The much used and community despised anti-copy protection system SecuROM isn’t to blame for limited installs or online activations says Capcom’s Christian Svensson.
Those decisions are taken by the publishers and development studios themselves, and it’s how they’re ”implemented and, furthermore, how it’s communicated” or not to gamers.
”They have been an excellent partner and I think they are, quite frankly, much maligned for things that they are not necessarily responsible for,” said Capcom vice president Svensson, in an interview with VideoGamer.com.
”SecuROM is as onerous or innocuous as a developer or publisher chooses to make the policies. You can decide, for example, what is the appropriate number of concurrent installs.”
A major sore point for PC gamers is the number of times a game is now ‘permitted’ to be installed. However Svensson points out that in fact you can install the game are many times as you want actually, this measure is meant to stop the game being installed on more than five PCs at once for example - not to only ever be installed just five times.
”So instead of having five installs for life, as long as you provide a revoke tool or some other mechanism to revoke, or you have the revoke tool happen transparently via uninstall, you can install or uninstall a million times, but you can only have it on three, five, seven, ten, whatever the policy you chose to hold, machines at any one time,” he explained.
The problem is how that system is implemented by the developers and publishers - it’s they that are too blame says Svensson, not the technology or its makers SecuROM.
”The technology itself is not the bad guy. It’s how it’s implemented and, furthermore, how it’s communicated or not communicated to fans.
I think so many people have been beaten up so badly with let’s say more restrictive forms of DRM that they always assume the worst. That’s not always the case.”
Capcom has no intention of cutting ties with SecuROM and plans to keep on using their technology in the future for PC releases. ”We have a good, long-standing relationship with SecuROM. I don’t anticipate that going away any time soon. And to be fair we think it’s actually had really good results for us.”
Do you agree that SecuROM is taking unfair flak?
