Blizzard, Analyst Call DRM Damaging. Is Ubisoft Listening?
In separate interviews, Blizzard’s Frank Pearce and analyst Nicholas Lovell have both attacked restrictive DRM and copy protection.
In an interview with VideoGamer.com Pearce said that DRM was “a losing battle” and that he wants his team to focus on “cool features, not anti-piracy technology.” Pearce said that he’d rather attract users to play online with a great implementation of Battle.net, and 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.”
In a separate interview with PC Zone, Lovell, who set-up Gamesbrief.com, said that “there is no doubt in my mind that pirates now have a better experience than legitimate consumers”. He stated that while defeating piracy is a “balance”, the always-on systems that Ubisoft uses are “draconian”, although he said that always-on isn’t wrong “per se”, but that it’s a mistake to “limit [player's] ability to play it in a way that pirates are not limited.”
He did note that he thought Ubisoft will probably succeed in bringing down piracy, but he argued that they “are targeting the wrong metric” and that sales will also drop because of the resentment against Ubisoft. ”There are ways to see piracy as the start of a relationship with a future consumer, not theft”, he said.
In Blizzard’s case, calling out DRM is in itself an awesome PR move. Not locking players down and treating them like adults (not criminals) creates a greater relationship between companies and gamers. Look at Valve: I love them as a company because they make great games, because they have a personality and don’t act like dicks. Ubisoft or Activision on the other hand see us all as threats against their profiteering and thus punish the majority to impede the few. The music industry went to great lengths to control their content with DRM, but have now (almost) realised that punishing the people who actually spend money on your content is probably isn’t that clever. It took them long enough, though.
You’re never going to beat piracy, it will always be there. But treat your customers with respect and you won’t lose the ones who are willing to pay for your content.
Via: Rock, Paper, Shotgun, CVG
Your “Look at Valve” sentence either has the wrong conjunction or is missing a word somewhere.
I think it’s cool that someone from a company as involved with computer gaming as Blizzard is has come out against DRM, and I think he’s right on the money. As we’ve seen with AC2, people are much more likely to get angry about new, more restrictive DRM. However, I’m more willing to spend money on a game if I see that it has new innovations or some neat features that really separate it from the crowd. That’s what developers should be focusing on.
Wholeheartedly agree. You will NEVER win against pirates, you can just slow them down. You are much better off with schemes that \hide\ or \mask\ the DRM such as Steam. Steam is DRM done right: offline modes, a great community, and automatic updates.
If you stuff your game with intrusive DRM that punishes your customers, you are going to lose more sales from paying customers than you would stop people from pirating the game. The worst offender is Ubisoft’s always-online DRM. Their verification servers were hacked out of spite and paying customers couldn’t play the game they paid for.
I can’t talk about DRM and not talk about the recent success of the Humble Indie Bundle. Indie developers sold a bundle of 6 games DRM free, for whatever price you wanted (even $.01). They raised over ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
reCAPTCHA: campiest was
@Glassninja: Nice catch. Blame Wardrox for being a rubbish editor.
The problem is that this is really just PR bullshit, if you look at the new features that blizzard is introducing for battle.net 2.0, then you see that the direction they are taking it is not one that has the customer in mind.
Things like no LAN play for starcraft 2, if you ever want to run a small tournament then you have to run all games on the battle.net severs and hope that the internet connection can hold up while all the people play. And because of how e sports for SC1 turned out, blizzard has now set up limitations on anyone wanting to hold a tournament. You much contact them before hand, and get permission, this has already lead to the delay of a beta tournament and assuming that the game grows as popular as SC1 was in south korea, then it will only get worse.
They also left out, and have no plans to include, chat rooms for battle.net. The only battle.net alternative is a party chat system that only allows six or so people, so the only effective way for a clan to meet is in an external IRC. This also means that if there were say, a nukezilla starcraft clan then not only would we need to use external communication, but setting up games would be more difficult than battle.net’s 1997 predecessor.
Another ‘feature’ is the removal of the simple game list from battle net 1.0, instead you are given an IWnet like match making system that plays on random maps, and against random races that you may not want to play against, but once you find out what race they are you are loading up the game, so if you decide to leave, then it counts as a loss.
