[game_preservation] Problematic installation DRM; thoughts?

[Jim Leonard]

Andrew Armstrong wrote:

> Good point that it is partially an MMO (although not pay per month 

> right? that usually is the main way to stop the piracy of MMO's), 

> although I am sure Spore allows entirely offline play from it's 

> descriptions. Mass Effect is purely singleplayer however. You're right 

> that the CD key generation would be hampered, but I've no idea how they 

> do it so it's unlikely to do much to stop it.


My overall point is that the problem will never go away and eventually 
become the industry standard.  To be honest, I'm astonished most 
companies haven't gone to public-key encryption verification yet.  It's 
free, it's unbreakable, and it would almost completely eliminate piracy 
if portions of the gaming experience were located on corporate servers 
and access to those servers was required for gameplay.

Stand-alone games will always have the opportunity to be cracked, as 
they can be cracked after installation.  No surprise, then, that many 
companies won't produce games without online components.

The *real* thing you should be worried about is a decade from now, when 
all electronic content offerings are online and no information resides 
on the local hardware except maybe as a cache.  The success of xbox live 
and the Wii marketplace is the first tiny bit of writing on the wall. 
In a decade I would expect all electronic gaming platforms, both console 
and PC, to be 100% network devices without the ability to accept local 
media to start the experience.  At that time, historical/archival 
efforts *must* be performed at the then-present time, because they will 
have a very short life (ie. four years later when nobody plays the game, 
the company will cease to offer the content).

Just your friendly doom and gloom for the week...
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)            http://www.oldskool.org/
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