Loading ...Atari’s Nolan Bushnell give’s a blurb:
Speaking at yesterday’s Wedbush Morgan Securities annual Management Access Conference, the Atari founder suggested that game piracy will soon be a thing of the past thanks to a new chip.
“There is a stealth encryption chip called a TPM that is going on the motherboards of most of the computers that are coming out now,” he pointed out.
“What that says is that in the games business we will be able to encrypt with an absolutely verifiable private key in the encryption world - which is uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords - which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t this exactly the same idea behind HD-DVD and Blu-ray security, and that was cracked like… what… a month before they were released?
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May 24th, 2008 at 11:30 am
I’m afraid that this will mean much lower revenue for companies like nvidia ati and such because people will stop buying their expensive hardware.Gamers just dont have the money to pay 60euros for a piece of software ask your selves who actually buys a original pc game!!! the answer is almost nobody heck they all buy cracked ones but they do buy the graphic cards that can handle this software if this TPM chip is implemented gamers would just stop buying the expensive hardware because they wouldnt have the cash because they would have to buy original games instead of using that money to buy the hardware that could run those games so this could lead to an unbalance that isnt really good considering that consoles are cheap and you dont have to upgrade every six months to play a game this TPM chip could possibly bury pc gaming for good.
May 24th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Anonymous,
Interesting point. Unfortunately I think the PC Gaming market was flagged for murder years ago when it was clear that the console market was doing nothing but growing-growing and growing. This current gen, for the first time, we are seeing console-only releases of some epic games, which is not something we’ve ever seen before in the history of games.
Next-gen releases (Xbox 720, PS4, etc.) will most certainly be so expensive to produce that I doubt any of those will be cross console/PC releases. I full expect this trend to continue.
And when you look at this trend, the money ATI/NVIDIA were making from the PC Gaming market are now making in the media device market with GPUs/Graphics for hand held devices, the game consoles themsemves (ATI=Xbox 360, NVIDIA=PS3) and there is also the high-definition decoding/rendering market that is relatively new that they have opportunities in.
In short, the anti-piracy chip, assuming it works, will be the nail in the coffin for PC gaming, knocking out those customers you accurately described. At that point though, I would guess atleast half will finally get a console, and then ATI/NVIDIA/Intel will just get their money a different way.
Publishers prefer it because no piracy and a controller distribution channel means more revenue. Also you better believe they won’t lower the price of any of the games, those will continue to climb unabated until we, as a group, stop paying those prices.