Ubisoft: EndWar PC Impacted by Piracy [Oct 08, 2008, 09:31 am ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Videogaming247 quotes Ubisoft Shanghai creative director Michael de Plater
on how piracy is a reason Tom Clancy's EndWar is appearing on consoles
first, with plans for a PC edition remaining vague (story). He
says this of a PC version of the voice-controlled RTS game: "To be honest, if PC
wasn’t pirated to hell and back, there’d probably be a PC version coming out the
same day as the other two," also saying: "You know, the level of piracy that you
get with the PC just cannibalizes the others, because people just steal that
version." He goes on to agree with dire predictions about the impact of piracy
on PC gaming: "But at the moment, if you release the PC version, essentially
what you’re doing is letting people have a free version that they rip off
instead of a purchased version. Piracy’s basically killing PC."
Hardware chips would never work. There would always be some vendor willing to make a non-chipped motherboard just to one-up the others. Plus every casual user usually has a tech savvy friend who could remove/defeat it. I see idiots all the time in my shop with hard drives full of games/movies/porn that their friends showed them how to download.
First off (for any publishers and/or devs that are reading this), I do understand that companies want to protect their product from piracy, and rightfully so. I appreciate that you want to make sure you get the money that you deserve for making your game.
But.....could someone please tell me what is wrong with - instead of DRM on the game disks - having to register and tie an e-mail address first with a unique serial number and an account name to the game with a specific PC...a one time 'activation' if you will?
Then the game disks (or downloaded content) could be copied as many times as you wanted - no DRM + free distribution of the game on the web! Also, you have tied your single license with your email address, account and the specific hardware you installed it on. This should generate a unique serial number to put into your game and there you go.
If you wanted to, you should be able to uninstall or re-install on that computer any number of times. You could install the game content from the game disks to a different computer, but since it doesn't have all the information to properly match the licensed copy to the hardware it will not work.
However, if your machine crashes and burns, or you need to do a major upgrade - no sweat. You would log into your account, unregister the license that was bound to the 'old' computer, and re-register to the new or updated computer.
There you go, Piracy averted.
I've seen this work. Ironically, the makers of Alcohol 120% do this. It seems to work well.
Of course, if the company were to go belly up, something else would have to be done like a patch to remove the way the licensing is done, or another company could host the licensing database\site for a fee or something - but at least no DRM measures have to be installed with the game, potentially screwing your computer over.
That and the whining fucking stops with the publishers, which means they can feel more comfortable with developing for the PC again.
So I ask you, doesn't this sound good (or at least better than what is now done) - or is there a gaping hole of Buccaneerish logic I've missed?
This comment was edited on Oct 8, 2008, 11:04.
First off (for any publishers and/or devs that are reading this), I do understand that companies want to protect their product from piracy, and rightfully so. I appreciate that you want to make sure you get the money that you deserve for making your game.
But.....could someone please tell me what is wrong with - instead of DRM on the game disks - having to register and tie an e-mail address first with a unique serial number and an account name to the game with a specific PC...a one time 'activation' if you will?
Then the game disks (or downloaded content) could be copied as many times as you wanted - no DRM + free distribution of the game on the web! Also, you have tied your single license with your email address, account and the specific hardware you installed it on. This should generate a unique serial number to put into your game and there you go.
If you wanted to, you should be able to uninstall or re-install on that computer any number of times. You could install the game content from the game disks to a different computer, but since it doesn't have all the information to properly match the licensed copy to the hardware it will not work.
However, if your machine crashes and burns, or you need to do a major upgrade - no sweat. You would log into your account, unregister the license that was bound to the 'old' computer, and re-register to the new or updated computer.
There you go, Piracy averted.
I've seen this work. Ironically, the makers of Alcohol 120% do this. It seems to work well.
Of course, if the company were to go belly up, something else would have to be done like a patch to remove the way the licensing is done, or another company could host the licensing database\site for a fee or something - but at least no DRM measures have to be installed with the game, potentially screwing your computer over.
That and the whining fucking stops with the publishers, which means they can feel more comfortable with developing for the PC again.
So I ask you, doesn't this sound good (or at least better than what is now done) - or is there a gaping hole of Buccaneerish logic I've missed?
This comment was edited on Oct 8, 2008, 11:04.
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