Game piracy is a big deal. Protection mechanisms have improved over the years, but the industry still suffers significant losses because of it. According to a 2005 report by the Interactive Entertainment Association of Australia, piracy costs local developers around $100 million per year. A scary number when you consider the industry only generated $136.9 million in income in 2007.
Atari founder Nolan Bushnell reckons Trusted Computing (TC) is the answer. A few days ago at a Wedbush Morgan security conference, Bushnell explained that Trusted Protection Module, or TPM, chips are currently being built into motherboards, and could be used to slow down, and even stop, piracy.
“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 – which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem,” he went on to say. More »
