Stardock Announces GOO DRM

Author	Hugo Jobling
Published	27th Mar 2009

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A quick look at Spore customer reviews on Amazon is all the proof needed that DRM can be a contentious issue but with GOO, Stardock might just be striking the right medium between protecting developers' intellectual property and not causing gamers intolerable frustration.

GOO, which stands for Game Object Obfuscation, works by bundling the Stardock's Impulse Reactor in with a game executable in an encrypted package. On the first run, GOO requires the user to enter an email address and a serial number, tying the game to that ID. Thereafter no Internet connection is required as the game is locked to a single user. No third party software, such as Valve's Steam platform or EA's Download Manager, need be run to play the game.

Better still the DRM is removable, which makes selling the game as simple as unregistering the added email address from the GOO'd game. Further, because the DRM is tied to the game itself, even if the developers or publishers go out of business the game can still be authenticated and games can be installed on multiple computers.

GOO will be released on the 7th of April and Stardock says it expects to announce "multiple major publishers making use of GOO in April."

Link:
Impulse Driven.

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TL1210 said on 27th March 2009

I hope they can do something like that for xbox. After installing a game to the hard drive, it would be nice not to keep changing cds when switching games.

Brian White said on 28th March 2009

This is a good step in the right direction.

Matthew BLB said on 29th March 2009

Subheading for this news story is "DRM that isn't detrimental to the consumer!?" - Let me be the first to say: DRM is *ALWAYS* detrimental to the consumer. The quest... more

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