By on 27 May, 2010 at 5:56 PM
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Thumbs Up To Blizzard, Who Says “Focus On Cool Features Not DRM”

Thumbs Up To Blizzard, Who Says “Focus On Cool Features Not DRM”

Frank Pearce, co-founder of Blizzard, believes that DRM is “a losing battle”, and that piracy should instead be fought with “cool features” that make players actually want to connect to Battle.net and play away. That rhymed, it was unintentional.

Referring to StarCraft II mostly, Pearce said, “If we’ve done our job right people will want to be connected while they’re playing the single player campaign so they can stay connected to their friends and earn the achievements.”

“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.”

“We need our development teams focused on content and cool features, not anti-piracy technology,” he added.

Brilliant, Frank, I agree completely. We share an identical vision there, you and I. Purchase incentive is a far better alternative to anti-piracy technology, effectively because by investing in anti-piracy technology you’re only lessening the PC gaming crowd’s desire to purchase games at retail and only giving hackers another challenge that they can gloat about once they, inevitability, crack it.

There are currently mixed views on the whole DRM business in the gaming industry. Most recent comments include Avalanche Studio’s very logical statement that DRM punishes legal gamers, and then there was also Namco’s rather dumb comment, in my opinion anyway, that DRM is a good strategy, but only because there are currently no other alternatives.

[Source: CVG]

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Name: Azhar Amien
Location: Cape Town
Position: Editor, Reviews

Azhar has published 2501 posts. Read all of Azhar's posts.
  • Gintox

    You know…

    i think a major player in piracy is money. I will admit that im quite of a pirate myself. Im in university now and im earning my own money…mostly :P, and in the past 3 months ive bought more games (original) than i have in my whole life. And buying original games is awesome. You get much more satisfaction out of playing the game because you’ve worked for it and you milk it for everything its worth.

    And im seriously contemplating buying an xbox tomoro :?: …if not tomro

    on the weekend :D

  • KraZy

    There is no need to make anti-piracy software! find me one proper game that i CANNOT dl and play and ill eat my hat! Gintox has a good point, games are expensive and to a teenager on a limit, R500+ is a crapload to spend on a game, piracy is free(excluding ISP fee’s and sex for games). y dont game companies put alot of really kwl stuff in the packaging of the games like poster’s, manuals, The making of Dvd, anything!

  • A-G Sonday

    Blizzard has the right idea but why can’t anybody else see it. Are all the big corporations blinded by fast cars and shiny objects?

    • Esda

      A-G Sonday – not all corporations make as much money as Blizzard to not have to worry about it. But I agree. I’m buying sc2 the same way I did Dawn of War 2. It needs to be worth it.

  • Onca

    Full feature? as in no LAN? And Bnet 2.0 looks “meh” from teh Beta view. Actually, the only notable new feature is the facebook feature, which is…retarded -.- Oh please dont mention teh stupid league names (mothership juliet, wtf?)
    Im kinda disappointed in Blizz tbh, it seems they havent improved on Bnet, but in fact removed a _lot_ of features. But maybe post release itll be improved (hah!).
    Like frinstance, you cant watch replays online with friends. That just removes a feature they had for the original sc more than 10 years ago -.-
    No chat rooms as of yet either :(
    ALL I WANT IS LAN DAMMIT, LAN LAN LAN, I HAZ FRENZ IN REEL LIFE!!!

  • Gema

    Blizzard is waving its big d**k around. They force players to play only using battle.net and they call that quality?

    Piracy wont go away and even blizzards servers were emulated.

    Quality games should be made but doesnt exclude blizzard from making the same game twice with just better graphics – ala Starcraft 2 and the first Starcraft still looks better :P

  • dean0

    LOL! SC2 is awesome though. It has loads of changes and it will revive competition. :D

  • Onca

    SC2 is good, gameplay wise, but shitty battle net and no lan can kill it :/ Plus server migration isnt there, that means that tournaments between EU and US players is not possible :S I dont get what theyre trying to do.

  • http://egamer.co.za/ Tody

    No server migration? That can be quite troublesome from a competitive perspective…No LAN is also quite a kill joy, which means if you want to “LAN”, everyone has to be connected to the host’s internet throughout the gameplay session, which definitely isn’t cool. :???:

    Maybe they’ll receive divine intervention and do the right thing after the game is released with some patches, right? Yeah, I know, that’s like wishing for the KFC Double Crunch back. :sad: