Blizzard Calls DRM a "Losing Battle" | Hacker News Reader

Blizzard Calls DRM a "Losing Battle"

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52 pointsSlyShy28 comments

It's nice to see this coming from Blizzard, but it's not the 'full' story. They are just counter-acting piracy of the game by adding value through Battle.net. But they will defend Battle.net to the death.

The statements sound progressive and to a point they are, but this is just accomplished by moving the battle somewhere else. It's a lot easier to squash people trying to create alternate Battle.net servers/networks than it is to squash all of the cracking groups out there.

At least Blizzard is a company that is known for not abandoning their older titles (IIRC, you can still connect to Battle.net from the original StarCraft).

See:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bnetd

- http://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd

[On a side note...] I came across this Battle.net 404 page while searching, anyone know which came first?

- 404 Page http://eu.battle.net/starcraft-universe.shtml?rhtml=y

- Original http://knowyourmeme.com/system/icons/185/original/nickcage.j...

They may not abandon them completely, but they come pretty darned close. Diablo 2, for instance, still pegs my system pretty hard - 100% on a single core. Their display code apparently requires 256 color mode on startup, but not in-game, leading to the Mac launch problems a while back. It also lags occasionally on a single player or local network game and takes a second or two to catch up. And if you've ever tried allowing more than one person behind a NAT to connect to Battle.net, you'd realize just how little they've touched the older games, despite how much money they still get from them.

(For those interested:) The only way to allow more than one person to connect to Battle.net in the older games is to rewrite packets on your router (iptables or similar), because the games steadfastly refuse to communicate on any other ports, and don't even communicate error messages. They just fail to connect, as if the servers are down. How hard would it be to specify a launch parameter which sets which port you use? Even if it's not simple for the average user, a solution is better than none, and this has been an acknowledged problem for many years.

Counterexample: Just last year a StarCraft patch (1.16 IIRC) came out which drops CPU usage from 100% to around 3%

Yeah, the latest round of patches was pretty big, and it's nice they keep doing it. But it's also kinda sad they didn't make some of the critical changes earlier / yet. I have a feeling a lot of the motivation behind the updates was to get people to buy them before SC2/D3 comes out.

> But they will defend Battle.net to the death.

Of course they will. I should hope they would. It's the best and most successful alternative to DRM (that I am aware of) when it comes to curbing piracy, which they as a company NEED TO DO. DRM may be bad, but preventing piracy is not. I don't think they are trying come across as saying "we don't care about piracy".

Besides, Battle.net has provided some pretty darn good extra value.

On the other hand, no LAN games does suck.

curbing piracy, which they as a company NEED TO DO

Let me state plainly that I believe piracy is generally immoral and I would be happy to see it vanish from the face of the earth. Let me also say that I think approaches like battle.net are much better than DRM.

But, they do not necessarily need to stop piracy. What they need to do is earn a reasonable and healthy profit.

They could (potentially) do this witout worrying about piracy at all. They would benefit from preventing all piracy that would otherwise have been a sale, of course, but if they are earning a profit even this is only beneficial, not necessary. The piracy that would not otherwise have been a sale is simply irrelevant to the company's health. In fact, in some circumstances piracy that would not otherwise have been a sale could be beneficial to them by providing publicity and helping to gain a fan base that will eventually make purchases (again, this should not in any way be read as condoning piracy, but it remains true.)

Yes, you are correct; in all likelihood, they technically do not have to fight piracy. I was just conjecturing that the cost of some piracy prevention is probably lower than the gains. i.e. squashing out every last pirate is financially a poor choice, but the low-hanging fruit are worthwhile. Typically I refer to a clearly wise business move as a 'need', though that is technically a mistake on my part.

Yes, StarCraft is still alive and kicking on battle.net. Hardly surprising considering that the game is still incredibly popular in Korea, with a pro scene and all.

I would point out that no serious or semi-serious players, in Korea or anywhere else, actually use Battle.net for Internet play. They generally use iCCup, a hacked-together custom implementation of Battle.net with its own ladder, anti-hack, and out-of-game integration. Blizzard is not happy about this and is apparently going to work as hard as possible to try to keep total control this time.

Of course, but the point is that Blizzard is still interested in maintaining the game for the foreseeable future, whether or not battle.net is the chosen medium through which serious players compete.

Blizzard aren't being completely honest here. They aren't just making Battle.net so awesome people will want to pay for the game — they're specifically disabling LAN multiplayer so that people have no choice but to use Blizzard's servers for any real gameplay.

Fighting piracy by making people authenticate with a server just to use a feature that would otherwise work fine without an Internet connection? Back in my day, we called that "DRM."

Hopefully they are not so stupid as to "disable" LAN play. What they have probably done is to never have written LAN netcode in the first place. There is a very large difference between those two - one implies maliciousness, one implies that they didn't devote the manpower necessary to get it running anywhere other than Battle.net (which presumably is doing something more complex than connecting several IPs together for a net game).

