While speaking at a conference, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell suggested that a new chip that is currently in production could mean that video game piracy could come to an end.

At the conference, he explained that this stealth encryption chip (known as a TPM) is being installed on new motherboards that come with new computers, and that it will open up revenue prospects in areas such as Asia and India. In these regions, the chip 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." This will allow a huge market to develop in some sectors where piracy is a major problem.

While this could be good news for software developers, Bushnell believes that piracy of movies and music will continue to be an unstoppable force because "if you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it. Games are a different thing, because games are so integrated with the code. The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay."

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50-50 chance that this fails horrible like Starforce.

they better reserve some spot on landfill.

I say 50-50 too. I just hope it doesn't go overboard. What if you have a freeware title that happens to share code with a comercial game ? Like a add on for Wolfenstien, and you can't copy it to anything ? What then ?

Ahh, Nolan Bushnell, always with his finger on the pulse of the gaming public. Maybe he could band together with leading luminaries such as Trip Hawkins and sell a home version of the Chuck E. Cheese experience.

There's always something that is "unbreakable and stops piracy" but pirates always find a way around it.

Pirates might have to build their own PCs to work around it, but I'm sure they'd happily do that.

Heh, the only way anyone is going to end Piracy is by nuking most of Asia and Eastern Europe. :p

If they can hack into the NSA they can hack into anything. Doh.

Nah! The only way to end the piracy is to stop making/releasing anything.

And the only way to get my money is release games without shitty "protections" and DRM. I will never pay a penny for anything that must be activated. For example if I want Bioshock (for PC) then I just download better (it can be played after 20 years too, retail version will not be activated any more) and 100% free pirate version.

Why do those companies waste money and annoy their customers?

You have a dangerous mind, sir. Run away, before it's too late!!!

yeah, it doesn't make you want a game that will be unplayable in the future because some activating server, copy-protection or chip.

Not many games are like Alley Cat, which still runs today.

Exactly my point of view. They always have the feeling that all their crappy protections are going to make people think "gee, then I'll better buy it instead of download it." I'm pretty positive that it's just the other way around.

Who are the people who would have downloaded a game instead of buying it? People with not enough money, people who just want to try it but would not pay money for it, etc... if there are no illegitimate copies, those people still don't have enough money to buy the thing. And the others will just shrug and go try (and later possibly buy) another game that they CAN find on their P2P network. I understand that piracy is a big problem in Eastern European and Asian regions. But what the hell do they think, that people will suddenly be ready to spend 20% of their monthly earnings on a game? They will either play something else they can get for squat, or just stop playing games entirely. That's what I would bet my money on.

If *anything* is making people choose pirating over buying, then it's DRM and copy protections themselves. Because most people know that this means the Warez version they can get for free is even HIGHER quality and lasts LONGER than the one they would have to pay for.

Of course!

TPM is the Portuguese acronym for Premenstrual syndrome. Based on the reactions it will cause, I wonder if they didn't got that name from the syndrome. =P

One word: Failure.

This doesn't stand a chance of working. Some of you charitably give it 50/50 odds, but hackers won't give it a damn. Everything, and I mean everything, can be beat in some way. People, iPhones, computers, everything is crackable.

I'm all for anti-piracy if it would mean that game prices would plummet down to 10-15 dollars but of course it's not going to happen. I still think in North America and Western Europe it's the best way to fight piracy. Dramatically reduce prices. Of course it could also be argued that rampant piracy of PS2 helped it establish it's sales over that of the nearly unhackable without breaking apart the case GameCube. Sure people copied the game but they still needed the system to play it on. I'm positive that the day they make something that "works" will be the day they shoot themselves in the foot.

I think it would help relieve piracy if there wasn't any region locks on consoles or dvd's. Why are those in place again ?

To protect themselves from people trying to buy their stuff. ;-)

Someone forgot the main idea of capitalism, eh? :p

On DVDs, the idea was to prevent parallel imports. Like, preventing German people from importing US-DVDs of movies that are still in German theaters. Which would be a very understandable reason economically. Unfortunately the whole system is a piece of bull, because as a last resort anyone can buy a second DVD player with a different region. In Switzerland, we actually have a law that local stores can only start importing DVDs of cinema movies when they are out of Swiss theaters.

As for the guy who decided to have region codes on game consoles, I don't know what the hell he was smoking. At least Sony got rid of it again.

I guess those guys never heard of mod chips and their success on the console world.

What a stupid idea. Here is the rub, (haha... rub) what about trying to play that game 2 years from now? 15 years from now? 30+ years from now?

You get the idea, this is stupid, and consumers never like the idea that you buy it once, then can never use it again. Just call it what it is, a "subscription" like divix. And watch it tank all the way.

I still enjoy the fact that I can play old games I bought some 20+ years ago, however it seems that this fossil wants’ desperately to destroy the industry.

Shouldn't this guy retire already???? Or is he trying to push another ET on us?

LOL Reserve space in the landfill!!!!!!

it seems that this fossil wants’ desperately to destroy the industry

He's come back to finish the job he started when Chuck E. Cheese's dismantled and destroyed all their arcade machines.

The only way to break hardware level protection is with hardware level cracking.

UNLESS you emulate, nothing beats emulation. But emulation is SLOW. However if this works, in the future it won't matter because it will be just like today where we use DOSBox and such to play old games, with the overhead being negligible.

And UNLESS the protection mechanism is just a shitty "Code correct? Run | Don't Run" with no code encryption. Then in that case it can be cracked pretty easily just like I've done with a couple of Dongle "protected" programs by using a nice debugger like Olly Shadow.

BUT, maybe if the code gets decrypted and stored in memory to be fed into the cpu it could be done by software but with incredible difficulty, not to mention it would be insanely time consuming. If the code gets decrypted on the fly however, which is what I suppose it will do, then there sure is no way to do it by software cracking without emulation.

This whole thing probably only applies to newbie gamers who never heard of emulation nor a s t a l a v i s t a.

Which gamer is cracking a game anyway? I don't know about you, but I think the mass is downloading a pre-cracked version from some P2P platforms.. or as you said yourself, downloading just the crack.

To use TPM to completely stop piracy, the operation system must deny the execution of all applications which are TPM-incompatible/unauthorized, because neither the OS or that chip can differentiate between a legit non-TPM-supported application and a cracked-to-act-like-a-non-TPM-supported application.

The only way would be for example for Atari to release all their games beginning 2010 as TPM-only which requires to have Windows 7 which in turn prevents the non-TPM-apps to run. All gamers worldwide wanting to play those new releases would require a new mainboard and the new OS. As "classic" releases for "old" mainboards and non-TPM-executions would still compromise this goal. Any though Microsoft would be really happy to finally get rid of the entire open-source/freeware "shit" like Linux, OpenOffice etc., it just isn't working as you can't just introduce a "new" PC as you can do with a new console.

Microsoft would be really happy to finally get rid of the entire open-source/freeware "shit" like Linux, OpenOffice etc.

DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run?

Of all people, Nolan Bushnell should know better. If it's made, it can be unmade. It seems that copy protection is getting cracked faster these days.

Right. Remember how fast the Wii was hacked into ?

It will be cracked sooner or later. There were numerous "unbreakable anti-piracy gimmicks", and they all failed. Nothing is unbreakable.

Sounds fair enough... Give it a try.

Every year some new thing comes out that "ends all piracy." Then it is broken by some kid who is either living at college or in mom's basement.

Anyone read the news about some kid who broke into the NASA and FBI database (among others) just to find evidence of UFO's? And found it? This was about 2 years ago maybe.

one step closer

Another potential headache if it isn't done right.