Could this really bring PC piracy to an end?...

[FaceLifter]

I would really love to hear what everyone thinks of this.

This article is about an encryption chip that will "absolutely stop piracy of [PC] gameplay."

Could this at least be the end of DRM as we know it?

Apparently it is already being installed on Mobos that are out for sale now!

Here's the link:

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/52841

 

[FaceLifter]

This guy is a bit of a tool and I'm skeptical as to whether or not this is going to take off.
Will gamers just start to avoid Mobo's that use this chip? Will the big companies, like Asus, stay away from the guaranteed negative press that they will get for using this type of chip?

 

[polarity]

They used similar hardware based encryption on DVDs (CSS) and HD/BluRay, and they were both cracked shortly after release.

There's a TPM chip on all intel MACs, that's supposed to stop OSX being installed on anything but MACs, but there's still OSX86.

 

[Oh Snap]

Then the companies creating games will 1) require that you have a motherboard that uses this chip, thus alienating even MORE of their loyal customers who haven't yet purchased one or 2) don't require them, so that even if most motherboards do have these chips on them, someone will find a way of bypassing/disabling/removing the chip. Or, better yet, companies will see that the motherboards with these chips on them aren't selling as well as the ones that don't, and it won't be in their best interest to use them (unless the game companies who support them are willing to make it financially worthwhile for the manufacturers, in which case that means even more money dumped into anti-piracy).

I don't see this taking off. Even most non-pirates can agree they wouldn't want a chip like that on their hardware.

After founding Atari and making Pong a household name, Bushnell went on to create the Chuck E. Cheese franchise, which mixed pizza eateries with arcades and animatronic stage performances.

Since then, he has moved away from the mainstream video game industry, and recently went so far as to label modern games "pure, unadulterated trash."

Wow, this guy just sounds like a complete douche.

I can honestly say I just wouldn't even go near motherboards that implemented this, and if it meant I couldn't play newer games, so be it. I'd just continue to play Fallout 1 & 2 and that means less money for the industry. This **** is getting out of hand.

Mike Russell: I can't go into details on that, but I can actually address how it works for general titles, not SiN Ep. Generally what happens is that a developer is paid, say, $2-5 million to develop a product. When a unit is bought from the publisher, the publisher gets their cut, which covers cost of goods, testing on the publisher side, and so on and so forth. Then, a portion of that money from that sale goes towards what the developer was paid to make it, and it's only once that number reaches what the developer was paid to make the product, that the developer starts making money.

So, a good example is, if I'm working on a first party title with a $2 million budget, it takes about $15 million worth of retail sales before I break even. If I'm a developer, because of the way the royalty structure works, it can take about $40 million worth of retail sales before the developer sees a dime of their advance.

Sounds like they're getting raped worse by the publishers than they are by the pirates.

 

[purplerat]

It just sounds like they are trying to recycle console technology into PCs. PC users would just be even more likely to use mod chips like those already available to console gamers. Sounds like if any thing this will be a huge boost to mod chip makers, which will make them even more popular in consoles. The way things currently are a modded console is much easier to get pirated games for than is a PC, so this would probably drive up the rate of piracy.

 

[infornography42]

Wouldn't work. This sort of thing has been tried in other ways and technologies and it never works. The install base has to be nearly 100% before any publisher would use it because they would be giving up on sales otherwise, Techies (who coincidently are the most profitable gamer segment) would know to avoid the things, and even if they did manage to get that distribution, it would get cracked just as all similar technologies have been.

You cannot stop piracy. The more you promise that you will, the bigger a fool you look when you fail. The problem is publishers are so intent on stopping it that they are failing to do the many things that they CAN do to minimize it and encourage sales. Not the least of which is to simply minimize or remove DRM.

 

[razor512]

it will never work. there too many things that can go wrong with it

and too many factors to deal with

it may also add unneeded delays

it is like those hardware virus scanners and firewalls that claim to take the load off of your pc by having a usb drive with a 550MHz processor but it still takes up memory and slows all network traffic to a snails pace since it is going through an underpowered device

 

[Gargamel]

I LAF'd at this article bigtime and while I was reading I looked over to the corner and thought to myself "the peoples on the internets are out there in internets land and want to steal my secrets...."

Did you guys even take in some of the crap that this whack job was spewing? check this 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..."

Uncrackable by people on the internet? Is he living in the third world or something? Whatever can be engineered can be reverse engineered, whatever can be made can be unmade and everyone knows this and that why digital piracy will never stop. They can cry till their eyes swell up for all I care, if the item that they are selling is worth buying then it will be bought, even CD's which are the bread and butter of the piracy industry along with movies and games, are purchased if they are decent.

I always download games before I buy them when I can, try before you buy, and in the case that the game is great I will buy the retail copy. If it is a lemon then I just saved myself some money for the companies that want to put a decent game on the shelf.

With this chip nonsense, if you can put it on then you can take it off or get it modified. The guy who wrote this is writing to the people that are absolutely clueless about computers, you know the ones who buy into the anti-virus software and don't know what a port is.

OH NOES!!! T3H Viruses will get me.......

Yeah right, right after the INTERNET police..???

 

[amdfangirl]

Nothing digital will be safe from hacking, period.

Someone will always find a breakthrough. These things have been tried and failed.