I refuse to buy popular PC games any more. I simply cannot afford to take the chance that the install procedure will add malware to my already flaky instance of Windows XP. If you pay money for a typical blockbuster game from Electronic Arts (EA) today, the only permanent code installed on your hard drive is a piece of malware you don't ask for, isn't mentioned in the EULA for the game and displays incredible similarities to a program that got Sony slapped down by the US Supreme Court a couple of years ago.

Take a wild guess what people are doing? Three things. One: they're not buying the games. Two: they're leaving thousands of vitriolic comments on Amazon's rating system. Top titles like Crysis Warhead and Spore, which should be hovering around 4.5 stars, are instead scraping the bottom at one or maybe one-and-a-half stars; not because the games suck, but because users are tired of having draconian DRM systems installed on their PCs. And three: they're downloading games from sites like Pirate Bay for free.

What should have been a cash cow for EA this year - the eagerly-awaited title Spore - has turned into a complete disaster, with hundreds of thousands of copies ripped from the file sharing networks as thousands of angry gamers give it a single star rating on the review sites.