Month: September 2008

Did Spore DRM Cost Electronic Arts $25 Million?

Staci Kramer wrote an interesting take on the fact that Spore was apparently the most heavily pirated game in history — there were an estimated 500,000 downloads of cracked versions of the game from BitTorrent sites. At $50 apiece, Kramer’s take is that Electronic Arts left $25 million on the table in its efforts to make the DRM as draconian as possible.

Normally I’d take something like Kramer’s analysis with a grain of salt. I suspect a very large percentage of folks who downloaded the game from BitTorrent would have done so regardless of the DRM scheme that EA had in place. Moreover, aren’t anti-DRM folks always making the case that illegal downloads can drive real world sales, so EA may in fact pick up customers who download the game, try it out, and decide its worth $50.

That said, it was nice to see how quickly EA backpedaled. First they caved on the ridiculous three install limit. Then they had to switch gears on their one account per registration key nonsense. If they’re smart (and this is EA we’re talking about so who knows) they’ll wait until December and announce a Christmas present patch that removes the Securom DRM which obviously caused so much trouble to all those folks who uploaded crack versions to BitTorrent.

Given the bad publicity, EA would be smart to rethink its approach to DRM in time for the Sims 3 release (currently scheduled for February 29, 2009). That and maybe get WIll Wright to actually finish Spore so its actually a playable game rather than a half-assed tech demo for an amazing set of content creation tools.

Not All Improbable Events Are Urban Legends

Over at Boing! Boing! gadgets guru John Browlee profiles some awesome looking Lazer Tag guns, but slips in a pretty big factual error in the process,

I’m really tempted to pull the trigger on these. I’ve never played LazerTag: I’m an 80s child whose parents unfortunately bought into the whole nightly news scare when the first urban legend about a cop shooting a kid armed with a LazerTag gun in a playground made its word-of-mouth lamentable tour.

Except the “cop shot kid because he thought LazerTag gun was real” urban legend isn’t an urban legend. It in fact did happen.

According to the April 11, 1987 edition of the New York Times,

Groups opposed to war toys today condemned the laser gun game a teen-ager was playing when he was shot to death by a sheriff’s deputy.

Toy manufacturers must share the blame for the death of Leonard Joseph Falcon, of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., said Dr. Carole Lieberman, assistant linical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The 19-year-old was playing the Lazer Tag game when he was shot to death Tuesday night at Central Elementary School in Rancho Cucamonga by a deputy who was told armed prowlers were loose in the schoolyard.

The Associated Press also had a more detailed account of the Falcon shooting which is also on the New York Times website.

Before the whining activist complainers had their way, toy guns sold in the United States tended to look very much like real guns. I remember having an Uzi water pistol as a kid that aside from being plastic and only about 3/4 scale, was a pretty good replica especially at a distance.

For example, here’s a photo of the Starlyte guns which were among the first Lazer Tag gun sold by World of Wonder starting in 1986.

Originally this came in black. Later, it was sold in white, allegedly in response to the criticism surrounding the shooting death of Falcon

bbPress Alpha and BBXF

For the first time in about a month, there’s been an update on the status of the bbPress 1.0 alpha series, with Sam Bauers reporting in the bbPress blog that the first alpha should be out sometime in the next few weeks.

What really got my attention, however, was this,

An alpha version of bbPress’ new export/import format and tools has also landed in trunk thanks to our Google Summer of Code student Dan Larkin. You can read a little more about that at the BBXF website.

BBXF is an attempt by the bbPress folks to create a common standard XML format for importing and exporting forum data. According to the BBXF website,

The simple premise is that web forum data should be easily transportable between web forum systems. So when installing web forum software, an administrator won’t have to fear vendor “lock in”, and can feel confident that if their first choice doesn’t work out, they can easily move their data to another web forum platform.

Nice.

Progressive License WordPress Plugin

WordPressProgressive License is a clever little WordPress plugin that allows the user to, among other things, change the licensing terms for blog posts over time. For example, you could have a copyright notice appear on a blog post until 30 days after it is published whereupon the license automatically switches over to a Creative Commons noncommercial license. If you wanted, you could go further and remove the noncommercial stipulation after, say, 6 months or whatever else you find appropriate.