Lets face it, damn near anything that leaves the hallowed halls of developer Blizzard is pretty much guaranteed to be a smash hit. Along with said success comes the concern of rampant piracy, a topic that Blizzard has never shied away from discussing. Considering that their current MMO development model for World of Warcraft goes a long way towards clamping down on gamers flying the flag of the USS BitTorrent, the same cannot be said for some of their more notable single player franchises such as the original StarCraft.
Having witnessed the game being pirated to hell and back over the last decade, the developers decided to crackdown on the abuse in StarCraft II by removing LAN support, a staple of the prior installments.
Gamers have pissed and moaned about the decision, but while speaking with VideoGames.com, Blizzard Co-Founder Frank Pearce comments that this is purely symptomatic of developers and publishers discovering that DRM is a not the solution to piracy.
“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 continued by noting:
“We need our development teams focused on content and cool features, not anti-piracy technology.” — Frank Pearce via VideoGames.com
Pearce is spot on and shockingly candid in his statement, further revealing the frustration that developers have to deal with in this era of one-click piracy solutions. The question they face is do you make it more difficult for your target audience by requiring DRM and/or product registration, or risk being driven into the poorhouse by penny pinching pricks who have nothing better to do than watch a progress bar of their lastest digital theivery scroll across the screen?
I believe that their newly implemented Battle.net and registration process is a fair middle ground. What do you think?
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