I cringe when someone tries to say their DRM isn’t DRM. There’s nothing inherently wrong with DRM. The problem thus far with it is that the R part of it (rights) is often ignored. A proper acronym for DRM thus far should be DrM . The rights in DRM were supposed to be between both developers and users.
So for months, since the Gamers Bill of Rights was launched we’ve been working on a technology that would provide the kind of protection publishers want and would accept but at the same time would give gamers a lot of the things they’ve been asking for.
The solution we’ve come up with and integrated into Impulse Reactor is called Game Object Obfuscation (GOO). When a developer runs GOO on their EXE, it encapsulates it and Impulse Reactor into a single encrypted EXE. When the user runs the program for the first time, they enter in their email address and serial #. It’s about as easy as logging into a forum except you only have to do this once.
Because the game is tied to a person instead of hardware, they can install on their other machines without being hassled. Also, because it’s all self-contained it makes possible 3 key things:
1. Universal Activation. If I buy a copy of a game from Steam or Direct2Drive or Impulse that is also available on one of the other platforms, I should be able to re-download it form any of the services that it’s available on. That way, if the place I buy from folds, I can still re-download my game from someone else. A Goo’d game makes this possible.
2. Used copies. One thing that holds digital distribution back is that a gamer who buys a game digitally can be made to feel like they’re renting it because the licenses are non-transferable. Publishers, however, really don’t like reselling games (I hate the way it’s currently done). But with Goo, now the game developer and the user can both benefit and let gamers resell their copy to someone else. That’s because the Goo’d EXE is encrypted and the user can voluntarily disable their access from it thus making it transferrable.
To demonstrate the business advantages of this, we plan to use this feature of Goo ourselves on Elemental– it lowers the risk of buying a game and thus can increase sales.
3. Untethered gaming. Because Goo is all self-contained, there’s no third party client floating around. A developer can use this on their game and have it available at retail or other digital distributors.
What’s nice about GOO is that a developer simply runs it on their program. They don’t have to mess with source code or anything. It takes care of it all for them. Legitimate customers end up with something that’s incredibly benign, publishers end up something that protects their rights, and both get something that opens the door to resolving some of the remaining challenges with digital distribution.
Internal beta of Impulse Phase 3 client. UI graphics are not finalized yet. Faster, cleaner, more streamlined view. More major publishers scheduled to come on board in the month of April.
What is this? I haven`t heard of it. Do you have a link where I could get a little more infromed on this?
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/03/microsoft-1.ars
I wondering too what people without internet access (or an email adress) should do when they buy such a retail copy?
Will stardocks games use this anyway? If not and there probably wont be any retail games with this DRM.
(Off topic: i thought you were talking about wolrd of goo when seeing the topic)
So the validation process still requires that the game phone home, but the intention is there will be multiple homes (companies) to phone home to and hopefully not all of them will go down at once?
If i understands correctly then it doesn't matter where you get you're game from, they will all use the same home to activate.
You can buy you're game on Direct2Drive and use impulse or any other source to download it.
I'm wondering how bulletproof the whole encryption/activation will be. Most shell's are diasassembled in no time.
Well I read on FoxBusiness, I believe, that there was some mention about concerns being address: that if a company goes bust, any games bought from the company are now useless. So if they are still phoning home, needing to connect with a server to activate, then who cares how many places you can download the game from? If there is no server to connect to, having the software won't help you at all (talking legally of course). As for claims for companies' releasing patches to fix this right before they go belly up, please...
Anyway, how exactly is a game being validated?
Quote
1. There is no third-party client required. This means a developer can use this as a universal solution since it is not tied to any particular digital distributor. 2. It paves the way to letting users validate their game on any digital distribution service that supports that game. One common concern of gamers is if the company they purchased a game from exits the market, their game library may disappear too. Games that use Goo would be able to be validated anywhere. 3. It opens the door to gamers being able to resell their games because users can voluntarily disable their game access and transfer their license ownership to another user.
Well i'm not sure, but maybe it is not activated at all. Just decrypted by the given key. So if you can download it and keep the key somewhere you are fine.
Could be that activation/registration is only needed with updates.
