by Aaron Linde May 23, 2008 3:57pm CST tags: PC Gaming, Piracy
At yesterday's Wedbush Morgan Securities conference, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell claimed that a stealth encryption chip will "absolutely stop piracy of [PC] gameplay." "There is a stealth encryption chip called a TPM that is going on the motherboards of most of the computers that are coming out now," explained Bushnell, according to a GamesIndustry report.
"What that says is that in the games business we will be able to encrypt with an absolutely verifiable private key in the encryption world--which is uncrackable by people on the internet and by giving away passwords--which will allow for a huge market to develop in some of the areas where piracy has been a real problem."
The founder went on to suggest that though movie and music piracy will likely continue unabated, game markets made previously inaccessible due to piracy issues will begin to flourish as the chip's install base grows.
"Games are a different thing, because games are so integrated with the code. The TPM will, in fact, absolutely stop piracy of gameplay," Bushnell noted. "As soon as the installed base of the TPM hardware chip gets large enough, we will start to see revenues coming from Asia and India at a time when before it didn't make sense."