Although Valve recently declared how it intends to make digital rights management obsolete with Steamworks, I think many of us are hesitant to believe that one solution from a single company is enough to remedy the current DRM situation. It’s going to take the cooperation of many companies in this industry, which is why I’m happy to see Stardock stepping up to the plate.
Stardock’s digital distribution platform, Impulse, is set to get a new anti-piracy system on April 7 that looks to be one of the most consumer-friendly solutions proposed thus far: Game Object Obfuscation (GOO). Essentially, Goo allows developers to encapsulate their game’s EXE file and Impulse Reactor “into a single encrypted EXE.”
This means that upon running said executable file, you are required to enter your serial number and email once; this allows the game you purchased to be tied to you and not any one machine you own. That may not sound like much, but Goo’d games also bring the following benefits:
Universal Activation. If I buy a copy of a game from Steam or Direct2Drive or Impulse that is also available on one of the other platforms, I should be able to re-download it form any of the services that it’s available on.
Used copies. But with Goo, now the game developer and the user can both benefit and let gamers resell their copy to someone else. That’s because the Goo’d EXE is encrypted and the user can voluntarily disable their access from it thus making it transferable.
Untethered gaming. Because Goo is all self-contained, there’s no third party client floating around. A developer can use this on their game and have it available at retail or other digital distributors.
In my eyes, this sounds extremely promising — especially the bit about being able to resell games that were purchased digitally. Are you guys feeling Goo as well?
[Via Shacknews]
