DVDs Didn’t Go Walkies For 13 Whole Days
Back when Bioshock launched for the PC there were some server hiccups. Server hiccups for a single player game? Yes, if the single player game needs to be authenticated before it will run. Copy protection is something our 13th podcast talked about and it’s something that most of us have come to accept, grudgingly, about PC games. The exceptions like Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations II are few and far between and celebrated by the law-abiding and criminal alike. A new article at Gamespot covering some comments from 2K Australia about their copy protection plans for the future, however, introduced something into the equation I hadn’t thought about.
Copy protection, said senior programmer Martin Slater, has special importance when your title will be available on consoles along with the PC:
“…we don’t want to lose console sales to people ripping off the PC and the piracy issue. If they can get a cheap pirated version on PC they may not buy the 360 SKU”
That’s one I hadn’t heard before. Given how game publishing is a business where you ostensibly fire people for screwing up, you’d think that the other dangers he mentioned wouldn’t be so widespread:
You find with a lot of games, what happens is that anywhere between manufacturing and the stores, one of these DVDS will go walkies and end up in the hands of crackers.
I hadn’t heard that their copy protection was considered a success because it kept them crack-free for 13 days. Just 13 days is long enough for the inital burst of sales? Perhaps the power of being uncracked for that long convinced people to just pony up the dough and buy the game right away to get access to what everyone raved about.
Even though he said they probably won’t require the download of a 10Meg executable for their games in the future to avoid slamming their servers, they have to do something. We’ll see what they do next. Is server-side authentication so bad to get the actual runtime if the server infrastructure is beefed up and it lets them continue making great games?
Seen on Gamespot.
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