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Games

Game Industry Vets On DRM 372

An anonymous reader points out an article at SavyGamer in which several game industry veterans were polled for their opinions on DRM. Cliff Harris of Positech Games said he didn't think his decision to stop using DRM significantly affected piracy of his games, accepting it as an unavoidable fact. "Maybe a few of the more honest people now buy the game rather than pirate it, but this sort of thing is impossible to measure. You can see how many people are cracking and uploading your game, but tracking downloads is harder. It seems any game, even if it's $0.99 has a five hour demo and is DRM-free and done by a nobel-peace prize winning game design legend, will be cracked and distributed on day one by some self righteous teenager anyway. People who crack and upload games don't give a damn what you've done to placate gamers, they crack it anyway." Nihal de Silva of Direct2Drive UK said his company hasn't noticed any sales patterns indicating customers are avoiding games with DRM. Richard Wilson of TIGA feels that customers should be adequately warned before buying a game that uses DRM, but makes no bones about the opinion that the resale of used games is not something publishers should worry about.

Comment Re:I Love Slashdot (Score 1) 185

At least we know that he has some understanding of were we are coming from. COMPUTE! was a great magazine! What Sony needs to realize is that this is not a "want" but a "need" from the independent development community. The PS3 bring totally new technology (the CELL) to the entire development community and people are eager to to exploit its features but a main feature is locked away. The CELL is not enough to satisfy the "need" (if there were dual CELLs maybe :)). Independent developers need access to the GPU too. It's like programming a game on the C64 with no access to the SID chip (or the sprites.) It is just not enough. Sony needs to rectify this situation.

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