Blizzard: DRM is a losing battle

Developer Blizzard will use a one-off Battle.net activation as its way to safeguard upcoming release StarCraft II from piracy.

It’s opted for this approach over the use of DRM as it believes both that fighting piracy is, in its words, a losing battle” and that its developers should not be wasting man-hours on concocting security software.

If we’ve done our job right and implemented Battle.net in a great way people will want to be connected while they’re playing the single player campaign so they can stay connected to their friends on Battle.net and earn the achievements on Battle.net,” Blizzard co-founder and StarCraft II’s executive producer Frank Pearce told VideoGamer.

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.

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.”