In news that surprised almost nobody at all, it would seem that Maxis' underwhelming new creature feature, Spore, has become the prime target of pirated downloads this year according to a leading torrent site.

For those curious as to who the other honorees were in the most pirated top-ten list, here's a quick rundown before I get rolling.

1) Spore from Electronic Arts with 1,700,000 downloads
2) The Sims 2 from Electronic Arts at 1,150,000
3) Assassin's Creed from Ubisoft at 1,070,000
4) Crysis from Crytek at 940,000
5) Command & Conquer 3 from Electronic Arts at 860,000
6) Call of Duty 4 from Activision at 830,000
7) Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas from Rockstar Games at 740,000
8) Fallout 3 from Bethesda Softworks at 645,000
9) Far Cry 2 from Ubisoft at 585,000
10) Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 from Konami at 470,000

While there's no way we can take a survey of the reasons why people would be downloading Spore illegally, we've got a couple of guesses as to why they might - at least in terms of Australian gamers.

Note: I am not advising piracy here. Even if it weren't a huge ethical no-no, risking getting a virus, malware (you know, other than the SecuROM thing) or winding up a zombie in some convoluted botnet is not something you want to mess with. No game is worth the risk of winding up with someone other than EA's rootkit on your machine.

Creatures created in Spore
1.) Spore's SecuROM DRM was beyond overzealous when it launched. Many games require you to have the physical CD in the drive to start, which was what I expected when I got a copy of Spore. After all, that's a long-held industry standard. For some, it's also enough of a reason just to buy the game rather than screwing with finding workarounds for it. Of course, EA had to skip that and instead run with their login service, requiring you to sign on to their service and authenticate, much like Steam. (I'd note they say this has since been removed for offline mode.) Okay, that's cool. Many gamers tend to be somewhat understanding of that, as we'll happily sign in to play CS and TF2 anyway.

But then there's the fact that their SecuROM software bundled with Spore has the pain-in-the-ass factor of not being uninstallable short of a system reformat. (There are class-action lawsuits in the United States over that particular issue now.) Couple that with the fact that you can only install the game five times (up from three originally) before you have to call and get authorization to install it again. Upgrade your primary computer hardware thus changing settings, or rebuild a few if you own more than one? Tough luck. Time to get on the phone, wait, and jump through hoops explaining just why you need access to the software you already shelled out a small fortune for. Which brings me to the next point.

2.) Let's face it, games are ridiculously expensive in Australia. Sure, there's blame to go around in this regard. There's the expense of taxes, tariffs, and the cost of physically shipping the games around the country. How much all of that amounts to in regards to the overall price-tag I don't think anyone short of the game companies and government know.

But as witnessed by the change in pricing for Call of Duty 4 last year even digital distribution of games - which secure a larger profit for the gaming companies - don't necessarily mean you'll get a price break for skipping the shipping. Australian gamers are paying for the bandwidth to download games, trying to find some middle ground between enjoying new games and saving some cash, and yet you get to pay the exact same price as you would if you marched into a physical store and bought a copy? In the end it costs you twice as much and then some - and this is acceptable?


Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Apparently according to EA's Mariam Sughayer in an interview with Gamasutra, piracy isn't really affecting them, despite Spore's overwhelming popularity on the torrent sites.

“Stepping aside from the whole issue of DRM, people need to recognize that every BitTorrent download doesn’t represent a successful copy of a game, let alone a lost sale. We’ve talked to people that made several unsuccessful attempts to download the game and ended up with incomplete, slow, buggy or unusable code. In one case, a file identified as Spore contained a virus. To say that every download represents a successful copy of the game –- or that there’s been more than 500K copies downloaded — that’s just not true.”

Of course, in the face of the new numbers, the torrent-tracking site in question responded with their own statement about the statistics.

When we posted about the impressive download rate on Spore - inflated due to the DRM that was put into the game - EA doubted our statistics. EA’s Mariam Sughayer said that every BitTorrent download was not a successful copy, and that several downloads didn’t work, were buggy, or contained viruses. We won’t deny that on badly moderated torrent sites, malicious torrents probably can be found. However, this constitutes less than 1% of the available torrents, and they are not added to our statistics.

Again, not that I'd advise pirating any game; after all, developers need to eat too. I'm for supporting the kick-ass folks in the industry who bring us the games we know and love. But it does shed some light on why some people may be doing it - especially when it comes to certain games with invasive DRM like Spore.