Meanwhile, Spore was cracked on the day of release, and pirates are enjoying DRM free Spore!
You've gotta wonder - how do game developers write code BLIND?! Because they obviously all are, as they don't see how much people hate DRM, and that pirates crack it every time! Though I've gotta find out how to do it, I could work in the day - and contribute to open source projects at night while I'm asleep! Woah!
However, before judging on the qualities of game developers one should better understand the world that they live in. They live in the world of 20th century show business, not your 21th century web development world. That's the world where channels are narrow and the technologies involved are expensive. That's the world of "short tail".
There is a real need in at least two distinct parties: developers and publishers, and maybe others such as producers. As computer technology marches forward, it gets more and more expensive to master, which means bigger budgets, which means both smaller number of games and larger audiences needed to make a game profitable. Bigger budgets and larger audiences makes publishers increasingly more cautious, so they pressure developers harder and harder to subdue to their perception of mass appeal. On the other hand, publishers, in their effort to protect as much of their revenue as they can, enforce copy protection on the games they release, including DRM.
I think the developers in general are not fond of DRM, but it's not them who decide. The developers would also be happy to make richer games, but they get pressured into diluting their product so that it would sell. The Maxis Software and Will Wright have an outstanding track record of making innovative games that sell well, so they should have had as much freedom as it gets in negotiating terms with the publisher and developing the product the way they want, but if you followed the development process from the prototypes you will notice how it got diluted too.
Bottom line: given the current state of the industry, we should be happy to get what we get. DRM sucks and I hope that the publisher will remove it if public resentment weighs something (which I doubt), and it is certainly out of developers' reach.
Interestingly my father brought up the Spore DRM in conversation last night. He plays games but isn't a gamer in the sense that he follows online news or current industry events. It was from a more mainstream outlet that he heard about the DRM backlash on Amazon.
It isn't the developers who make the call on DRM, by a long-shot. Had it not been for pushback from EA developers the DRM on Spore would've been much harsher.
You've gotta wonder - how do game developers write code BLIND?! Because they obviously all are, as they don't see how much people hate DRM, and that pirates crack it every time! Though I've gotta find out how to do it, I could work in the day - and contribute to open source projects at night while I'm asleep! Woah!