The Digital Rights Management (DRM) controversy has an impact on all sides of the software and entertainment industries.  Our article on the topic earlier this month mostly focused on the music, but it affects movies and video games as well.  Just ask gaming giant Electronic Arts (NASDAQ:ERTS), who received a lot of bad press since the launch of its much anticipated game Spore, due to its DRM implementation.  The problem was that you could only install the game three times.  EA has since then upped that limit to five and argued publicly that their DRM policy only affects 0.2% of their customers.

It may be true that vast majority of users don’t need to install the game five times and don’t really care about the footprint that the DRM software leaves on their computer.  However, the minority that does care is quite vocal: the Amazon.com review page for the game lists an average rating of 1.5/5 stars, with an overwhelming majority of those reviews being only 1 star.  This is directly caused by the DRM issue as the game has otherwise received good reviews.  Now this may only be the doing of 0.2% of users, but 100% of the customers browsing Amazon will see this rating.

EA is trying to do as much damage control as they can and is trying to work toward more long-term solutions, such as allowing players to de-authenticate installations (much like what iTunes has done for years). However, industry analysts are saying that much of the damage has already been done.

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