informed consumers who ultimately control the flow of cash into major corporations! ;)

Kris Asick

You'd REALLY think publishers learned this by now, sigh.

LGR

Awesome! Ross is an awesome guy. We've talked about collaborating on something, just need to find out what.

LGR

I always wanted to play that one and never got the chance! Argh!

LGR

I don't mind grinding when it feels like my choice or it will be real benefit to how I want to play, I just don't like when it's so arbitrary that it makes it feel tedious.

LGR

It can't be terribly expensive, especially when you only have dozens (or low hundreds) of people playing at any one time.

LGR

I do wonder what the uprising will be when a "popular" game gets the ax. Not pretty I imagine!

LGR

That's a solid solution for the well-informed consumer. But I sincerely doubt that the typical person just picking this up on the store shelf knows what DRM schemes are good or bad. What I'm calling for here is a change of policy entirely, because what they're doing is deceptive from a consumer standpoint :)

LGR

I really hope this becomes common practice in the future. Once more well-known games are taken offline, I imagine people will start to make a bigger fuss. I just wish people would fuss NOW so we could prevent it.

LGR

Yep, there are lots of games that have been brought back from the dead or are in the process of it! But the point is that we shouldn't ever have to rely on such projects :/

LGR

It's more or less an art crime in my book.

LGR

Nope, they never implied that exactly. Now, the terms of service were updated at one point to say it could be taken offline at anytime, but I don't know how much water that holds

LGR

You'd THINK. But you know big publishers: they'd rather ALL the money rather than some money, so expenses are shed, even smaller ones

LGR

And now you may have missed it forever. It's cases like that which really make me angry :/

LGR

They punish the players that buy the game because of the ones that pirate. It's insane. If a game is good, it will give itself incentives to buy it.

Kaipivara

Aaaww yeah! I support both You and Ross, so the shout-out made my bitter hearth smile :)

Michal -milczyciel- Holdynski

Although I may be the only person who played it, I was highly disappointed when "Motor City Online" went "Offline" and became a tombstone as you put it. Sad state of affairs for sure.

Andrew Buffenmyer

Oh, and I'm finally happy to have a shiny silver star next to my name after supporting your Patreon for so long :)

Lindsay Michelle

Well, that review took a different direction than most of your reviews do -- thought I admit I didn't hear about this news beforehand. That is stupid to kill a game like that and totally cut off access to everyone for the sake of being online-only, whether it's for DRM or for game design reasons. Imagine wanting to go back to a game you played back in the day and NOPE gone forever. That is so depressing! You might as well be leasing the game (as a commenter mentioned below) instead of just owning it indefinitely... Also, do you not like level grinding in games in general, or do you not mind it as much if the game is good?

Lindsay Michelle

Surprisingly, Diablo 1 and 2 are STILL playable online despite being old as dirt and having an offline mode - so I can't really imagine that running a game server is that horribly expensive as some companies make it out to be.

Maniko, conduit of hugely adorable, massively destructive beans

Oh Spore. You were the warning sign that anti-piracy measures were going too far. And EA, being the emotionless corpse of a company that it is, didn't learn from it. They still haven't. And neither has Ubisoft. It's disgusting. EA is a company that is both a blessing and a curse upon the game industry. Early on, they were a looser conglomerate of developers uniting under one publishing banner, a sort of "indie" publisher for studios without the means to get their games out there. It didn't take long for them to corrupt into a force of an unrelenting creativity-sink. Embrace and extinguish became the order of the day, and they've literally spent the better part of two decades not understanding how that's affected the industry they rely on. Consumer confidence was the major factor in the North American video game crash of the 80's. And here we are again, ironically for the opposite reasons: Where the crash happened as a result of extremely loose control and oversaturation of the industry, today we're losing confidence as a result of *too much* control and the *homogenizing* of the industry. The rise of indie developers in recent years is at least in part a result of that. Manufacturing fun on what is essentially a production line only goes so far, and telling people how and when they can do it is almost daring them to find it elsewhere. As more and more games shut down (especially single player games), and as more and more games fall under the digital distribution banner, I feel people will be less inclined to buy in, especially at today's asking prices, knowing that their investment may be temporary. It's sure slowed down my purchasing habits. Don't get me wrong, I think digital distribution is a great convenience, but when that's also tied to DRM that may or may not work in a few years' time, that's another story. Steam gets away with this because it's become an anchor, a fixture, essentially "the" PC game store. But its DRM isn't enough for some publishers...

Runefox

It's like when Square Enix re-released Dungeon Siege when the third game came out. It didn't include the expansion (which I had but won't install on modern systems), but they gutted out the multiplayer completely, which still people play. Plus the game was buggy at the end. you win and instantly puts you in the main menu. no ending, and no way to see what you got (which is useless anyway because they took out the multiplayer). EA are bastards with what they are doing, and in the early days they were a great company that took care and brought out great products and showed off the production teams, now they are just a corporation who shits on it's customers and only cares about money, and it was a sad day when they shut down Maxis, just like Westwood. I can't imagine the backlash if they do that to Bioware.

Douglas Holmes

My method of protest has always been to simply not buy games which incorporate design schemes or DRM I don't agree with. This is why I don't have the latest SimCity or Diablo III. The less money publishers get for releasing games with this mentality, the less likely publishers will do it again. :P

Kris Asick

When publishers take down online services like this, they really should at least release the software so that the community can run their own servers. It's disappointing that we have to rely on reverse engineering (which is an excruciatingly difficult process for most of these online-only games) to play games we've paid for.

_nderscore

So many of my favorite games have died this way. But I can still go back and enjoy Tribes because they let me create my own server. That is what we need. Let us make our own servers. Also... have you seen the Star Wars Galaxies Initiative? They have some portions of that back online again, and are working on the rest.

Zem Hysong

I heartily agree; online dependency killing a game completely is a travesty.

Fletcher Shires

This is very sad indeed. Money gets in the way of so many things. Especially art. It's a shame that something as beautiful as art in it many forms, has simply become a way to take of advantage of people.

Kevin

Do the publishers make it clear that you are only leasing the game instead of buying it? If not, wouldn't this be illegal? I know I wouldn't bother with any game that I knew had a limited shelf life.

Gary Leigh

For the sake of consumer confidence, you'd think they could at the very least just leave a 1U server in the rack for older titles.

BaudBand

Even though I liked the original Spore quite much I never heard of this "spin off" until recently when the shutdown was announced. Don't really know how I missed it.

MrMattan