Copying games: Is it a buyer's right or blatant piracy? Whatever your stance on this controversial subject, one company is making it a whole lot easier. 321 Studios, makers of DVD X Copy , showed something called Games X Copy at its CES booth.
DVD X Copy and its subsequent products, for the uninitiated, are PC tools that allow people to back up their DVD collection with ease. As you can probably deduce, Games X Copy works the same way, but with PC games. You can also burn the games, in their entirety, onto you computer's hard drive.
The software is not as effective for Xbox, PSone, and PlayStation 2 games. However, a rep from 321 Studios said that you could burn backups and play them on modified consoles. "Modding" your console, of course, is frowned upon by the manufacturers, and voids your warranty.
The idea with the product is to keep your discs in pristine condition. "You no longer need to fear losing your expensive PC game collection to scratches, skipping, or freezing," says 321 Studios' founder and president, Robert Moore. "Now you can simply back them up and put the expensive original in a safe place, and the backup will play on your PC just like the original."
It doesn't take a crystal ball to tell that the video game industry is probably going to have a problem with this piece of software. No matter how much 321 Studios claims that parents with the most honorable intentions are its target market, it's easy to see where it would be the perfect item for unscrupulous gamers to copy software to give to or trade with their friends. It goes against everything the industry has been fighting against.
News source: GameSpy