What they've disabled is unauthenticated LAN games. The plan, at least this time last year, was to have connections try to go over the LAN if the players are within a LAN. All the players must however authenticate with the Battle.net server.

I asked Canessa whether the solution his team is working on might include a pseudo-LAN connection, where the game would only check in with Battle.net to authenticate before reverting to typical LAN behavior.

"Something like that," he replied. "Maintaining a connection with Battle.net, I don't know if it's once or periodically, but then also having a peer-to-peer connection between players to facilitate a very low-ping, high-bandwidth connection.. those are the things that we're working on."

From http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/60156

Thank you for the source link - I stand corrected, but I will wait until I see it in action before passing judgement. In retrospect, it makes sense that they would have some way of running a game specifically for high-level competitive tournaments as a percent of their market (and a very vocal group) plays specifically with that in mind.

I absolutely hate this drive of killing lan games in the name of DRM. 4 of us traditionally met up once or twice a year to play strat games like Starcraft, War 3, CoH, Dawn Of War on a LAN (2 copies usually hacked, £120 for a few nights play? You're having a laugh). Would any of us buy the game otherwise? No. Do ANY of us buy the games now that we can't play this way? No.

THQ say strat games are dead, I wonder whether the truth is that they killed them themselves. Dawn Of War 2 with the crapness that is Windows Live was horrid. DoW we played 3-4 years, all of us ended up with legit copies and expansion packs. DoW2 one of us has it, none of us have bought the upgrades, all because we couldn't play it socially.

Shot themselves in the foot imho. If they had any sense they'd enable LAN & allow distribution of temporary free keys on the same LAN. Totally one perspective I know, but I've met other people who play games this way, as a social thing, so I can't believe I'm the only gamer lamenting the frankly idiotic battle.net type solution. I care sod all about achievements in what I see as a social game.

It's like everyone having to bring their own box of Risk to be able to play it. Dumb.

Somehow I think Blizzard will manage.

Indeed, it's a lament for a simpler time ;)

It's worth noting that crackers have been working on the Starcraft 2 battle.net for months and still don't have working multiplayer. Server emulation is a lot harder than cracking a single player game.

The future of profitable software is in architectures that allow you to keep a significant portion of the code on your own servers and only "sell" the client application.

Their progress was hindered http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/100197-Blizzard-Su.... The costs of a lawyer will likely stop anyone from continuing to crack it, since I'm guessing these guys are mostly computer science students having some fun.

It's interesting they dropped the charges. I wonder if they were afraid to take the risk of a verdict that would have legalized alternate game servers (when you think about it : you bought the damn game, you should be allowed to plug it wherever you like). Even if that's really implausible, they really had nothing to gain with the lawsuit once they had scared the hackers away.

The charges were for copyright violations. It was merely a way to tell them to stop, as Blizzard has done this in the past, having lawyers show up to the doors of people making or promoting wow emulators.

The courts have already ruled that creating alternate gaming servers is against the law.

http://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd

The future of profitable software is in architectures that allow you to keep a significant portion of the code on your own servers and only "sell" the client application.

You don't sell the client -- you sell the bit in the database that makes their account active. Let them have the client, for all the good it will do them. Downloading the WoW client lets you pirate WoW about as much as downloading Firefox lets you pirate Basecamp.

But yeah: welcome to the future. The game companies have heard your preferences and adjusted accordingly.

the problem with DRM is that it penalizes the legit users, without actually stopping the pirates. A lot of people started pirating, after their DRM software crapped out on them.

who cares about drm? Everybody in the game industry knows that "cloud computing" is the future.. Where the company holding the copyright do not have to release the entire binary. The future is services over fiber/4G networks. Distributed gaming that is. This may also mean that cheating as we know it will cease to exist.

who cares about drm?

It can hinder my enjoyment of my software that I have purchased legitimately right now. Every time I have to deal with even the most minor of DRM I am annoyed. If I have to put in a disc for a game I have already installed, it makes me actually dig out that disc. Registration codes annoy me to know end, especially very long ones. I am a veteran and still work with the government, in my job I could wind up without network access for some period, so I do not even think about buying a game that requires network authentication for the single player version.

Any time an illegal, cracked version of a piece of software is superior in usability to the legitimate version, I consider that a major problem.

Everybody in the game industry knows that "cloud computing" is the future..

This may prove true in the long run, but I find it far from obvious and it certainly is not true right now.

Remember that there are people (people deployed in the military come to mind, also some rural areas even in America..) for which consistent network access, much less fast network access is a luxury they do not always have. This may change in the future, but it is going to hold true for a while still.

Also, there are some people that just do not like the idea of their software needing to check in and report back. They do not like it for privacy reasons and because they may like being able to play retro games long after they are unpopular and forgotten about by most.

Cloud computer will definitely affect gaming (already has to a degree), but I think the idea of it being "the future" for all or even most games is not obvious

I'm pretty sure just about everyone has realized this by now. IMHO the media companies are using it to draw out their demise to maximize revenue before collapse or drastic change inevitably comes about. It also buys time to think of a better answer.

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