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."
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.
I guess you missed the part where the PC is an open platform and that this is impossible in the first place. The only way you could achieve it would be to force a company like Intel to mandate it in all reference designs - but what about non-reference motherboards? If you require some sort of hardware chip to check to ensure its running signed code only then someone will simply emulate those functions. Someone will provide a non-reference motherboard without this piece of hardware and someone else will provide a mechanism to overcome any security checks. Look at console piracy for examples of that in action. Industry co-operation between all of the hardware giants, software companies and game developers/publishers like that is almost unheard of.
Hardware chips very possibly present the best option for protecting against piracy.
Which is exactly why it would never work on the PC. People will not tolerate having something tell them they can't watch a movie, piece of music or play a game. It doesn't matter that they paid for it(or not), people don't like being restricted on what they deem is their own property. There are countless examples of this in the history of the software industry. Hardware dongles work for niche markets only and yes the music software industry is a niche market compared to something like games or regular office applications.
This comment was edited on Oct 8, 2008, 17:15.
Date
Subject
Author
Copyright © 1996-2025 Stephen Heaslip. All rights reserved.
All trademarks are properties of their respective owners.
Privacy Policy. Manage Cookie Settings.
News CGI copyright © 1999-2025 James "furn" Furness & Blue's News. All rights reserved.
Chatbear v1.5.0/blue++: Page generated 16 July 2025, 05:01.