Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Steamworks Makes DRM Obsolete?

<< < (2/2)

f0dder:
Well,

decrypting and rebuilding datafiles to remove watermarking will be relatively trivial - especially since it's hard to watermark all content (if it's done on the fly by the servers, you can't take advantage of p2p distribution, and if it's done locally by the steam executable, it can be overridden). What they're going to do now is building custom executables - if done properly, getting rid of the watermarks is going to be pretty tough. Not impossible to beat, but tough.

Deozaan:
From my point of view, there's no stopping the people who are serious about breaking copy-protections, but at least this removes the excuse from developers that intrusive, rootkit-like DRMs such as SecuROM are necessary to protect their assets.

And it also gives someone like me, who dreams of getting into the Indie Game business, some good news that the Steamworks services are free for developers. And Steamworks provides more than just copy protection. It also provides matchmaking lobbies, achievements, automatic updates, etc. All in all it sounds like a nice solution to me. I think this would allow me, if I were a game developer to be honest and say that yes, my games are going to be pirated, but I also would be putting some effort into protecting my software from that.

I guess my main point is that I imagine publishers require some sort of copy protection to be placed on your software. Something like Steamworks would allow an a developer to meet the publisher's demands for DRM with little or no additional cost, even if as a developer you knew there was no way to absolutely protect your software from piracy.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page