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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."
Seriously, this is why I love this company. Ever since being a young kid playing Warcraft Orc and Humans, then playing multiplayer against my dad, I've known they make quality games, how they want, when they are ready. I still play Diablo 2 to this day, completing Hell difficultly on Hardcore still gives me a feeling of achievement lacking in recent games!
Hasn't Blizzard said you'll need a connection to Battle.net for multiplayer, even if you're playing with someone in the same room?
...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.
Starcraft 2 requires an internet connection to Battle.net in order to play multiplayer. LAN support was stripped out during development.
They've removed features from the original game in order to "prevent" piracy in the sequel. That's pretty much the goddamned definition of onerous DRM.
And here Blizzard has a trick : WoW requires a monthly fee. So used games resell aren't a "threat" to its income.
StarCraft 2 would essentially be played online thru its battle.net servers and there you will need to have a valid account and register your game, as you would need to with Ubisoft. No one plays offline and alone.
Ubisoft's AssassinCreed2 is a game you can play only alone. So the "phoning home" from the DRM is artificial while it is "hidden" in games with a naturally online gameplay.
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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.
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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.
Oh, come on. After that rant, you can't possibly be suggesting you believe individual people should be allowed to own stuff.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
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.
Why do all recent games feel that a list/lobby based multiplayer environment is a bad thing?
Because the average Internet using gamer has proven to be a douchebag and not suitable to be out in public.
That and it doesn't scale well at the numbers Blizzard is looking at for SC2. What's the benefit of a list, when you have 21,000 games in it? What's the benefit of a lobby when you have 2,000 lobbies? You can't realistically find something by looking manually and produce a good user experience, so you let matchmaking take over for you.
Actually, quite a few people have been known to enjoy that.
leg warmers? wait what? Those are out of fashion?
"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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I had to once work on a computer for someone who had an app that installed off of a dozen or so floppies, and on the last one, it moved a file off the floppy to the hard drive, rather than copying it. If you told the program to uninstall itself, you were actually prompted to insert that last floppy, so the license file could be moved back. Unfortunately, the person who had the computer did not know enough to back up the computer, or even the floppy set, so when their computer crashed, we were unable to reinstall that program without jumping through a bunch of hoops with the company who sold it...
I have a few points to make. I would post directly to the relevant comments, but that would take too long.
A) A history of letting you not need the disc in the drive anymore after a patch is NOT really a friendly way of stripping away DRM once the "hype" dies down. Besides, people are getting the dates wrong here, Starcraft removed needing the disc with patch 1.15, which was released almost ten years after the game debuted. Requiring online activation of a unique code is apples-to-oranges with keeping a disc in the drive.
B) People still do have LAN parties, especially Starcraft enthusiasts! It's a classic of the LAN party, and was by far the most-played at the last one I went to. Now, I'm not sure how much data is actually launched up and down the tubes when you're playing online, but if you have a lousy ISP, or not the highest-speed service, having eight people all stacked up on one connection playing that game might be a bit much, especially if you have an ISP that throttles, or imposes other crappy limits, or, in my case, one that likes to disconnect for random periods of time, especially during the night.
B2) The above point, either way, shouldn't be a matter of if it is or isn't a hassle, it should be a matter of, just because you can, doesn't mean you should have to.
C) This whole discussion is instantly destroyed by the level of fanboyism for Blizzard, and the level of anti-fanboyism as well. I'm probably going to get modded down to comment hell for this post, for example. This is becoming a matter of "Awh, shucks, Blizzard are such great guys! I bet they'd buy me a new computer if my current one couldn't run Starcraft II" versus "DRM IS COCKS!!! GO DIE!!!"
D) That being said, I really see no reason for anyone who loves SC1 to get SC2. I played the beta, it's pretty much just feels like a modded, or expansion-packed, or remastered SC1, with some bits from Relic's RTSes pasted on. I think the best way to avoid the alleged hassle of SC2 is to just... keep playing SC1.
E) I think my biggest issue here, and the one I will leave off with (leaving out comments about stat tracking and achievement farming and whatnot), is just that Blizzard here is stating, and their fanboys in the room are happily restating, is that, put simply, they are awesome because they aren't doing what Ubisoft is doing. Even though they aren't as bad as Ubi, they're just as bad, if not worse, than the rest of the market in this matter. They're still being 'bad', they just aren't the 'worst'. But they're still being bad.
Blizzard forever lost me as a customer when they removed LAN play from their games, and sued the bnetd developers for restoring the feature. As far as I'm concerned, Blizzard and Microsoft are part of the same Axis of Evil (but for different reasons).
It's not gay if it's with an elf
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Which, rather surprisingly, has never been cracked (at least as of the last time I heard anything about it, which admittedly was a couple years ago).
That's because there is a version of Windows XP that doesn't require activation, and it happens to be much better than the version that ships with non-business PCs.
What version is it, you ask? Why, Windows XP Pro - Enterprise. What's great about this version is it doesn't even need a crack a lot of times. These versions generally come with several hundred to several thousand CD keys, so depending on who's enterprise keys were stolen, thousands of people could install XP with no problem.
Why do it the hard way (cracking activation), when there is an easy way that gives you a better product? That's the only real reason Windows Activation wasn't cracked. Who was going to download Home when they could download Pro and not have to deal with it?
This is similar to what happened to Windows 2000: The code for 2000 and 2000 Server were identical, the only difference between them was a registry key and a few thousand dollars. No need to hack the system, just change the key and voila! Server version at Desktop price. Obviously they fixed it eventually, but a lot of people took advantage of that little mistake.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller