It’s easy to sit back and scoff at “review bombing”, as we saw last week when Blizzard released a broken Diablo III. Flooding Amazon to give zero stars to something others have called 10/10, sure, that’s not a legitimate review. And people staging a sit-in aren’t there to legitimately patronize a public accommodation, either. But a sit-in is a legitimate form of protest. And I think a review bomb is, too.
Each and every time someone at CD Projekt Red discusses piracy, it seems as though they talk sense. After experimenting with DRM and other methods, CD Projeckt Red has completely abandoned use of DRM in any form. Now, speaking to Forbes, they’ve reiterated their stance: DRM “absolutely does not work”.
AFACT’s loss in the high court on Friday brought to an end the current legal woes for iiNet, but it’s far from the end of the story. In the press conference held afterwards, iiNet’s Michael Malone repeatedly pressed home the point that a lot of the problems would go away if Australian content delivery mechanisms were better. I agree with him, but I’m left pondering if that won’t bring with it a whole new host of problems.
Maxis and EA’s upcoming SimCity game looks pretty cool, but Joystiq is reporting that the game will require an internet connection to play.
DRM protection in games is often controversial, but Ubisoft’s PC games have a record of shipping with restrictive, always-on activation that strikes a particular sore spot with gamers.
The developers behind The Witcher series are done with DRM for its PC games. Seriously. It says that no game the company releases going forward will have any kind of DRM whatsoever.
Piracy’s a fact of life. As a defence against having their intellectual properties swiped, cracked and traded online like so many baseball cards, a lot of companies have turned to Digital Rights Management, a move that seldom does more than temporarily slow pirates and enrage paying customers. Fortunately, there’s a growing number of non-DRM related options out there for developers and software vendors to explore that’ll stymy piracy while respect the rights of their paying users. Let’s give ‘em a try.
I’ve been visiting Guru3D for years now — even before I started working at Atomic. Usually, I’m there to see what the latest NVIDIA beta drivers are, but very recently the site, which conducts hardware reviews, declared it was axing Ubisoft titles from its benchmarking suite due to the company’s DRM on Anno 2070. In a rare move, Ubi not only responded to Guru3D, but lessened the grip of its DRM.
Last month the developer of The Witcher 2, CD Projekt Red, estimated that their game had been illegally downloaded 4.5 million times. Now TorrentFreak reports that the company is slapping BitTorrent pirates with legal notices seeking €912 to cover their debt to the company.
