Blizzard weighs in on DRM, calls it a "losing battle"

If we didn't know any better, we'd say the gaming industry never learned the alphabet, because it always puts the letters "PC" and "DRM" right next to each other. Oddly enough, however, Blizzard - PC dev extraordinare - has never really dropped its two cents on the subject.

Until now.

"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," Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce told VideoGamer.

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

So, how do we have our cake and stop pirates from eating it too? Blizzard's solution: the community.

"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," Pearce explained.

"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."

Of course, there's also the glass half-empty side of the story, wherein Blizzard sacrificed StarCraft II's LAN functionality in order to keep pirates at bay.

We can't blame Blizzard, though. If we'd been polishing a game to absolute perfection since 2003, we'd probably knife someone if they so much as stole a glance at a Bittorrent file of our game - let alone actually obliged their sticky fingers.