Less than a week after the release of Will Wright’s innovative game Spore, the otherwise excellent game is getting massive bad raps from players, complaining of the “draconian” DRM functions implemented by EA.

Spore has a built-in SecuROM copy protection system which limits the game to only three activations, one per machine. Should any further be required, the user must call EA’s support line and request an additional one. Users have reported being treated with suspicion, and being interrogated about the reasons for needing additional activations as well as proof of purchase.

This has made users feel that they were being “treated like thieves” and subsequently user reviews have plummeted, despite favorable critic response (the game has a metacritic.com metascore of 86%), on sites such as amazon.com the game’s rating has been brought down to one and a half stars (out of five) due to the more than 2000 user reviews, most of them negative due to the prohibitive DRM. The user reviews have actually briefly disappeared from the amazon.com site, although Amazon state that this has been due to a technical glitch, and the reviews have been restored.

Last year 2K games’ BioShock, and this year EA’s own Mass Effect have also met with negative user reaction due to restrictive DRM policy, the former due to the limited number of activations, and the latter because of mandatory re-activation required after a ten-day period. It would seem EA has not learned from this experience, especially as the DRM measures for all three games have proven ineffective, pirated versions of all three are available online for download through torrent sites and P2P networks. Spore, most notably has reportedly been downloaded a total of more than 500,000 times through torrents alone so far.