The president of the newly formed PG Gaming Alliance, Randy Stude, has spoken about DRM in PC gaming and has come to some conclusions on piracy in gaming.
“I don’t think it’s getting worse, as much as it’s getting easier,” said the consortium head to Ars Technica. He offered file-sharing trail-blazer Napster as an example to show that pirates strike all forms of media and are not unique to the games industry.
What was most surprising is that he leads a consortium which is backed by many of the main PC gaming companies but has come out on the side of the enraged gamers which complained about Spore’s Draconian DRM. “I think gamers wanted to make their voices known; it was the equivalent of the Boston tea party,” he remarked.
Stude showed his understanding that PC gamers are a unique and diverse bunch, and as such don’t do well with limitations. “PC gamers don’t buy one machine, stick it in the corner, hook it up to the TV, and play it forever. We play on multitudes of machines, and we want the same rights an Xbox 360 purchaser has, to move the game to whatever machine we want to play on.”
Stude was still pushed onto the piracy issue by the publishers he represents. For their sake, he promises a solution. “The PCGA would like to address the methodology that publishers might be able to take to solve … the piracy challenge for their substantial investments in content.” He reiterated his organization’s promise to accurately measure piracy in the wake of wildly varying statistics on the issue.
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