Strategy Informer  

The future adoption of an encryption chip fixed on PC motherboards known as TPM "will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay."

A bold proclamation indeed, though Bushnell admits music and movies will remain susceptible - "if you can watch it and you can hear it, you can copy it."

"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 said, speaking at the Wedbush Morgan Securities annual Management Access Conference.

All this talk of ridding the market of piracy has been trumped before, and will mostly likely be again in the future. It's naive to have such a stalwart faith in a system that's not even been tested in the real world en masse.

"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."

Have these corporate big wigs forgotten just how creative 'programming enthusiasts' are when it comes to a challenge of the "uncrackable"?

"Games are a different thing, because games are so integrated with the code. The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay."

"As soon as the installed base of the TPM hardware chip gets large enough, we will start to see revenues coming from Asia and India at a time when before it didn't make sense."

I imagine this TPM chip has caught the eye of the publishing houses interest. The threat of the chip would seem to 'function' the same as the consoles, meaning users would possibly need to physically risk their hardware in order to circumvent the system. This 'threat' is why console piracy is far lighter than that of the PC.

We'll just have to see where this goes.



Source: GamesIndustry.biz