Same question here. What does the unpacking entail? A phone home? If I'm not mistaken, they could do some fancy work with a private/public key where your email + authentication code == public key. That way you don't need internet access to unpack your copy of the game and it doesn't need to phone home. However, once unpacked the game would be installed with that e-mail address / authentication code, so any future phone homes (such as when you participate in the online portion of the game or try to install an update) could validate that you aren't using a warezed key.
However, my guess is that it phones home, which makes me sad. What happens if you aren't connected to the internet at the time of the install?
I like the focus on useability without going through hoops and loops to use the game you just paid for - the latter is really, really irritating.
I suspect the push back will come from those whose sole interest if to maximise revenue and dont care about the consequencies for others. They need to get the age old message that 80% of reward comes from 20% of the effort. To close that last 20% of reward to perfection, requires a massive 80% of effort. Its the quest for utter perfection or total absolute return that is fools gold.
Where in that wide margin of result people lay will depend on their objective and motivation, reaching utter perfection for perfection's sake is plainly silly. In that regard there will always be pirates who - in the end - will crack any system, given time - frankly, big deal, so what?.
All "DRM" needs to do is make it too much of a hassle to make it worthwhile for the vast majority of the gaming user base out there. The huge effort needed to close that last gap in search of the "perfect" DRM to beat all and any pirating in any circumstance, is both stupid and better put to developing better games. Who gives a rats if "2%" - or whatever the real figure is - get a "free game", thats always going to be the case, ignore the irrelevant clowns, the other 98% out there in the real world get on with their life with better games with better redirected resource.
The balance at present is too far towards this manic quest to sweeze every dollar of return possible from an unattainable "perfect" DRM, and damn the consquencies (exagerating to illustrate). GOO sounds like a good compromise. The battle will not be with those who spend every waking hour picking things to death for some wierd kudos quest, the real battle will be with Publishing House CEOs and Finance Directors, getting them to wrap their heads around long term financial success, not circular chases for in year Bonus Enhancing activities.
Its the latter that really drives DRM, and its the latter that will dictate whether or not GOO succeeds across the industry. Its a good start on the face of it, more power to Stardocks elbow on this one.
RegardsZy
I really think the you have to be online to initially activate crowd is not that big- and makes a lot more noise then their actual weight. Who doesn't have an internet connection and plays PC games? The only situation where I can see someone complaining is military personnel who are deployed, but they can activate stuff before being shipped off, and they're not going to be buying new games in the desert.
I take it you don't play games in multiplayer then?
If you're managing to do so without an internet connection, I must say I'm interested.
But at the same time, it's a small percentage of the overall gamer population. I'm sure there will be a way to activate manually (similar to how SDC had it, perhaps?).
Still, at this day and age, a one time internet connection is not an unreasonable requirement. It is impossible to have a system work for every possible demographic - the goal is to minimize those for whom it does not. It's the way of business.
For me, DRM is any attempt to create scarce good out of innately non-scarce good. Digital media is, by its very nature, non-scarce. Once initial costs are paid, once the good created, a piece of software costs almost nothing to reproduce. In case of physical goods, the concept of property was introduced to control distribution of scarce good better. Here, it's the other way around. You have something that's by definition free (as in freedom, thought, speech) and artificially try to impose limits on it. You're in denial. The only resource you're using up is programmer's time and effort. I don't know why you should be paid for anything else. There are business models other than selling software which allow making money from software development. Two come to mind immediately - free game with advertisments, and 2nd: grant. In the case of grant, money would be paid before the development even takes place (so the "I need to get my development costs back" argument goes through the window) and then the game is released for free. Of course, not many people are going to pay for something in advance. But with a game developer with good reputation, such as Stardock, it shouldn't be a big problem.
You shouldn't be able to dictate what I do with a game I paid for. I may want to do something perfectly legit with it, such as running it on an operating system I prefer (Linux). DRM mechanisms like this are infamous for preventing legally purchased games from running in wine emulation. I bought Prey (retail) and had to download a crack to get it running on Linux through wine. I tried to run Fish Fillets 2 demo, but the demo comes with securom or something similar and I wasn't able to play something that's intended to be a free game.
This new invention of yours is DRM. I'm very disappointed with Stardock. Now I see all this 'Bill of Rights' was just a publicity stunt. Experiments like those with Steam and halving the price of Left 4 Dead (which increased revenue 30 times !) indicate that the main thing that's wrong with selling games is the price. Gamers are not necessarily unwilling to pay for games, you just need to get the pricing right. If games costed 1/10 of what they cost now, who would want to bother with piracy ?
