Behold the wall of text! Hopefully you are goofing off at work or something and enjoy the read...
That assertion is ridiculous, unfounded and I am very sure without any proof but I will add that I would not waste my time even going to read more about it given the obvious fallacy of that statement.
Someone else mentioned there will always be piracy and for as long as games run client side I would agree that is correct. Short of encrypting the entire game and requiring a key to unlock and run it which is unique per user, the only other way to exert full control is server side computing and even there creative hackers sometimes have a field day although it is rare in contrast to rampant piracy of software on the Internet today. Yes, piracy is rampant is not hard to believe if you use a search engine and poke around but numbers that high are laughable. I would say on the world wild web this would be very difficult to quantify.
I bring that up as I think the days of pirated software and to some extent other media possibly are numbered as we see a move towards a client - server model of distribution versus client only. There is a reason I believe that companies like Microsoft are developing services like Live Microsoft Office that will run server side and also why you see even game companies like Valve, EA and Ubi starting to explore this model of distribution. Traditional productivity apps will lead the way here but I think you can expect to see entertainment titles and possibly other media follow suit in the years to come. Right now the greatest issue probably centers on bandwidth and possibly startup and development costs as this technology rolls out and we see this happening right now. Google is another early player in this scenario with their now free office applications.
Making services and content free to Internet users until they are accepted and the value of them is proven has become something of a "traditional" method at this point of rolling out new Internet content in loss leader fashion until users come to desire and rely on it. At this point, you see content segment into limited free and the full content for a subscription or sometimes even one time fee. I believe this is why so many Google offerings which are all really in various forms of beta whether they call it that or not along with currently free Microsoft Live content will later all cost money to use when they have demonstrated real value and won acceptance.
By the time the client server model for retail applications starts becoming the norm I think Internet bandwidth will have improved enough to support moving gaming and other entertainment to this model as well. At that point, the pirating party is effectively over. The ramifications for publishers and developers in terms of fully capturing profit from their efforts is obvious and therefore no doubt strongly motivates the activity we are seeing presently in this direction.
Of course nobody can know timelines in advance on such things but when you consider how close we are to this now it could happen sooner than one might expect looking at it today. We have already seen how well this can work for a game for years now when you look at MMOs which generally have a lot of their content installed locally for performance reasons but are impossible to play without logging into an owned and paid account. Yes, I know about illegal free servers and perhaps illegal free content servers down the road could become the new piracy versus the self applied cracks to local installations prevalent today among those stealing software.
As it stands right now, a simple and very popular version of this is Valve's Steam. If I want to play my purchased copy of Counter-Strike Source purchased via Steam, the one and only way to do so is to logon to my account that is associated with that purchase. I like this for other reasons but this is very good for Valve as well since they have a lot of control over use here. Undoubtedly people have worked ways around this but I doubt with anywhere near the frequency of a stand alone retail boxed game that has no online ties beyond a serial number.
There are a lot of reasons this is going to come to be and not all of them are just good for the owners of intellectual properties of all sorts. For consumers this is going to mean you can purchase virtually all of the media you want from the comfort of home without driving to your local retailer and your ownership is not tied to some physical boxed item or plastic disc that can be lost, damaged, etc. In this world to come, my house could burn to the ground in the worst case scenario and assuming I live, when I rebuild I can go online and retrieve all of my digital belongings. It means I can access all of my digital belongings from anywhere and everywhere as time goes by. This is going to be a wonderful thing down the road in my opinion. I already like it where I can find it, such as with Valve's Steam for example.
Even library books are now available online in readable and audio formats in growing numbers. All media is going to come to us this way and given enough time, this will become the norm not the exception.
People have soundly rejected DRM but down the line improved forms of rights management will come to be that take into account traditional rights and uses of media we've historically had with physical copies of it in our possession. I can see a time coming when it won't be a big deal to loan a copy of anything I digitally own to a friend or family member with constraints just like the physical lending of books, cds, etc. When I loan it, they can use it and I can't. When they give it back, I can use it and they can't. This is exactly how lending someone a book or music CD works with physical media and I would be willing to be this is eventually implemented in an easy to use fashion for common forms of digital media. It almost has to happen for the masses to accept and move to it I would think. At that point, nobody can complain about being limited in ways they were not in the physical world eliminating that objection to the control publishers want. P2P sharing lovers will complain plenty but in legal and moral terms those complaints are baseless however passionately made.
It's a very interesting subject. I already use Microsoft's Live suite of online software and have signed up for the Office online beta which I expect is eventually going to be the only way to run office. It's just a matter of time. These guys want their hard earned money - all of it. I'd be willing to bet most software, including games, even console games, is all or nearly all client server delivered within about a decade or less.
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