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Blizzard Boss Says Restrictive DRM Is a Waste of Time
Stoobalou writes "Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce reckons that fighting piracy with DRM is a losing battle. His company — which is responsible for one of the biggest video games of all time, the addictive online fantasy role player World of Warcraft — is to release StarCraft 2 on July 27, and Pearce has told Videogamer that the title won't be hobbled with the kind of crazy copy protection schemes that have made Ubisoft very unpopular in gaming circles of late. StarCraft 2 will require a single online activation using the company's Battle.net servers, after which players will be allowed to play the single-player game to their hearts' content, without being forced to have a persistent Internet connection."
...are destined to repeat it. I can remember, back in the early '80s, when computer games on floppies (remember them?) were "protected" by weird copy protection schemes, including scrambling the directory so that if you tried to copy the files you'd just get garbage. There were even games that blanked the directory as part of their startup, only re-writing it at the end, so that if you removed the disk before the game was over, you lost everything. It didn't last, because, among other things, people always found ways around it. Now, Blizzard is learning that old lesson Yet Again: copy protection is, and always will be a lost cause.
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Yep -- proving once again that history goes in cycles even as it progresses, in line with the overarching wavicle nature of the universe. Next up: Bell bottoms, and leg warmers -- this time, together!
Whee!
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
but won't this "activation" business complicate reinstallation onto new OS/computer? And what about the lack of LAN play?
Don't get me wrong, less intrusive DRM is better than more intrusive DRM and I laud both Blizzard's actions and words here, but don't the standard criticisms still apply: that it only hurts paying customers (though it hurts fewer of them than worse DRM) and is ineffective against pirates?
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Their games are mostly played online, and they've left out home network play. Their DRM is not the usual crippleware, it's the new kind of crippleware that puts necessary software on the server while taking away features gamers have loved for over a decade.
Unless of course they DON'T release a patch.
Maybe because they at that point don't want to.
Or maybe they are bought out by someone else who doesn't want to.
Or maybe because they go bankrupt and there are simply no funds or willingness on the part of the company sweeping up the pieces to do so.
Copyright is NOT intended to protect media creators. It is intended to create public domain works by temporarily incentivising creators.
The deal is they get short term profits, humanity gets the product forever after. In addition there are fair use rights in the interim.
DRM breaks fair use, but not only that it breaks copyright itself.
Activation is DRM. DRM breaks copyright. By breaking their end of copyright yet taking advantage of OUR end of the bargain, they are stealing what does not belong to them. They are breaching a social contract.
What if they collect royalties for the many decades they're allowed to, and then just stiff us? What was supposed to be public domain is lost forever.
Please post your address, I'd like to come take all your stuff. You'll clearly be OK with that if I give you the vague impression that I'm "likely" to give it back to you someday.
This space available.
My friends and I used to play cracked Warcraft and Starcraft copies on our PCs. After we graduated and eventually had jobs, some of my friends bought authentic CDs because they felt that it was the right thing to do. They said that they've always wanted to buy the real thing but they didn't have money to do so. It was then that I realized that the figures that some companies claim to have lost to piracy are just a bunch of BS. I also realized that in order for a software company to be profitable, they need to make quality software that people actually use. Attempting to control how people copy their software is a waste of time.
Actually, quite a few people have been known to enjoy that.
Online activation for singleplayer mode is still leagues more restrictive than what we had just 5 years ago.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
"your key is then bound to this account" because this put an extra burden to the second sale market. IMHO company like blizzard saw that DRM is useless for piracy, but that they could easily pretend to be only checking the validity of your copy without being intruding, when the goal all along is to kill the second hand market and bypass the first sale doctrine.
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