Electronic Arts has owned up to the mess it created with the DRM-heavy launch of Sporelast week, a fracas that may actually have cost the gaming giant as much as $25 million in missed revenue. Gamers angry with the "draconian" content protection features opted out of the $50 a pop for Spore and copped it illegally instead, to the tune of an estimated 500,000 downloads across various BitTorrent sites. In fact, peer-to-peer research firm Big Champagne called the speed at which gamers downloaded pirated copies "extraordinary."
In a statement, Frank Gibeau, EA Games label president, said the company was "disappointed" by the misunderstanding around its digital-rights-management software and that it would expand the installation limit to five machines. He added that EA is expediting the development of a system that will allow customers to "deauthorize" computers and move the game to new machines, without needing to call the company.