Interestingly, Square Enix recently announced an official Chinese version of their game for the first time, Final Fantasy 13 for PS3. The only console that can run the offline software business in China is the PS3 backed by Cell & Blu-ray.
Piracy not reason consoles won
- Thread starter edepot
- Start date
There is no perfect antipiracy mechanism, but there are pretty good antipiracy mechanisms which the industry could use right now ... instead they waste tons and tons of money on trying to put rootkits on my PC instead (always fun having to go to gamecopyworld to get a game executable which will actually launch, gg).
If the industry got together they could launch a dongle based anti-copy system very easily (for examples of what is possible with modern dongles look at Senselock and Rockey6 and ignore the fundamentally broken crypto challenge/response type dongles). If they bought one of the companies offering these dongles out or developed one themselves they could manufacture them for a couple of bucks a piece in volume ...
Or they could just keep putting buggy rootkits on my PC and giving piracy enabling sites a very legitimate reason to exist.
Oh I wouldn't try and justify some of the currnet attempts at antipiracy.
IMO no application should ever install a driver, or change system files. Of course I also believe the registry was a hideous mistake and you should be able to uninstall an application by deleting the directory it was installed in.
But I don't think dongles are the answer either, do you really want to have to sort through 100 dongles to run a game, it's as bad as games that require the original Disc in the DVD drive.
As I said above, if you want to minimize piracy, games need to become services, you have to be paying for something that isn't the bits on your HD. Require being online and signed in, and provide some additional value to get people over the acceptance hump.
IMO no application should ever install a driver, or change system files. Of course I also believe the registry was a hideous mistake and you should be able to uninstall an application by deleting the directory it was installed in.
But I don't think dongles are the answer either, do you really want to have to sort through 100 dongles to run a game, it's as bad as games that require the original Disc in the DVD drive.
As I said above, if you want to minimize piracy, games need to become services, you have to be paying for something that isn't the bits on your HD. Require being online and signed in, and provide some additional value to get people over the acceptance hump.
That's why the industry should get together ... with online activation a single dongle is enough for all games.
PS. even if it were one per game I'd much rather have a dongle in my computer to play a game than a DVD ... I have many more USB slots than DVD drives.
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I have discriminated on that bases, I never go to gcw for the DRM-free releases.
A single disc of Starcraft would spawn I think eight LAN copies. What a foolish move! Whoever made that game probably went bankrupt shortly after release.
Maybe developers should try making games that actually run on the machines people have. Remember in the olden days, when a game would have a software renderer, but also had OpenGL/DX/Glide for people with fancy graphics cards? They should go back to that idea, except the basic game would run on a typical integrated video chip, with extra fancy junk if you've got a $300 video card.
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Silent_Buddha
Legend
I believe it was you that mentioned that some critical part of even single player games should be hosted/run remotely. Personally I think that would be a good idea and probably the next step up from UBI Soft's current initiative.
If the launcher for a single player game had to connect online to run the main executable hosted online, then people would have no choice but to connect and validate their copy everytime they played.
However, would this be able to be designed such that it would be virtually unhackable yet still not be affected by internet latency? IE - you obviously have to execute some essential piece from the cloud that is not stored locally (otherwise, it's just hacking as normal), yet if you do that, wouldn't you then be subjected to internet latency when playing?
Obviously drawback is that anyone without a decent internet connection is going to be S.O.L., but that would be a small price to pay IMO, if pubs could regain confidence in the PC sector. Oh and I'd feel sorry for a lot of the people I know that have Comcast cable service with it's often spotty service (frequent dropouts).
Regards,
SB
A single Computer ID donglle, would be a big plus for software developers. It'd be portable between systems, so your software would be registered to the dongle, not the ever-changing hardware of your PC. The risk would be a pirate dongle on which will run pirate rips. I don't know how secure dongle systems truly are. I only know of them on high-end software applications from yesteryear and the pirated software having the dongle code ripped out, making it more convenient.
Dongles can be hacked. I've seen it. I would seriously doubt that Microsoft would go the route of putting all the registration ID info in the dongle. Too many eggs in one basket. I'm sure if they did something it would at least be tied to the console ID & possibly the GamerTag that purchased the content.
Tommy McClain
And pigs can follow ballistic trajectories, I've seen that as well, but that doesn't mean they all do it just the same.
Look at the evolution of the console protection, look at the evolution of the cable/satellite content protection, everything has evolved a bit ... including dongles.
