PC Gaming piracy coming to an end?

[Sniper]

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Speaking at yesterday's Wedbush Morgan Securities annual Management Access Conference, the Atari founder suggested that game piracy will soon be a thing of the past thanks to a new chip.

"There is a stealth encryption chip called a TPM that is going on the motherboards of most of the computers that are coming out now," he pointed out.

"What that says is that in the games business we will be able to encrypt with an absolutely verifiable private key in the encryption world - which is uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords - which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem."

Bushnell thinks that piracy of movies and music, however, is probably unstoppable because "if you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it."

"Games are a different thing, because games are so integrated with the code. The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay.

"As soon as the installed base of the TPM hardware chip gets large enough, we will start to see revenues coming from Asia and India at a time when before it didn't make sense."

Thanks to Daftshadow for pointing this out.

[sswilson]

This sounds a little bit too much like the identifier embedded in P4 chips.

There was so much outcry over it back in the day that intel changed their plans to have it turned on by default.

Quite frankly I'm not interested in anything that will allow automatic identification of my computer on-line. There's just too much chance of abuse by either comercial or government interests.

[Scratch]

+1 on that argument. not interested in any regulation quite frankly

[thenewguy001]

games can still be cracked and released without code that checks for security.

chips can be modded

there will be a market for counterfeit hacked boards

the educated public will boycott these boards

etc

this man is delusional

[MpG]

Interesting, but I don't see how this makes it any more difficult to simply crack the game so that it doesn't require the check. It might work for an online game, but those already go through checks every time you log on, and require payment regardless. So not much improvement there, either.

I'd expect a sort of chicken-egg scenario here, albeit in our favour for once. You'll have a lot of trouble selling a game that requires such a chip when nobody has the necessary chip, and you'll have trouble selling such a chip to a public that doesn't want or need such a thing in the first place.

[vinister]

I'm kind of happy about it. More money = bigger budgets = (hopefully) better games.

Honestly now its way too easy to pirate games.

[sswilson]

It's just not going to fly though. If they want to kill PC gaming, this will go a long ways towards pushing it over the edge. All this would mean is that folks like myself who purchase legal copies of their games will abandon the PC gaming platform.

If companies want to prevent piracy... offer some form of free on-line content for validated/registered users that basically turns the retail CD into a form of shareware.

On-Line content through free battlenet servers for Blizzard turned Diablo and Diablo II into what must be the most profitable PC gaming franchise ever created. Imagine... folks actually going out 5 - 10 years after the game was released to purchase new copies of a game they already own because their old cd is worn out.

[Scratch]

Originally Posted by vinister

I'm kind of happy about it. More money = bigger budgets = (hopefully) better games.

Honestly now its way too easy to pirate games.

regardless of piracy blizzard entertainment alone made billions last year and that is 1 company. the more money they make the more money their shareholders make
average 50.00 per game 20.00 per patch on 3 gaming platforms plus mmorgs with a monthly fee of 15.00 per account
my friend worked for ncsoft, well over half the player base on lineage2 consisted of chinese farmers playing multiple accounts to sell adena/items online and management was ordered to leave them alone as it was more important to make the money for shareholders than to provide a pleasurable gaming experience for the players
my other friends worked on tombraider doing graphics. do not fool yourself, they make more money than you can possibly conceive.

Lars made the same argument with Napster and look how that ended up

[tyreman]

I don't game so I don't really care... but hey lets face it if it was anybodies game company here they wouldn't let people steal from them.

You can say you would but you wouldn't.

Like it or not thats what you are doing by pirating...its stealing really.

Because its currently unstoppable doesn't make it right.
Its the internet so...

But thats a whole nother issue.

As the internet is involved and the ways of securing the various programs on the internet and such.

[belgolas]

Why not just have a internet connection like steam does and just use that. And also drop any of that crap that only lets you install a game only so many times. Honestly though you can't really stop pirating but that doesn't mean it is right.