They made a new account system called Real ID, this seemed to be made to stop people from abusing how easy it is to make a new account on B.net and start killing off scrubs left and right to get to top rank with a near flawless record, a process known as smurfing. Removing this seems like it would be beneficial at first glance, but when one realize the different uses for creating new accounts, it becomes apparent that the removal of smurfing is more of a detriment than a bonus. I have this problem personally, I play Protoss, and have a rank with a decent win to loss record. Now I want to start playing the other races, but for obvious reasons changing to another race would lead to a huge hit to my record, and most likely lower me into other leagues, meaning that I would need to fight my way back up if I were to play Protoss again. With the old battle.net system I could easily make a new account then have one account for each race. Keeping them all at separate skill levels and win/loss records. Another use for the account system in b.net 1.0 was the solid development of strategies. One could make a new account then use the same strategy over and over slowly learning the timings or counters from the ground up. If one were to introduce a new strat and played it against other people that have been challenging in the past, then the strat may come as a surprise to the opponent, but ultimately without perfecting it, it would lead to a huge number of losses. And even though they removed the ability for players to smurf, because of the shit system they use for matchmaking, the same thing happens, only now it is built in by blizzard. An example was when I first started playing the beta, I was placed into silver league, the 3rd place league. And after getting completely destroyed by another player I asked what league he was in right before a left the game. Turns out the genius system had placed be with a platinum player, the highest league in the game at the time.
Also along the lines of limiting how many accounts you could have, they have also stated that unlike SC1, you are bound to the region that you buy the game from. So if for example I had a friend that lived in the EU (I’m in the US), or I wanted to get on the crazy hard mode Asian servers the only way to do this is to buy multiple copies of the game.
The main ideas behind battle.net 2.0 are far from the accepting nature of valve’s use of steam. They are implementing an always on system that means even if you are playing single player missions against AI you still need a connection to battle.net. The way SC2 is made right now, you cannot even see the map list unless you have a connection to battle.net. The only thing that blizzard has said will change is the introduction of an offline mode, but even that only allows you to play the campaign, and that only works if you first authenticate the game with battle.net.
Kinda the TLDR bit:
Team liquid is generally considered the number one foreign (meaning out side of Korea) site for starcraft as has been for some time, and in a poll of almost 2900 (at the time of posting), 94% say that they do not ‘like the direction BNET 2.0 is taking’. And finally the real icing on the cake that sums up the whole mentality of b.net 2.0 is facebook integration…
Let’s all act like Blizzard is in no way connected to Activision and pretend to believe there won’t be DRM in coming Blizzard products.
Let’s also pretend Steam isn’t DRM and be happy Valve fanboys.
Great comment. This is obviously a PR move and of course limitations are always going to be there, but I still think the more companies who call out DRM the better.
In some ways it’s just about corporate pressure. Getting more companies away from the idea that your customers are a threat and you should adversely limit everyone to stop a few is what this is about. In my opinion, it’s less about the individual methods of DRM and more the culture inside the company.
As Lovell says, with Ubisoft DRM makes it a better experience for the pirates, not something you could say about Steam I would argue.
What are you even talking about?
Whats the difference between what blizzard are doing to the sc2 with Bnet 2.0 and what Valve does with their games?
If I’m not connected to bnet 2.0 I cant do anything with my sc2 game.
This is the issues I have with sc2 and bnet 2.0:
# No LAN Support
# Microtransactions
# Custom Maps for $$$
# No UMS Names
# No UMS Joinable Lobbies
# 10 MB Map Limit
# 20 MB Total Maps Allowed
# Only 5 Maps Per Account
# Inability to Play Custom Maps At All Once Removed
# Only Able to Add Friends via Email
# Real Name Plastered Everywhere
# Requires Address, Phone #, Name, Birth Date, Credit Card #
# One Account Per $60
# Region Locking = Pay $60 Per Area You Play
# Inability to Play While BNet is Down in Any Form
# No Chat Rooms
# Pay to Play in Russia, South America, Asia, etc
# Privacy Leaking
# Random Account Resets
# Moderators Deleting / Banning / Locking Every Critical Topic(in sc2 forum, look for yourself. Right now its crazy, half of the post get locked or deleted)
You seriously are suggesting that Blizzard are not setting limitations on their buyers?
Blizzard are actually in the progress of setting a new low for the gaming industry.