Although Valve recently declared how it intends to make digital rights management obsolete with Steamworks, I think many of us are hesitant to believe that one solution from a single company is enough to remedy the current DRM situation. It's going to take the cooperation of many companies in this industry, which is why I'm happy to see Stardock stepping up to the plate.
Stardock's digital distribution platform, Impulse, is set to get a new anti-piracy system on April 7 that looks to be one of the most consumer-friendly solutions proposed thus far: Game Object Obfuscation (GOO). Essentially, Goo allows developers to encapsulate their game's EXE file and Impulse Reactor "into a single encrypted EXE."
This means that upon running said executable file, you are required to enter your serial number and email once; this allows the game you purchased to be tied to you and not any one machine you own. That may not sound like much, but Goo'd games also bring the following benefits:
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.
Used copies. 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 transferable.
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.
In my eyes, this sounds extremely promising -- especially the bit about being able to resell games that were purchased digitally. Are you guys feeling Goo as well?
[Via Shacknews]
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Contest:
12:20 PM on 03.26.2009
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sounds interesting though, selling your DigiDownloaded games? relsy? sounds suspect...
Seeing such communication bewtween companies seems like only a good idea.
Will the person who bought it new sell their rights to play it to the devs/publisher (thus making their exe no longer work) who will then retail it as a used game at a lower price? How would this work in retail stores? Or would it not?
I don't see how this is going to stop piracy, people could just hack the files like with any other game.
A game is going to get pirated whether developers like it or not and downloads do not mean lost sales. DRM is redundant.
Still, it's nice to see them attempting to make things better.
If I understand things, one EXE can be decrypted by a username/password. That username/password works for that EXE until I transfer the license to somebody else.
So now someone will just buy one copy, make the username/password public and then you're all set.
Username: aXXo
Password: aXXo
Bam, every EXE released by that piracy group will work and not be modified.
How will they prevent this from happening?
The stuff about resale isn't just going to be a gift to game buyers, it's a way for the publishers to get their hands into the used games market. Whenever you try to sell your "used" digital download, a percentage will go to the publisher.
If this percentage is low, then I am all about it. Call me cynical, but I see this percentage as 25% or more.
This is an extremely DRM-lite solution that both recognizes gamers' rights along with publisher rights and needs to protect their sales from "casual" piracy. That being me just zipping a folder with my game and emailing it to all of my friends.
I think it is the most practical and gamer-friendly solution I've seen, and hope that something like this triumphs over something like Steam's solution. For the record, I use both Impulse and Steam, and prefer Steam currently, however the GOO solution that is pro-consumer and distributor agnostic is much preferable.
Are you people even reading the press release or just making up whatever your scarred minds invent?
Followed by..
"Stardock's digital distribution platform, Impulse, is set to get a new anti-piracy system on April 7 that looks to be one of the most consumer-friendly solutions proposed thus far... Stardock's digital distribution platform, Impulse, is set to get a new anti-piracy system on April 7 that looks to be one of the most consumer-friendly solutions proposed thus far."
So, not to nitpick, but aren't you saying here that Valve's system wont work, because it's one company/publisher doing it, but Stardocks system will?
DRM is DRM. Even if this format will be better somehow (which I doubt will be the case), it still places restrains on the consumer, despite how loose those restrains are. Not to mention this will not slow down piracy whatsoever. Hey, I get it, you like Stardock and maybe Valve, (I loved SoaSE+HL) and they are great companies that do look out for gamers like us. But this is still just another way of them "securing" their product.
Epic grammar fail.
And all the people with the usual kneejerk reactions are idiots and totally missing the point. This is really cool in theory, as it would mean your digital copy of the game would be the same as having your own disc of it (if it were a console game anyways). Obviously you can't install the game on yours and your friends computer like you used to, but console games have NEVER been able to do that, and there's no rational way to allow that, but not allow the game to be freely distributed.
On the other hand this DOES let you essentially loan out a copy of the game to a friend, or trade it, or whatever, which brings DD games onto par with physical console copies now at least, something that is annoyingly lacking from Steam games at the moment and why I only buy those when they're super cheap.
The point of this isn't to stop piracy, the point is to make things work better for paying customers, and allowing dd copies of games to have resale/trade value is a great way to do that.