|
Todd Hollenshead on Piracy @ GDC 2007
|
|
|
Author: Roger LaMarca
Published: 2007-03-09 |
(Post a
Comment) |
id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead spoke at 2007 Game Developers Conference about piracy in the video game industry. He discussed why the gaming community should care about the rampant rise of piracy, what solutions are available, id's personal problems and successes with piracy, and what the future holds.
Todd said gamers should care about piracy not only for the huge loss of revenue for developers, but the impact it causes for development time and the impact it has on moral. The three billion lost due to piracy every year in a seven billion dollar industry doesn't even account for the piracy taking place online.
Some of the solutions discussed were of course stopping the physical copying of discs along with internet guerilla warfare, legal and criminal remedies, and education of the gaming community. Stopping the physical coping of games is an easy way to stop the average person who tries to make a copy for their friend, but of course there are way to get around that. Internet guerilla warfare involves the developer distributing fake versions of their software being pirated online to confuse and annoy those trying to illegally download their work. A much more complicated and costly solution to piracy is through the legal system. This method is the hardest, most costly, and inefficient manner to go about combating piracy. While piracy is still a large issue in the United States, law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and customs do help to combat the problem. Unlike other areas around the world, piracy is taken much more seriously in the U.S.. A solution that Todd reiterated many times during his discussion was the education of the public on the negative impact of piracy. While it severely hurts game developers, piracy has also been linked to fund terrorist and criminal organizations. In the end though, all these "solutions are a band aid on a huge problem", Todd said.
A very interesting part of the discussion included id Software's own experiences of their games being leaked before they got to the market. Going all the way back to the original QUAKE, id had the game's source code leaked by the company working on Linux port. The company had their website hacked and the source made its way online. With Hexen II, the game was leaked during a press meeting at an Australian distributor's office. While those two instances were the fault of third party affiliates, the leak of Quake2 was the fault of id Software themselves. A new security system they installed on a Linux server in their offices turned out to be a trojan horse allowing outsiders to access their internal files and e-mail. With Quake3, a build distributed to hardware vendors to be used for driver compatibility testing was leaked. More recently with DOOM3 a early build was leaked online also by a hardware company testing the game. Even with id's latest project Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, they have seen screenshots from inside the game floating around the warez community that they did not release.
While id has had its fair share of problem with piracy, they have also been successfully with prevention methods such as their CD key authorization system. Todd proudly stated that the system has never been cracked and that key generators and other workarounds have been unsuccessfully in breaking their system. id's decision to use Punkbuster in all their latest titles has freed up a lot of time waited by the company's programmers who found themselves continuously patching their games to no end.
While Todd expressed a deep frustration while the piracy problem, he seemed reluctant to implement prevention methods such as online activation of games or requiring users to always be online when playing. He really took into account the inconvenience security methods such as these impose on gamers. The use of subscriptions such as those used in many online role playing games was not something Todd wanted to see be implemented into first person shooters. The rampant piracy issues with PC software was also one of the reasons id has now moved to consoles as their primary development base.
Post Your Comment
You are currently not logged in. You may post an anonymous comment, but it must first be approved to appear. We recommend that you either
Login In or
Register an Account to post under your name.
Please click on the ad to support QuakeUnity!
