I think we can all agree at this stage of gaming that DRM sucks. Doing little more than putting our paid-for content under lock and key, there have been some truly ludicrous implementations of DRM over the last couple years. I myself have pretty much turned exclusively to indie gaming as a result.
Apparently, Blizzard is on our side. According to Frank Pearce, executive producer for StarCraft II and co-founder of Blizzard itself, has assured us that SCII will feature no DRM, due to Blizzard’s desire to get more people using its Battle.Net service, which requires a legitimate copy of the game to run.
“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,” said Pearce of the strategy. “That’s a battle that we have a chance in. 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. We need our development teams focused on content and cool features, not anti-piracy technology.”
Well said, Frank, well said.
It feels good to have one of the biggest developers on the gamers’ side of the DRM debate, and it’s interesting, too, as I seem to remember for the longest time as a child, Blizzard had absolutely absurdly effective anti-piracy measures. Maybe I was just a crappy pirate back in the day.
[Via Gossip Gamers]
Activision-Blizzard can eat it. No matter how much eye candy and “cool features” you throw at it, you still stripped off the LAN game forcing customers to have an internet connection to play which is just like what Ubisoft is doing, using third-party DRM in order to control it.
I for one will not be buying any more Activision-Blizzard games, especially since you screwed Infinity Ward and ruined the COD franchise.