Aware of the idea that Digital Rights Management can draw the ire of consumers, Steam and Microsoft have both announced new technologies to prevent computer game piracy without using the dreaded "DRM" terminology.
Steam -- the digital download service offered by Valve, makers of Half-Life -- claims that its latest service suite for game developers "makes DRM obsolete." The new technology, dubbed "Custom Executable Generation," allows the player to install a game an unlimited number of times by making "unique copies" for each user. This is done without the installation of any rootkits, but Steam doesn't get more specific than that. Perhaps there's some sort of key that must be entered with each install.
Meanwhile, Microsoft unveiled two developments that it avoids referring to as DRM, Ars Technica reports. The first is "zero-day piracy protection," which encrypts a game until its official release date, after which a decryption code is sent to the player. This prevents people from playing leaked copies, or even retail copies that were sold early.
Microsoft's other countermeasure sounds pretty similar to what Steam is doing. Online games will require server-side authentication, and beyond that, the player can install an unlimited number of copies. "Whereas traditionally DRM is really about copy protection, what we're trying to do is license protection," Drew Johnston, the product unit manager for the Windows Gaming Platform, told Ars Technica.
Because DRM typically refers to restrictions on what an individual consumer can do with purchased media, Microsoft and Steam have cleverly won a game of semantics, but I'm not sure how this is any better than those print-out key legends that came with LucasArts games in the 1990s. Eventually, the new methods will be cracked, and we'll be back to square one, but at least legitimate game owners will be dealing with fewer shackles than before.
