One of the year's most highly-anticipated titles, Spore, from one of our best and brightest designers, Will Wright, may prove to be more notable for the fact that it marks the first time a major publisher defied the wishes of its own customers. By now you're surely aware that Spore shipped with SecuROM, a Sony-owned digital rights management (DRM) tool which EA chose to implement. Consumers had previously contended with authentication codes as EA's anti-piracy method of choice; but in dealing with SecuROM, the rules of the game had been changed – and not in small ways – unbeknownst to gamers... hence the outrage and subsequent backlash.

Spore was expected to be one of the best selling games of the year, but it got off to a rough start with many product reviews being less than stellar. The EA PR machine did a very nice job allaying the fears associated with those reviews by pointing out (and having Will emphasize in his interviews) that the game was intended to be a mass market title. But the day that the game shipped, the DRM issue reared its ugly head and snowballed into a travesty that is still playing out a week later.

"This DRM did nothing to combat the cracking of the game. In fact, it essentially helped in training legions of customers how to become pirates and legitimized their rationalization in the process."

The first (and perhaps largest) problem that consumers have had with the DRM is that it only permits them three installations. There seems to be some debate regarding just how restrictive this measure is: with some saying that it's draconian and akin to being more like a rental than a sale, while others feel that EA's customer support can and will handle the hundreds of thousands of potential calls they may have to field from angry gamers.

The next issue was that the popular Creature Creator (which did not ship with SecuROM) allowed multiple user profiles per copy. Very typically – and certainly much more prevalently, as computers make their way from the sole domain of the home office and into the living room – one machine will be home to many family members' entertainment choices, games among them. The packaging that shipped with Spore stated that multiple accounts were permitted, but the reality was that the DRM didn't allow it. EA's stance was to explain to their customers that there was a misunderstanding – a typo – and that each individual user would henceforth be required to purchase their own copy of the game.

Finally, game consumers were upset with SecuROM itself, as a technology. It's far from easy to remove from your computer even if you decide to uninstall the game. So it's not just the disclosure issues, it's also the perceived lack of respect. Gamers were so incensed by the new undisclosed limitations that they felt misled and betrayed. Like with Mass Effect, they thought that vocalizing their opinions about the DRM would yield positive results. But EA held firm.

The backlash was almost instantaneous. Endemic media sites reported that the file sharing sites exploded in popularity, with gamers who had never before pirated software doing so in record numbers. Gamers blasted the game's rating on Amazon with one-star reviews. The damage in credibility that the label is suffering is likely incalculable. The rock star developer is silent, where otherwise one would expect a debate about "intelligent design" in the mainstream media. And the anger from gamers mounts. It's an intellectual property standoff with an entire franchise hanging in the balance.