I cringe when someone tries to say their DRM isn’t DRM and this a remarkable example of it.
2 hypothesis:
- either there is indeed no hardware tying and this goo is just a watermark which is almost useless for IP Protection and extremely dangerous for users from a legal point of view
- or it's just the same old activation DRM scheme as usual with a few more "we-are-nice,-trust-us" promises. This still need a 3rd party controlled server. It is irrelevant if it is controlled by the publisher, the distributor or a "protection-provider". And as long as this server (or the lack of) can kill an "owned" game at any time (at least at any "hardware change" detected), your laxist promises are of no value... unless I can pay you with DRMed money I can charge you back even 10 years later on your personnal assets.
Where did Brad write that GOO isn't DRM?
Could you elaborate about the dangerous side?
1. Where did he say this wasn't DRM?
2. Where does the "Bill of rights" say "no kind of DRM, ever"? (AFAIK it just talks about harmful/extremely limiting stuff.)
Also, If I understand it correctly, this DRM is supposed to validate from any download seller that carries the game. I.e.: buy a game from Direct to Drive (or in a brick and mortar store) and they (or the publiser/developer) go bankrupt? No problem! Just validate at Steam or Impulse, they carry it too.
More specifically, he's always said this is DRM, he's just trying to create an alternative DRM that's much friendlier to users than the existing ones, and still good enough that publishers don't shun it.
I believe I can.
1. Somehow, without your intent, a copy with your watermark is released to the internet. (a trojan, worm, virus, magnetic trace on a formatted hard disk, your cat jumps onto your keyboard, your 7 year old brother tries to annoy you, your computer is stolen, or someone deliberately frames you...)
2. You go to jail.
I'm all for someone (Stardock in this case) creating a less intrusive form of DRM to ween other publishers off of DRM slowly. However, I still will buy DRM free games over DRMed games and usually I'll just end up pirating DRMed games because it's easier.
I still don't get how publishers think that DRM (of any kind) serves any purpose. I kind of thought that Stardock had it figured out but it sounds like they will also be using GOO (not just producing it for other less enlightened publishers).
You can't stop pirating, it's just not realistically possible unless the end-user never gets the executable code (ie: online game where the majority of the code is on a secured server and never sent to the end-user). So what's the point? Raising the barrier to entry so average Joe can't give a pirated copy of the game to his friend? I would argue that it's *easier* to send your friend a link to a .torrent these days than it is to burn the game to DVD and hand it to him. So if Average Joe wants to casually pirate he is likely to be unaffected by any DRM scheme.
In the end what it comes down to is there are almost no publishers out there that realize DRM is completely unprofitable. I would be interested if someone can site any essays/blogs that prove DRM is profitable for a development/publishing company since I don't see it.
What made you think so? So far I haven't read anything that says so. I checked Demigod listing on Impulse and it isn't saying that it's using it, and it's released after Goo/Reactor.
The suits don't think that way. Other publishers are not private companies, like Stardock. They have old guys who don't understand half of this stuff as major shareholders, and even if the publisher realizes they are making less profit than they potentially would have without, try convincing the old rich guys.
Ultimately, us gamers and consumers have to meet them half way somewhere. It's nice to have no DRM at all to worry about, but whether we agree or not publishers do tend to want some protection on their stuff. Goo is something that can be amicable enough to both sides. It has to be a gradual change. We can't be hypocritical and complain about the big publishers being stubborn and sticking to DRM if we're stubborn and refuse to accept anything other than completely DRM-free stuff.
Maybe the OP just before the item 3.
Ok, indeed, Brad did not say it wasn't DRM. My mistake. I just still don't see how this is different as all those lenient policies are implemented server-side. It really needs an excellent license agreement or terms of service to shield the user from future misbehaviors or service closing (protection from changes of term, unDRM patch in escrow, etc.).
Now for the dangerous sides of watermarking, bursuk got it right. A stolen computer, an indelicate repairman and the game with your name attached is leaked onto the Internet. And the company sue you as being the sole responsible. Other scenarios include a stolen credit card number, or just crackers who manage to modify the watermark and put random data in it.
That only says they will use the re-sale part, though. Users being able to disable their game so another can activate it. Not that the entire scheme will be used. There's a big difference there
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