Either because they want free stuff, or it’s ”a curiosity for them,” groups of people will break DRM technology. Blizz prefer to stick with ‘cool content’.
For years many studios have been trying out different methods of PC DRM, with the latest from Ubisoft even demanding that you stay connected to the Internet at all times regardless if the game supports online play or not.
“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,” Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce told VideoGamer.com.
”If we’ve done our job right and implemented Battle.net in a great way people will want to be connected while they’re playing the single player campaign so they can stay connected to their friends on Battle.net and earn the achievements on Battle.net,” he said.
”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.”
”That’s a battle that we have a chance in,” noted Pearce. ”We need our development teams focused on content and cool features, not anti-piracy technology.” Outrage last year came from their decision to drop LAN from StarCraft II, citing a piracy safeguard.
Is it better for studios to focus more on content and win the ‘hearts and minds’ of gamers than it is to try and weed out illegal copies through DRM? There’s always going to be an element wanting everything for nothing… history teaches us that.