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Fighting PC game piracy with restrictive copy protection is "a losing battle", Blizzard has said.

In recent months some publishers have begun using digital rights management (DRM) that requires players have an active internet connection at all times.

Ubisoft's new DRM system forces PCs to be connected to the internet in order for games to work - even single-player games.

Earlier this year gamers reacted angrily to the strict DRM used by Ubisoft in the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5. Attacks on verification servers made it impossible for some gamers to play their new purchases.

StarCraft II developer Blizzard is taking a different approach.

StarCraft II, due out on July 27, requires a one-off activation and a registered Battle.net account. Once completed, players will be able to get started with the game's single-player campaign in offline mode.

Blizzard hopes the new and improved Battle.net service, which connects players from across Blizzard's stable of games, will be attractive enough to convince would-be pirates to buy the game.

"If we've done our job right and implemented Battle.net in a great way people will want to be connected while they're playing the single player campaign so they can stay connected to their friends on Battle.net and earn the achievements on Battle.net," Frank Pearce, Blizzard co-founder and executive producer on StarCraft II told VideoGamer.com.

"The best approach from our perspective is to make sure that you've got a full-featured platform that people want to play on, where their friends are, where the community is," he added.

"That's a battle that we have a chance in. If you start talking about DRM and different technologies to try to manage it, it's really a losing battle for us, because the community is always so much larger, and the number of people out there that want to try to counteract that technology, whether it's because they want to pirate the game or just because it's a curiosity for them, is much larger than our development teams.

"We need our development teams focused on content and cool features, not anti-piracy technology."

Last year it emerged that StarCraft II will lack LAN support, a move that angered some veteran fans of the series.

Blizzard said the decision was taken to "safeguard" against piracy.

http://www.videogamer.com/news/blizz...ng_battle.html

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