James Lee
09:27 (BST)
03/12/2008
Related articles
Valve: "There is a groundswell to abandon" DRM
Gabe Newell, president of Valve, has reportedly responded to a distressed blogger on the state of DRM systems used in PC games, saying "there is a groundswell to abandon these approaches."
Supposedly, Newell replied directly to an e-mail sent by the blogger, in which he describes many implementations of DRM as "dumb" and spoke of Valve's approach to solving piracy issues.
"As far as DRM goes, most DRM strategies are just dumb," Newell commented. "The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value (make it easy for me to play my games whenever and wherever I want to), not by decreasing the value of a product (maybe I'll be able to play my game and maybe I won't)."
"We really, really discourage other developers and publishes from using the broken DRM offerings," he added, "and in general there is a groundswell to abandon those approaches."
Recently EA faced outrage from consumers over its use of SecuROM DRM in Spore, which restricted users to a maximum of three installs for each copy of the game.
To view other users comments, you must be logged in to a GamesIndustry.biz Network account.
