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.