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. More »
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. More »
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. More »
I’ve played quite a bit of the latest entry in Croteam’s twitchtastic first-person shooter series, but I never encountered the super-speedy giant unkillable pink spider creature in the first level. Know why? Because my copy isn’t pirated. More »
Here’s a heartwarming tale full of good holiday cheer. In an interview with IncGamers, Stanislas Mettra, the creative director behind Ubisoft’s thought-provoking survival tale I Am Alive said chances of a PC port are about zero because a) um, piracy and b) lol, nobody buys PC games anymore. More »
Could a little-known company from the UK swoop in and change the way we play, create, and sell games forever. Utilising a device that looks like a super-sized Game Boy Micro? Probably not, but their heart is in the right place. More »
In their attempts to thwart pirates, most PC publishers end up pissing off paying customers with intrusive or bothersome DRM. All, that is, except for Bohemia Interactive, who the likes of EA and Ubisoft could learn a thing or two from. More »
Taking a page from Ubisoft’s apparently successful adventures with always-on DRM, GSC Game World plans to implement a similar feature in the follow-up to its spooky 2007 shooter S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. More »