PC gaming seems to be a hot topic in the industry right now. Between alliances being
formed, the chatter of those who think PC gaming is in
disarray, and the people who think PC gaming still
matters, PC gaming has been making headlines for the last few weeks. The biggest issue of course is piracy (you know it's bad when people are
pirating casual games) and there's really no system out there that has worked. Software keys are fairly easily broken and on disc protection mechanisms fair no better or are too obtrusive to be effective (SecurROM anyone).
Chris Taylor (of Gas Powered Games) has some
thoughts on how piracy could be thwarted by using a MMO like server based authentication system. Users would have to login to a central server in order to access their games. It's a great idea but you do have to wonder about the performance hit in terms of having to constantly communicate over the wire as well as what happens when a big game comes out and swamps the server. If they could over come these issues then I think it could work but it's not like this system couldn't be hacked in time.
