Ail said:
lol at your Blizzard interview. They are aware of piracy, to limit it they are just going to make the Starcraft experience outside of battlenet subpar and you won't be able to play Battlenet without a legit copy....... This is why there won't be any LAN without battlenet.... Why do you think they even considered preventing offline single player campaign ??? Because they like paying for Battlenet bandwidth and want to spend more money on it ?????? |
Again, the business model is what really counts. By making SC2 mutliplayer b.net only they aren't doing anything about pirates, because people can just set up clone servers like they do for WoW. This is something addressed in that article, maybe you could read the whole thing before making foolish arguments? Nothing, I mean nothing, stops piracy outright except (apparently) the security structure of the PS3 (and even that's questionable since it could still be for lack of trying). Even having to connect to a server in order to install won't cut it because, again, people can create clone servers.
What Blizzard is trying to do is create a service people will want to pay for (b.net) rather than relying on selling a product (SC2). People are going to buy legitimate copies not because they can't pirate, but because they can't get the full experience if they do. This is the same principle that XBox Live works off of. They can't stop piracy, they know it, all they can do is make the paid-for version better than the free one. They can make it annoying to use pirated copies or they can have legitimate ones support extra features, but they can't actually do anything about piracy itself so (for the wiser companies) they don't really try hard at all. They only put in the minimal effort as a means to stop the uniformed (ie mainstream) consumer that might try to make a simple copy of their legitmate product.
Also, here's Microsoft saying that piracy today makes for loyal customers tomorrow: http://www.cbronline.com/news/microsoft_admits_piracy_benefits
Windows, too, is like a service. You don't even have to be a pirate to get an OS for free that does 99% of what a typical PC user wants it to do. People will pay for Windows, though, for that extra 1% and, you know, not having to worry about MS's ominous statement that pirated OS's are much more vulnerable to attacks (which is to say "what is MS plotting to do to pirates?"). There must exist incentives or disincentives beyond simply legal threats to cutail piracy. American lawyers don't scare Chinese peasants.
You do not have the right to never be offended.