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."
Sorry to go back a bit but...
Hardware chips very possibly present the best option for protecting against piracy. They currently protect the music software industry, which has since seen products dropping vastly in price to reflect the absence of piracy. However, it does completely prevent resale. So it has already worked for part of the software industry. Obviously games are a different scenario because they are much more widely used and there would be more people attempting to crack it. The potential if it worked though is the elimination of piracy and no need for CD-checks or the current limited number of activations - it would give power back to the consumer.
Atari have already said they want to use the TPM when it reaches a large enough install base and they believe it will stop piracy altogether.
All I know is that something needs to be done. If piracy is eliminated then it is a good thing - it means that publishers could let users download an entire game like Fallout 3 to demo it for a particular period of time without risk of it being cracked. It means cheaper prices. It means simultaneous releases.
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.Nonsense. The point is the TPM is a hardware dongle through which components of the application are run through; not having a chip simply would mean the program wouldn't run at all. It's exactly like the hardware dongles employed by Pace (iLok) and Syncrosoft (neither of which are currently cracked), except supposedly much stronger. It is not something a "tech savvy friend" could simply bypass.
Hardware chips very possibly present the best option for protecting against piracy. They currently protect the music software industry, which has since seen products dropping vastly in price to reflect the absence of piracy. However, it does completely prevent resale. So it has already worked for part of the software industry. Obviously games are a different scenario because they are much more widely used and there would be more people attempting to crack it. The potential if it worked though is the elimination of piracy and no need for CD-checks or the current limited number of activations - it would give power back to the consumer.
Atari have already said they want to use the TPM when it reaches a large enough install base and they believe it will stop piracy altogether.
All I know is that something needs to be done. If piracy is eliminated then it is a good thing - it means that publishers could let users download an entire game like Fallout 3 to demo it for a particular period of time without risk of it being cracked. It means cheaper prices. It means simultaneous releases.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
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