Shack: Similar question in the sense that it's an issue that can be overblown. What kind of copy protection will be included on the PC version of Fallout 3?

Pete Hines: Pretty similar to what we did for Oblivion, which was--we basically don't do any--we do the mildest form possible. I actually don't know if I even want to get into what it is that we exactly do, but we try to be really noninvasive when it comes to that stuff. [ed- Oblivion employed a simple DVD check.]

And it is a pain in the ass--it is a pain in the ass that we have to do it at all in the first place. But when you spend tens of millions of dollars, we don't think it's right to just put something out there and let everybody do whatever they want and pass it around.

And to have to support all of that--which is often the unspoken thing that nobody really wants to point to. You can argue all day whether or not somebody would have bought a copy of a game they pirated, but you can't argue, and you will never win the argument that I'm not having to provide tech support for those folks. Because I know for a fact that we are. We catch those folks all the time, where we're providing support for somebody who turns out didn't actually pay for the game and just downloaded a copy.

Shack: We've heard that as far as tech support calls go, the amount of pirates asking for support can be greater than the amount of legitimate users.

Pete Hines: We don't have any specific data on it, but we can look across platforms, and when these two platforms are like this [gestures with a hand] and this platform is like this [raises a second hand much higher] and these two platforms you can't pirate games, and this one you can, you can start to draw some inferences as to what the cause for that gigantic chasm might be.

But no, we're pretty mild about how we do it, and we try to do it in a way that prevents folks from exploiting and distributing our games that we worked very hard on, and that we feel we have a right to try and sell and not have distributed free without our okay. It's very important for us not to ruin the experience for the person who did buy a copy, so we try to be very careful.