Spore launched yesterday. If you haven’t heard about Spore yet you’re missing out. Spore is the brainchild of Will Wright, who is the force behind The Sims and SimCity games and many other popular titles. Soren Johnson, the lead designer of Civilization IV, also contributed to Spore.

Originally titled Sim Everything, Spore is a very open “sandbox” style game. It starts at a cellular level and allows players to  grow and evolve a creature until it can walk on land. From the point the game passes through an individual creature stage, a tribal stage, a civilization stage and eventually a space exploration stage One of the most interesting things about Spore is how the player can create everything and it’s animated programatically on the fly. The game engine behind Spore, along with the incredible scope of the game make it worth checking out!

You may have noticed that SyndicateX.com is not a corporate site. We are not big and fancy and we are not owned by anyone big and fancy. We are a small operation that tries to tell it like it is. And this is how it is: we think Spore is awesome, fun and a big step forward in game design and development. But the DRM attached to Spore is a giant step backward. The big Corporate sites like Gamespot, IGN and others usually post really good reviews but they missed the ball by not mentioning anything about the sinister Spore DRM. Amazon reviews tell a different story, and that story is told by gamers like you. As of this posting, 800-some Amazon user reviews gave Spore a 1 star average for one reason: DRM.

EA Games, one of the most controversial publishers when it comes to DRM, has packaged some some invasive SecuRom DRM in this one. You may only install/activate this game on the original system 3 times without calling EA to beg for another activation (Microsoft anyone?). As bad as we hate to do it (because it hurts the developer and we love developers) we have to take a stand on this one.

EA Games is gaining a large monopoly on game publishing. They continue to acquire other publishers and developers have an increasingly small selection of quality publishers. This combined with their tendencies towards invasive DRM and rigid EULAs is a serious threat to legitimate gamers. How many games do you have that you enjoy playing 3-4 years later? We have a lot of them! We don’t want to try to activate our game on servers that went offline years ago and that could be where this is headed. It is important that you vote with your gaming dollar and send EA a message by not purchasing Spore (or other high-profile, DRM-laden games) until we see a change in DRM stance from big publishers. It’s for the future of gaming.