I should have said the industry minus Microsoft should get together yes ... you don't need Microsoft though.
The dongle would be tied to your account, but that doesn't mean a new dongle couldn't be tied to it as well ... you'd just have to jump through hoops (just like if say your Steam account gets jacked, or if you run out of activations for windows).
I woudn't expect a dongle to be used in consoles. You can embed individual hardware codes in consoles. I was thinking for PCs, which currently have no secure, robust way of identifying a machine/owner, where a dongle (more a mini USB stick) would work as a personal access card to which software is registered. It'd be a comfortable compromise between software security and user transportability.
Hell no, Do you seriously believe a publisher would fund a server for this, especially as after a year or two the game will cease to make money.
20 years from now I decide to play game X can I really trust the server to still be operational ?
and what happens when the publisher goes bankrupt your going to be locked out of your game
this is going to be a big problem in the future. Those of you who champion online style drm like steam are going to get screwed, it happened with music and it will happen with games
It's no different for MMORPGs today, and 11.5 million people accept that in WOW.
This business model and the mindset have to change, it has to become about services rather than products. To get that shift publishers will have to offer value to customers for being online/subscribing.
Let's hypothetically say, rather than buying for $50 you can pay $10 a month to play (less than people play for WOW). For most games how many people really play 5 months after they buy? sure the titles with longevity, will end up costing more, but your paying for the good titles.
Subscription and cancellation would have to be relatively painless.
Publishers obviously would want to retain customers so have to provide incentives for them to stay subscribed, probably new and evolving content.
There are obviously other models, channels where you subscribe to sets of games, pay for play, where your playtime is tracked at a finer grain etc etc.
Personally I wouldn't envision code running serverside, although it could be done. In the short term I think it's more likely to be data streamed from a remote server during the game, publishers could offer seamless content updates. Asherons call did this 8 years ago.
Having said that this takes a radically different development/business model than most publishers have in place today. And there maybe a barrier getting over the boxed good, although I think it's less of a barrier than many think.
The Sims will run on a Macbook with IGP. While all the developers are engaging in pissing contests to win the dollar of the elusive niche enthusiasts, EA's out there raking in the cash. And what are you calling hyperbole? Most PCs don't have standalone graphics cards, and the vast majority of developers choose to exclude those machines from their potential market. I wonder how many people with ordinary laptops would be willing to drop $30 for a halfway decent game. I like my PS3, but I'd certainly be willing to buy a game for my laptop that isn't the Sims...if there was a developer out there who wanted my money more than he wanted to win PC Gamer's "Best Graphics 2010" award.
Don't forget Carmack wrote Quake II with a software renderer.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
There are devs that do that. It's just that you have to be willing to take the obvious graphical downgrades that will entail. Torchlight for example is a recent hit (relatively speaking) to do such. I believe Kings Bounty would also run on many IGPs.
But we've gone over that ad nauseum, how many people on this forum for example would be willing to take huge downgrades in graphics and/or to be limited to gametypes (pop-cap, flash games, puzzles games, Sims) that appeal to the consumer base that isn't particularly interested in AAA graphics.
FPS, RTS, and RPG (with the exception of WoW) games that have gone the route of reduced graphics have in general sold far far less than the AAA titles in said genre's despite targetting a level of graphics that might run on an IGP/budget discrete card and despite getting rave/critical reviews for gameplay/story.
Some of the best RPGs released in recent memory have targetted very low end graphics. And despite being better than almost all AAA RPG's in the past 10 years have generally had dismal sales. But since their budgets were also very low, I think some of them still made enough profit to keep their devs from starving.
Regards,
SB
The Asian PC market is almost completely online-only, regardless of genre, with microtransactions, time-based (hourly), and subscriptions being the primary revenue models. In many ways, it's a harbinger of things to come for the Western game market. However, relatively limited console penetration in Asia distorts the market there somewhat. The western market for PC games isn't big enough to sustain AAA titles exclusively except for WoW and The Sims -- the two series that have dominated sales charts for the past decade.
I seem to remember Intel once tried a unique CPU ID for web browsing identification and DRM but there was a huge uproar about it.
I think this was it. Seems it wasn't too secure though. http://www.schneier.com/essay-187.html
But yea dongles would be better for their portability and ease of replacement in case your old dongle gets compromised.
I think this was it. Seems it wasn't too secure though. http://www.schneier.com/essay-187.html
But yea dongles would be better for their portability and ease of replacement in case your old dongle gets compromised.
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