| Aielyn said: With a bit of ingenuity, it should be easy to solve. How about having each game come with a small dongle that holds ongoing permission to play the associated game. Made very small (think a proprietary variant of Micro-SD), the system could come with a bank of slots for these dongles - 20 should be plenty. The dongle would only hold permission information. Then, used games would merely require that the permission dongle travel with the game. If you want to play the game at a friend's house, you take the dongle as well as the disc (just the dongle, if you've taken it there before and installed the game already). While the dongle is there, the game will play. Being proprietary, it wouldn't be trivial to copy the dongle. And with a bank of 20 slots, you'd be able to ensure that pretty much all of your oft-played games are playable immediately. A mechanism for adding further slots could then be set up, so people who want 60 such slots would be able to do it. This isn't the most streamlined system. But it's a demonstration that it can be done without real DRM. Another option would be to transition away from ROM-type discs (CD/DVD/BluRay/etc), to something that is at least partially writeable. SD card technology has come a long way. Even "regular" SD cards are able to have a 10MB/s minimum read/write speed (which puts it in a similar speed range to the BluRay drive in the PS3), and UHS SDHC and SDXC cards go over 50 MB/s (as high as 300 MB/s with the newest standard) - and these are "standards", not maximums. And such cards wouldn't be limited by reader tech in the way that BluRay, etc, are. BluRay maxes out at 128 GB for four-layer discs, with current maximum read speeds being around 54 MB/s (That's on a 12x reader). And with a proprietary card, you could easily have a small writeable portion enabling the system to mark the game as "installed" or "not installed" using a cryptographical method to ensure it's not easily faked. And the cards currently go as high as 2TB. My point? There are plenty of possible solutions that are not anti-consumer. But they aren't interested in such solutions, because the anti-consumer results are what they care about - limiting used games, limiting the ability to borrow games, getting as much money as they can per copy, etc. It's not about game security, it's about gouging the customer. |
Both of these ideas are quite good...but there are limiting scenarios with both.
For example, if a writable medium was used which tracks install and not installed states, you would need to uninstall the game every time youre going to play it at friends place, or have the card inserted in your machine at all times...back to medium swapping.
With a dongle, youd have to have a unique dongle per game, otherwise you wouldnt be able to resell the game and have the game deactivate on your console...so instead of game swapping, we are dongle swapping.
All in all I think the PC DRM approach works to an extent and if the console guys figure out how to incorporate game trading and resale which by the sound of things is what they are doing, we can hardly call them anti consumer. We will see thoug...whomknows how this will play out.
