EMA Suggests Point-Of-Sale Game Activation To Fight Piracy

Gamasutra reports on a set of standards (PDF) published by the Entertainment Merchants Association to promote the use of technology that would "disable" games and DVDs until they are activated when purchased. "The effort is codenamed 'Project Lazarus,' and the EMA says it's assembled a consortium of retailers, home video companies and video game publishers to see how easily such 'benefit denial technology' could be implemented, and to evaluate possible cost-benefit analyses. The initiative is similar to security tags used in clothing retail that spill ink on garments if they're forcibly removed, thereby destroying the item. In such a situation, shoplifting is discouraged by implementing a solution that only the retailer can remove at the point of sale."

Comments

Interesting idea

[scubamage]

However, not everyone has an internet connection. For those who do have an internet connection, blocking it from being accessed is just a short hosts file edit away. From there, a single crack and your game is playable single player. It also requires all servers to be hosted by the game maker and their licensees because otherwise the server software will be cracked within two hours of it being released to the public (that's actually assuming the crackers are lazy). This is highly unlikely to work.

Re:NO DRM! Can you hear us now?

[cliffski]

dude, this is not DRM, this is to stop people shoplifting. You might as well rant and spit about security tags on clothes.
try reading the article before you hit the "OH NOES TEH DRM" button.

Plus who the fuck buys games for $60? The only place I ever see $60 mentioned is by people complaining about not buying them.

Re:If you're a game maker

[cliffski]

this is to stop shoplifting

Re:If you're a game maker

[Amphetam1ne]

But there's no chip available for the 360 that lets you "just tool around" with it. Aside from a now close exploit, there is no way to gain full control of or run unsigned code on a 360. The chips and drive flash mods only allow one thing: Backup games to be loaded. That's it. Piracy is the only reason for chipping/flashing a 360.

Re:NO DRM! Can you hear us now?

[PainKilleR-CE]

CD keys being authenticated for online play has only been around a few years longer than activation, though. In many ways, it's exactly the sort of thing people have encouraged because a good online component does lead people to buy the game, if they want to play online. It extends the life of the product (really, who would still be playing Starcraft if it had been a single-player only title?). That system was basically the first step towards activation.

With activation, though, you have to have an internet connection to play a single-player game, which is ridiculous to people that want to be able to play a game in situations where they have no connectivity, or to just about anyone that doesn't have an always-on connection. If you had to log in to battle.net to play the single player campaign in Diablo or Starcraft and they decided to shut down the servers that authenticate those two games after Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 are released, it would probably be fairly irritating to the small number of people that would like to play the earlier titles (for instance, maybe someone that is planning on buying Diablo 3 would want to take a quick run through the first two games before buying the new one to refresh the (admittedly sparse) story-line).

Steam actually bothers me a little more than the other common methods (though I dislike anything other than the game being installed on my system). In that case I have to remember a user name and password that I signed up for several years ago in order to play games I bought before Steam existed (ie Half-Life and its mods and expansion). Sure, I could probably play the original game and expansion without current patches on my own machine, but if I run into some nasty bug or graphics glitches that might have been taken care of in a later patch, I'm SOL unless I install Steam and remember the information under which I previously registered those CD keys.

Re:NO DRM! Can you hear us now?

[petermgreen]

I wouldn't call what starcraft did activation.

Firstly there was no install limit or anything like that, the only thing it enforced was that each CD key could only be used for one login at a time.

Secondly it only affected play on battle.net which would go away anyway if blizzard took the servers offline. Activation extends this point of failure to single player and lan play.