Blizzard Boss: DRM is a Waste of Time

Via Thinq.co.uk -

Blizzard founder, Frank Pearce reckons that fighting piracy with DRM is a losing battle.

His company - which is responsible for the biggest videogame of all time, the worryingly-addictive online fantasy role player World of Warcraft - is to release Starcraft 2 on July 27th and Pearce has told Videogamer that the title won't be hobbled with the kind of crazy copy protection schemes which have made Ubisoft very unpopular in gaming circles of late.

Starcraft 2 will require a single online activation using the company's Battle.net servers, after which players will be allowed to play the single-player game to their hearts' content, without being forced to have a persistent Internet connection.

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The Blizzard boss is resigned to the fact that, how ever many people and man-hours you throw at anti-piracy measures, it can never be enough. "If you start talking about DRM and different technologies to try to manage it, it's really a losing battle for us, because the [cracking] community is always so much larger, and the number of people out there that want to try to counteract that technology, whether it's because they want to pirate the game or just because it's a curiosity for them, is much larger than our development teams."

And the pragmatic game designer's final words on the matter is a mantra which many other game houses would do well to adopt: "We need our development teams focused on content and cool features, not anti-piracy technology."