Blizzard Calls DRM a Losing Battle

In an interview with VideoGamer.com, Blizzard executive producer Frank Pearce notes Blizzard considers DRM a losing battle, and StarCraft II will ship without any, requiring “only” a one-time activation on Battle.net and being playable only through Battle.net (with LAN removed).

“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,” Frank Pearce, Blizzard co-founder and executive producer on StarCraft II told VideoGamer.com.

“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,” he added.

“That’s a battle that we have a chance in. 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.

I’m sorry, am I missing something here? Removing LAN gameplay and requiring a one-time activation may be lighter DRM than the recent Ubisoft fiasco, but it’s still DRM, isn’t it?