Yummy Interactive creates GameShield to stop piracy

Marke Andrews, Vancouver Sun

Published: Saturday, February 16, 2008

Piracy of online video games is a growing global problem, but a Vancouver software company has come up with what it believes will solve the problem.

Yummy Interactive, located in Gastown, has created GameShield, which it will showcase next week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Two large game publishers, both unnamed, are currently testing the product, which will be available to developers and publishers in March.

Employing SoftwareShield and IronWrap, which were also created by Yummy Interactive, GameShield allows digital rights management (DRM) to be built into the game code by the developer or "wrapped" around an existing game product (IronWrap technology acts as a virtual operating system, and detects intrusion).

GameShield was designed both for developers and publishers to safeguard their products, and for consumers to play the games easily.

"We'll keep the games safe and we'll make it easy for people to manage their licenses and activate their games online," says Chris Astolfo, vice-president of business development for Yummy Interactive. "There is a real priority to keep it simple for the end-user to get the game installed and get playing without any barriers."

Illegal downloading has plagued the video game industry for years. Nintendo recently released figures that estimated the company and its publishers and developers lost $975 million US worldwide to piracy in 2007.

"Games are a really attractive target for crackers, and it's really affecting [game] companies' bottom-line profits," says Tara Gregg, director of marketing for Yummy Interactive. "When you talk to publishers, it's often a matter of 'How long can I keep my game from being cracked?' because every extra day they have the game in the market uncracked means increased revenue for them."

Given the ingenuity of hackers and the speed at which they can crack encryption, what makes this product hacker-free?

"Nothing is ever crack-proof, but this is different because the level of DRM is not one file that's crackable," says Astolfo. "This is more layers of encryption that have to be undone."

Gregg says the new technology can also be used by content aggregators and portal networks that distribute games for publishers. It is specifically designed to protect online games, not games made specifically for consoles.

GameShield is initially designed to protect video games, but it may have more uses down the road.

"Our core target is game developers and game publishers, but eventually we see the product evolving to protect any kind of digital content," says Astolfo.

Yummy Interactive, which employs 20 people and has offices in Vancouver and Toronto, currently works with more than 40 game publishers to provide games-on-demand services for broadband networks.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

The Vancouver Sun