The first thing I did today was go to the EA store and buy the Spore Creature Creator.

Yes, I’ve been railing on all week about how it’s not worth $10. Yes, I bought it anyway. I want to make some critters and I want some parts.

But at the moment, I have my ire up because EA’s implementation of direct digital download is so terrible that I accidentally deleted all my creations from the demo version while trying to get it working.

I went and bought the product, got the EA download manager and told it to open up the full Spore CC version. It did, and I got another invitation to buy the full game. Sure enough, 3/4 of the creature parts were still missing.

I re-downloaded the Creator Creator with the download manager and tried to open it again. Same situation.

I went back out, and got my registration code from the download manager. However, there’s no place in the creature creator to put your code.

I went out to the EA forums to see if I could find a solution. Sure enough, I found one. They recommended you manually uninstall the trial version from Windows and download it again.

That worked! Except, out of habit, I clicked the button on the Windows prompt to delete all data generated by the program being uninstalled, realizing a second later that I’d just wiped all of the previous evening’s work. Whoops.

This is balls.

Compare these hoops to competing service Steam. Steam would say “Hey, buying the full version? Credit card, please. Ok, done. Go play.” It certainly would not provide me with a registration code and no way to input it.

If digital downloads for games are really the future, we’re going to need some download services that can actually deliver on the “instant” and “gratification” parts of “instant gratification.”

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