piracy posts

At PAX East, just a few hours after NVIDIA announced the launch of the 400 series GPU, a panel comprised of John Kreiner (Terminal Reality), John Abercrombie (Lead Designer at Irrational Games), and Michell Shuster (Co-owner of LanSlide Gaming PCs) came together to discuss the future of PC gaming. Moderated by Jeff Kalles from Penny Arcade, the panel took questions from the audience to figure out where PC gaming is headed, given the trends and approaches publishers are taking combined with the leaps in technology. Although the room was almost filled to capacity with PC gamers and all three speakers are self-described fans of PC gaming, the mood quickly turned a grim comparison with console gaming. It soon became clear that the future of PC gaming was already going through a long, dark and ominous tunnel into the unknown. The only question is whether there's any hope of seeing light at the end of it.

In many ways PC gaming is still evolving from a retail box industry to a more downloadable and even browser based type of business. And in our opinion, there's nothing wrong with that at all. However the business-based gaming site IndustryGamers decided to look at some of the reasons why the retail store has become less and less of a factor in gaming.

While there are other factors brought up in the article such as piracy and DRM set-ups that seem to be against the average consumer, IndustryGamers puts the big blame on Microsoft. Their launch of the Xbox 360 console has caused many PC-only game developers to move into console development, often putting the PC version of their games as a low priority. Add to that the dismal launch of Windows Vista and Microsoft's own moves to close down much of their own PC game developers and it's hard to argue with this article's conclusion. Of course Microsoft's own official stance is that they are still big supporters of PC gaming (as our recent chat with the marketing head of Games For Windows Live demonstrated). The next 12 months will show if that claim is real (with the launch of Windows 7) or whether it's just hype.

Demiurge has made itself out to be one of those studios you can depend on. If you have a huge, expensive, killer-IP, AAA title, and you need some extra hands -- Demiurge is the company to call. But since it's (so far) produced little stand-alone, original content, its workers are unsung heroes of the gaming industry. No longer!

In the wake of the release of Mass Effect for the PC (a port on which Demiurge did much of the work), Shacknews interviewed head honcho Al Reed, asking him about the company's past, present, and future. It's a great read if you want an inside look at the video game industry.

Notably, Reed revealed which PC improvements in Mass Effect were invented by Demiurge rather than BioWare -- configurable hotbar buttons and individual squad mate commands. He lamented the piracy situation, saying "I don't know what the right solution is ... I wish someone did!" Finally, he laid out his company's future plans, which finally include some original, in-house games.

In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Nvidia's Rob Taylor, VP of Content Business Development, asserted his belief that PC gaming isn't at all threatened by consoles. Taylor sees console games that inevitably make their way to PC as a starting point, but "the PC [release] is going to be an improved version." Taylor noted Gears of War as a prime example.

Admitting that rampant software piracy will certainly keep many games from being exclusive to PC, Taylor said that "we're going to see more digital authentication, and we're going to see more of an approach that says that PC games aren't products - they're a service." As a service, the lifeline of a game will be extended by updates such as patches, mods, and expansions.

Because console have dominated the market in recent years, Taylor believes that "we have to face the facts - the value of consoles is such that no-one is going to make a PC-exclusive game in the future. Why would they? Why would they ignore consoles?"

Taylor continued by pointing out that such business moves aren't a threat to PC gaming, but rather a sign of its evolution. "PC gaming is changing - and consoles don't threaten PC gaming. They're just different. "Most PC gamers also own consoles - not all of them, but a lot of them. What we're seeing happen is that, yes, people are developing for Xbox 360, for PS3 - but they're also developing for PC."

Following the announcement of their free Steam Cloud service yesterday, Valve head honcho Gabe Newell spoke about the confidence he had in the Steam service overtaking retail in sales. According to Newell, Steam has grown by a smashing 200 percent, compared to the retail's traditional spurt of ten percent.

Steam "will actually pass over in the next three months, how much of our business is coming from retail versus how much is coming from other channels," Newell told Eurogamer.

In addition to believing that Steam will boost industry sales as a whole, Newell also believes the service has prevented -- and will continue to prevent -- a great deal of PC software piracy. "We've got great facilities that make it very hard for people to pirate ... It's a dangerous thing to pirate one of our games because later on, when we catch you, you lose all your games, or you can't play multiplayer."

Atari founder Nolan Bushnell was confident of video game piracy's demise when speaking at a conference hosted Wedbush Morgan Securities this past week. He believes that the Trusted Platform Module (or TPM) -- a secure cryptoprocessor attached to some PC motherboards -- will prove an insurmountable obstacle for would-be software pirates. "The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay," he said. A version of the technology is already shipping in some systems.

The TPM performs a hardware check of installed software, and verifies the software using practically uncrackable encryption keys. Given that console gaming pirates are able to (and must) solder a special chip to their console-of-choice's motherboard to play pirated games, we wonder if it might be possible to perform similar hardware operations on a PC to remove, modify, or replace the TPM chip. Even in the event that it is, the TPM's existence still might raise the bar of technical prowess required to pirate software much higher than most users can reach.

Given that Bushnell was speaking to sell the industry to potential investors, we're understandably skeptical, but his was an intriguing proposition. Bushnell noted, however, that the TPM technology will not solve the characteristically different problems of video and music piracy.