Atari Founder: PC Piracy About to be Eradicated

[L.B. Jeffries]

You'll forgive me if I don't share the industries adamant awe and worship of Nolan 'Chucky Cheese' Bushnell. This will end poorly for all believers.

Last time I checked, he makes tons of cash then leaves burning wastelands behind him in his business ventures. We're lucky video games survived that guy's strip mining tactics.

 

[Lvl 64 Klutz]

As pretty much everyone's already said: Cops get better armor, criminals find bigger guns. Same goes for cybercrime.

 

[iamnotincompliance]

I notice a severe lack of any real information in the source article, so allow me to presume some things that will probably turn out to be right in the money.

Bushnell claims the stealthy chip will find it's way onto most new motherboards. What this suggests to me is major manufacturers (Dell, HP/Compaq, Gateway, Lenovo, Acer, etc.) will install this chip to please their Microsoft overlords*. The aftermarket manufacturers will likely continue unabated, and since all PC gamers I know build their own systems, this likely won't affect them one bit. I think it's safe to assume if that's the way things go, the pirates will build their own systems as well (assuming they don't already).

*Yes, Microsoft actually managed not to come up in the article, but it's also safe to assume anything to curb piracy MS is going to jump all over.

 

[Nugoo]

Of course, this only works if people buy motherboards with this chip. But, yeah, this is bad for people in developing countries because it's much harder to find a legitimate version of a game than a pirated version.

I must say, the price of PC Games is probaly the last thing a developing country worry about. This seems like a weak argument to fight it.

Yeah, I phrased that badly. I meant that it will become harder for the people in developing countries who buy games to continue to do so.

While I suspect most of the people who oppose this vocally are pirates, it's still a bad thing for non-pirates, too. I can only assume that a game that uses this technology won't play on a system without this chip, otherwise there's no point in having the chip. If that's the case, then that forces people who want such a game to buy a new motherboard, even if they didn't need one, and they better hope that there's a motherboard with that chip that's compatible with their processor and ram, let alone the fact that they'll have to reinstall Windows. It'll also add to the price of motherboards, which nobody (not even motherboard manufacturers because it'll result in fewer sales, and they don't get more profit) wants, except the people who make this chip.

 

[Incandescence]

Soulfein,

For developing countries with middle level economies--like South Africa and Kenya--high technology and electronics begin to take on new importance as these countries attempt to integrate themselves as more equal partners in the arena of global trade. Electronic games are one of these important commodities, and once countries start importing them it shows that the population feels less like they have to focus all their time on surviving; a hallmark of a developing polity. So games, along with other electronic commodities, are important to developing countries--a goal, if you will--and they should be made available, preferably legally for the benefit of international trade, but we must accept the reality of piracy. Of course, the logic follows that more legal copies will be made available anyway the more developed a country is and so piracy becomes less of a concern--given that sufficient legal copies are available for import.

More importantly, piracy doesn't increase the price of games; developers, publishers, and retailers increase the price of games. Games that cost millions upon millions of dollars to make are going to cost more to consume if anybody in the games business is hoping to make money off of it, and so long as there are still huge swaths of people willing to dole out the extra money for a game, production and retail prices will continue to go up. If piracy were really impacting the sales of games as much as some claim, the price of games would be more likely to decrease than increase. It is only once the price of a game becomes marginally prohibitive that piracy will increase to an equally prohibitive amount, and the price of games will then fall back to an equilibrium between legitimate and illegitimate distribution. Internationally, the laws and precedents of world economics and currency exchange rates do more to inflate the price of a game than piracy ever will. The price of games cannot continue to rise significantly past the buying power of the average gamer, because then no one will buy them. So, game developers, publishers and retailers have to find out how to innovate more with the same amount of money or risk going out of business. Since retail-based markets rarely react quickly--especially not unwieldy global ones--because of consumers that remain uninformed and therefore cannot anticipate and shape trends, there will often be a reactionary period where everybody wonders aloud why they are paying so much for games. And then they will continue to pay so much for games, while the rest of us get them for free.

 

[Fire Daemon]

Pirates always find a way, always. You can't beat them by making something "un-hackable".

 

[hastalavictoria]

"Just because they make it hack-proof don't mean we ain't going to hack it."

 

[cataract_orange]

I, too, don't want to see this go through for several reasons. One, I already don't use cracked games and I don't want manufacturers claiming it's because I couldn't anyways. Two, it'll just give hackers even bigger egos than they already have when they finally are able to crack it; my guess is probably through some external jimmy-rig (wires and soldering). Three, it's probably going to screw legitimate game owners even more than they are already now with the 'weekly activations' and SecuRom.

 

[cataract_orange]

You know how they broke Bitlocker? You cut the power to the machine, get the machine open really, really fast, spray compressed air onto the RAM to cool it down to prevent the information stored on the RAM degrading...

Try liquid nitrogen. Apparently, liquid nitrogen has several other electronic/computer uses, including recovering information off of dead or dying hard drives.....

 

[aussiesniper]

one company versus the collective brainpower and spare time of every pirate worldwide.

I'm going to say that the odds of hackable to unhackable* are roughly 10[sup]25[/sup]:1

 

[Dejawesp]

So someone want's to take another step towards preventing theft and all of a sudden they are the villian? How did that happen?

 

[richasr]

The Pirate World is much more well populated than the games industry, therefore; there will always be people cracking and bypassing the security these companies put into their games.

