Blizzard: DRM is a Losing Battle
Blizzard's co-founder speaks out about DRM and how it's handled with Battle.net.
Frank Pearce, Blizzard co-founder and executive producer on StarCraft II, recently said in an interview that fighting PC game piracy with DRM is a losing battle. The drama that surrounds restrictive copy protection has been a thorn in gamers' sides for quite some time, some of which has led to unavoidable hard drive formats by legitimate game owners. Ubisoft is one of the more recent DRM enforcers in the spotlight, requiring that both online and offline games maintain an internet connection at all time in order to function.
However Blizzard doesn't want to take that route. If anything, there's some indication that the company wants to follow in Valve's footsteps by providing minimal restrictions on the PC's delicate structure while maintaining IP security by establishing a closed network. In this case, it's the new and improved Battle,net. As with games found on Steam, StarCraft II will require a one-time activation within the user's account and still have the ability to play offline.
"If we've done our job right and implemented Battle.net in a great way, people will want to be connected while they're playing the single player campaign so they can stay connected to their friends on Battle.net and earn the achievements on Battle.net," Frank Pearce said. "The best approach from our perspective is to make sure that you've got a full-featured platform that people want to play on, where their friends are, where the community is."
Pearce believes that this approach will have more success than other invasive DRM methods. "If you start talking about DRM and different technologies to try to manage it, it's really a losing battle for us, because the community is always so much larger, and the number of people out there that want to try to counteract that technology, whether it's because they want to pirate the game or just because it's a curiosity for them, is much larger than our development teams," he added. "We need our development teams focused on content and cool features, not anti-piracy technology."
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is expected to (finally) launch on July 27.
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Maybe Blizzard is admitting that piracy actually creates brand awareness and using restrictive DRM's actually prohibit some people who try the pirated version and then decide to purchase the full game so they can play online. This is especially the case with Starcraft as most of the enjoyment will be through playing online.
Blizzard does this because they have great games and a solid franchise within Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. People like there games so much, they'll just buy then, there's no reason to pirate a game that you know is worth the money.
Any form of DRM sucks. I don't buy Valve games. I don't buy ubisoft, now it appears I won't be buying Blizzard.
Gaming is dead. Long live gaming.
These were the sanest sentences I ever heard/read this year. A BIG THANK YOU to Blizzard!
For the first time i guess an Original Diablo game will land in my hands, unpirated... just keep your promise: quality products without DRM!!!
dandenoth,
MaNGOS, AC Web, ArcEmu, Ascent. Those are 4 different WoW server emulators that are used by people who don't want to pay Blizzard to play the game.
The number one reason is that they don't like the way Blizzard run the game, and /know/ they can do a better job. At least with Valve's games, if you don't like the way they run their servers, you can go and run your own with their blessing, and they even provide you with all the tools you need to do it.
Blizzard do it right - again... Let's hope the other sheep will follow. I choose to buy Blizzards products, not because I have to but purely to support their future releases.
P.S - The same could be applied to the music industry, if thought out correctly, with the correct rewards & sense of down the line honest support for a cause - buy what you enjoy & support your favourite artists.
he's got it spot on, if your game is good and has an online component worth playing then people will buy the game - the proportion of those who only play the single player (e.g. download a hooky copy) will be fairly small, and in fact downloading and playing the single player "for free" may well then persuade them to buy a game for the online play
Blizzard are making the right noises, but I don't trust them. Why is there not LAN on starcraft II. Surely battle.net could support it?
Will offline work? Steam is temperamental when it comes to offline play.
DRM S**K
That is all. :