Frank Pearce, co-founder of Blizzard, thinks the solution is creating communities

May 27, 2010 08:21 GMT  ·  By

Blizzard Entertainment Co-founder Frank Pearce weighed in on the digital-rights-management-in-PC-games debate in a recent interview with VideoGamer. His opinion was that developers were spending too many resources on a losing battle and that they should focus on game content. No anti-piracy technology would ever succeed, he continued to comment, as there were too many people out there that wanted to disable the DRM measures, even if only by curiosity.

Pearce stated that Blizzard's solution to the rampant piracy taking place on the PC was creating a community for the gamer and their friends. “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,” he went on to say. “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.”

This being said, many Blizzard fans have commented that the removal of local area network play from the upcoming Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty is a hidden DRM measure. Less copies of the game will be pirated, as no type of multiplayer will be available to non-legit users. To outweigh this loss, Blizzard is heavily promoting the Battle.net as the perfect platform for Starcraft multiplayer.

Battle.net features advanced communication options, statistics tracking, achievements and will require players to be connected to the service to access the online component of the title. However, unlike Ubisoft's recent public relations disaster of a DRM technology, the single-player portion of the game can be played while the owner's computer is not connected to the Internet. Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty, the first of three releases meant to continue the story of the first Starcraft, is set for release on the 27th of July, 2010, for both the PC and Mac.