DRM News

Posts Tagged ‘Blizzard’

Blizzard believes DRM is a losing battle

May 26th, 2010

Cliff Riseborough

Blizzard has said that fighting game piracy purely with restrictive copy protection is a losing battle, according to videogamer.com.

While Ubisoft has moved to a locked down server requirement for the games to work at all, Blizzard has kept the option there for the gamer to play offline. Once an initial activation is completed, the single player campaign of Starcraft II will be playable offline. The new Battle.net client is built up in such a way that Blizzard hopes players will choose to use it, offering an integrated mod system and cross-game chat.

"The best approach from our perspective is to make sure that you’ve got a full-featured platform that people want to play on, where their friends are, where the community is," he added.

"That’s a battle that we have a chance in. If you start talking about DRM and different technologies to try to manage it, it’s really a losing battle for us, because the 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.

"We need our development teams focused on content and cool features, not anti-piracy technology."

Starcraft II comes out in a month, and will probably make an amount equivalent to the GDP of Europe within a week.

Posted in Games

Tags: Battle.net, Blizzard, DRM losing battle

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Blizzard swings the ban hammer of +3 wallhack smiting

April 21st, 2010

Cliff Riseborough

Blizzard has announced that the accounts of over 320,000 Battle.net users have been suspended. The crime? Use of third party programs that violate their user agreement.

From the forum announcement :

We’ve recently banned over 320,000 Warcraft III and Diablo II accounts that were found to be violating the Battle.net Terms of Use. If this is a first offense, the CD key associated with the banned account will be suspended for 30 days, while repeat offenders will see their keys banned permanently. All account ban decisions are final.

We would like all players to remember that abuse of unintended mechanics and/or use of third party programs is a violation of the agreement made when signing on to Battle.net, and can subject your account to disciplinary action up to and including a permanent ban of its access to the service. These types of activities can severely impact the stability of our servers, and we’ll continue to aggressively monitor Battle.net in order to protect the service and its players from the harmful effects of cheating.

They go on to mention that all closures have come about as a result of investigations based on tips emailed to their hacks team by other Battle.net users.

More than likely this big swing of the proverbial ban hammer comes from a desire to try to clean up as many cheat and hack issues as possible before the rollout of Starcraft II later this year.

Unfortunately, some innocent users were no doubt caught up in the net as well, and thanks to the ‘decisions are final’ policy of Blizzard, they’re now stuck without account access for a month.

Posted in Games

Tags: 000 accounts banned, 320, Battle.net, Blizzard

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Russian Starcraft II buyers will pay to play online

April 13th, 2010

Cliff Riseborough

Blizzard has previously said they would make Starcraft II pricing decisions on a regional basis. Apparently, Russian gamers are big fans of paying in regular instalments, because they’ll have to to play the game online.

The base game will cost less than in other regions. However, the multiplayer out of the box will be time limited, and playing with other European based gamers will be blocked. The DVD will come with a year of multiplayer access to other Russian gamers only, while the jewel case version will have the limited multiplayer for only 120 days.

Beyond that, a monthly fee will have to be paid to maintain multiplayer access, and extend it beyond the borders of Russia itself. Or, you can pay more than you did for the game to ‘upgrade’ it to allow permanent multiplayer.

Will this be used in other markets? Maybe, maybe not. What it does prove is that the new Battle.net client is clearly set up to allow monthly payments for game play beyond just World of Warcraft.

As for how the average Russian gamer probably feels about this, one can guess…

Posted in Games

Tags: Blizzard, Russian gamers pay for multiplayer, Starcraft II

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Blizzard announces Battle.Net to be required for Starcraft II, details new additions to system UPDATED

February 9th, 2010

Cliff Riseborough

Starcraft II is one of the most anticipated games coming out this year, and Blizzard has now confirmed that their new Battle.net II client will be required to play the game. Actually, it goes beyond being required, it’s actually interwoven in to the game itself…the two cannot be separated.

This was one of the many details about the new Battle.net system released by Blizzard today. Starcraft 2 will remain fully interconnected with the new Battle.net client. Players will have a persistent presence on the Battle.net servers, allowing them access to everything offered on it even when playing single player. Among other new features :

(more…)

Posted in Games

Tags: Battle.net, Blizzard, server login required, Starcraft II

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Increased DRM in the World of Warcraft???

January 9th, 2010

Cliff Riseborough

As reported on WoW.com, Blizzard is giving serious consideration to making the use of account authenticators (a physical keyfob…as seen above…that is linked to your player account) mandatory amongst its MMO player base.

One of the biggest continuing issues faced by the game, and thus by its technical team, are security threats such as keyloggers, who can potentially steal account information (and possibly much more than that). The required use of an authenticator would likely reduce the threat of such issues drastically.

Here is a description of how the authenticators work, quoted from the Blizzard store page :

Introducing the Blizzard Authenticator! The Blizzard Authenticator is designed as a supplemental authentication method for your World of Warcraft account, giving you the security of Two-Factor authentication. Each time you log in using the Blizzard Authenticator you are provided with a unique, one-time use password to use in addition to your regular password. Log in with both and you can rest easy knowing that your account is now even more secure from malicious attacks such as keyloggers and trojans.

• Simple and easy to use – press one button to display the digital code. Setup of the token is simple and takes only a few minutes.
• Small and convenient – take your token to wherever you play World of Warcraft and know that your account is secure.

So far, the authenticator is an optional item, but with a sub $10 price tag and a character pet included with it, they have proven somewhat popular. Chances are good that if the device were made a requirement, it would be included with the new Cataclysm expansion, due out later this year.

The question is…if this proves to work well with WoW and/or Battle.net (Blizzard’s multiplayer server network, whose usage was made mandatory for WoW players last year), could we see the upcoming Starcraft and Diablo sequels use similar devices, too?

Posted in Games

Tags: authenticator, Blizzard, Warcraft

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