Price of games here in the UK doesn't affect us or at least me as much as in Europe or Asia, buying off the Internet can be a damn site cheaper and with free delivery, why go out of your house to buy a game?

 

[BlueMage]

Oh, and here I was thinking they were going to start simply giving the games away instead. Y'know, something akin to a realistic solution.

My bad.

 

[shadow1138]

I must say, the price of PC Games is probaly the last thing a developing country worry about. This seems like a weak argument to fight it.

Nah you got this very very wrong my friend.You see only a small part of the whole . I live in Bulgaria, but I just came back from the US a few months ago. I recall buying new games there at a price of 30-50 $ and given that my salary was about 2000$ (which is pretty average) I was pretty happy . I thought that's a pretty good deal. However in Bulgaria they would cost about 70$. And most middle income citizens here get about 350-600 levs(1lev= 0.75 USD) a month. So put yourself in a young kid's position. You could lose your lucnh money for two-three months and buy that thing , or you could get it for free. Tough question really.
And what about when you need to upgrade every two or three years--then it's starting to get interesting.

Personally now that I'm an adult I don't care that much for games. Plus I have my own system now.
It goes like this: get CoD4 - 70$,get new machine to play it on 3000-4000 levs or play it at a cyber cafe -whole CoD4 single player-6 levs -(4.50 $). Everything legit too.
Haven't had an upgrade on my home pc since 2003, not planning one soon either.

So someone want's to take another step towards preventing theft and all of a sudden they are the villian? How did that happen?

Well given all of the above I have a Yahtzee quote for those nice not trying to milk me to death companies:
"How about I give you 4? As in ..."

 

[Dejawesp]

Well given all of the above I have a Yahtzee quote for those nice not trying to milk me to death companies:
"How about I give you 4? As in ..."

What side of the argument are you supporting with that statement?

 

[man-man]

Even if we assume the TPM chip is the first ever entirely unhackable, non-circumventable protection mechanism, the games companies would have to make it a requirement for the protection to mean anything (otherwise pirates just remove the chip and carry on). This would narrow their market to people who have a very recent PC, as well as pissing off everyone who doesn't.

It all comes down to the fact that the hardware is under the control of the user, and the software is inevitably hacked.

did I mention Atari is irrelevant? I think I forgot that.

All this is going to do is place a teeny little bump in the path of the pirates, and most likely lock out a ton of legitimate buyers. Surprise surprise, suddenly the pissed off consumers are now also pirates because it works better than the real thing.

 

[Andy Chalk]

Quite aside from the fact that Nolan Bushnell is a bit crazy, he's clearly underestimating the ingenuity of the scumbag demographic. There will always be douchepits who can rationalize their behaviour, and as a result, there will always be piracy.

 

[Dejawesp]

Making a game "unhackable" is not so much about making it compleatly impossible to hack as it is making the effort required for each unit so much work that it is'nt worth it.

Take half life 2 for example. With steam and all that it's barely worth it. All they have to do with these chips is make each chip uniqe. Taking away the anonymity. So your games cd key becomes bound to the chip ID and then requires online checks like steam uses to be played. So each time you play the game the game is compared with the CD key and the computers ID chip.

Sure there are ways around it but every step that makes pirating harder reduces the ammount of thefts.

For example alien versus predator 1. To crack that game you took your AVP folder and burned the whole thing to a cd and the game was copied. The game was massivly pirated. Like half life 1. I wonder if anyone actualy paid money for half life 1.

But then you have multiplayer games that use CD keys. Practicly impossible to pirate since you need a uniqe cd key. If you use a cd key that someone elses also uses then one of you can't get online or both cd keys get permanently disabled.

So again. They don't have to make it impossible. Just so much work and the result so unsatisfying that it's just easier to buy the game for most people.

 

[Asehujiko]

The reason why this is bad is because there will be 0 compatability between pre lockdown hardware and post lockdown software and reverse.

Lockdown based games need the chip to function and non lockdown based games will run into a brick wall when trying to run on a chipped pc.

They are not preventing theft by giving benefits to people who don't steal.
They are not preventing theft by punishing thieves.
They are preventing theft by making sure there's nothing left to steal.

Acording to this theory you could obtain immortality by destroying all life so there's nothing that can die.

I'm with the pirates on this one. Or a more acurate wording would be: "i'm with everybody exept atari on this one" because we all get treated as criminals.

As to the people whining that drm is needed because of pirates: World of Warcraft, 10mil subs and absolutely no drm(infact, the client is free to download of their site).

 

[Skrapt]

Piracy shouldn't be condoned but it's obvious this isn't going to work. And dealing with piracy is quite a simple affair that most companies seem to overlook, make games cost less. I only buy new games from Steam and occasionally if I think I'll really enjoy it. Apart from that I refuse to buy new games from stores simply because they cost way too much, I know development costs are going up but personally I don't really see the difference between:

spend millions of dollars developing a hardware anti pirate system

and

a few less million dollars in sales revenue

and personally at least the second one balances out, cheaper games = more sales, more expensive games = less sales, so in then end sales revenue will be around the same figure except less people will be pirating games. And I agree with the above, it's about making games difficult to pirate so that the effort involved doesn't make it worth it. Steam is a good example, people do pirate Steam games but it is much less common compared to how many people pirated Half Life 1.