Stardock has announced it’ll be tackling the piracy and digital rights management (DRM) a little differently to other publishers, hoping to coin a new and effective protection scheme.
The DRM alternative is called Game Object Obfuscation, or Goo, and will match the game to the user rather than the game to hardware by asking the user to input their serial number and email address to verify. Goo won’t need a third-party client either, which means that it’s almost a “master key” solution.
Stardock president and CEO had this to say on Goo and copyright protection: “Publishers want to be able to sell their games in as many channels as possible but don’t want to have to implement a half-dozen “copy protection” schemes. Game Object Obfuscation lets the developer have a single game build that can be distributed everywhere while letting gamers potentially be able to re-download their game later from any digital service. Plus, it finally makes possible a way for gamers and publishers to transfer game licenses to players in a secure and reliable fashion.”
In addition to this, players and Goo users have been promised that they’ll be able to install their software on multiple machines, another one of the biggest issues currently faced by DRM.
Stardock will offer up the service for other publishers, but we’ll have to wait until the Impulse Reactor developer’s suite gets the Phase 3 release to see whether it’ll work or not.
