Atari defends Riddick PC DRM
But wants to eventually remove it.
Atari has defended the decision to use DRM to protect the PC version of The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, claiming only 10 per cent of owners have used one of their three installations, and only four people have been unable to play because of the anti-piracy measures.
"There has been a lot of talk lately about DRM and how it was implemented in Riddick and there is a lot of misinformation being tossed around," writes administrator MajorHavoc on the official Riddick forum. "DRM is not designed to keep you from playing the game, nor is it designed to combat any after-market sales."
"I want to make it clear that there are people who are monitoring activations so if and when we get into an issue with people not being able to play that issue will be addressed. Should the case get so severe it affects a large portion of the gamers, more activations will be set in place as needed. Further down the line the DRM will be removed and a new unprotected .exe will be released.
"So to summarise: if you buy Riddick legally on the PC we are going to do our best to make sure you can play it for as long as you want," says the post.
MajorHavoc reveals that one serial number had over 50,000 activation attempts, and that the four unlucky customers had first tried to illegally activate their games before being manually sorted out.
The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena launches for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 here on 24th April. The game is already out in the US, though, where it has picked up solid critical acclaim - Metacritic averages each version out at around 80 per cent.
Developer Starbreeze is also on top of early problems, and has released a PC patch addressing various ailments.
Head over to our Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena gamepage for our thoughts and look out for our review soon.
Thanks, Voodoo Extreme.