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[wonman321]

Hi, my name is Smith. I have finished my game and i have some troubles to sell it. i have 3 questions:

 1. now, iam using GM(Game Maker) engine and i dont know how to reg key activation for my game. it is GM file. i want to find some DRM software that can wrap my game. can you show me the DRM softwares that can wrap GM game file

 2. eSellerate can offer DRM solutions, But iam not sure about that. can eSellerate solve the DRM problems of GM files?

 3. iam living in Asia. can i use eSellerate to sell my game?

Someone help me, pls T.T

[Paul Eres]

hi, good to see you made it to the forum

1. i would suggest not using DRM with GM games. it's possible, but difficult. and i managed to successfully sell a commercial GM game without any DRM at all. piracy is going to happen with or without DRM, so it's best not to expend the effort on it, *especially* when it's GM, which has problems with most DRM wrappers

2. i've never used eSellerate so i don't know, but again i urge you not to use DRM. just have a separate 'demo' file and 'full game' file, and send people the 'full game' file after they buy it

3. you probably can use eSellerate in asia, yes. but it depends on where in asia, of course. if not, there are lots of other things to use besides eSellerate, such as fastspring, bmt-micro, paypal, etc. -- most of those work in most countries of the world. you will *probably* not be able to use any of these if you are in *north korea*, but any other asian country should be fine

[wonman321]

thank U a lot, but if i send them my full game and then they upload it as free game, cant they?

[Paul Eres]

depends on where they upload it. if they upload it to a file-sharing site, you simply email the file-sharing site and get them to take it down. if they create a torrent of it, there's not much you can do there, since most torrent hosts don't listen to requests to remove torrents (and they don't have to legally, since they aren't actually hosting the game, just an indirect link to others who are hosting the game on their personal computers)

but again like i said, even games with drm get pirated, very easily. point to any game with drm and i promise it's just as easy to pirate as any game without drm. my game was pirated a lot but still sold thousands of copies

[wonman321]

once again thank you, i have learned a lot from you ^^

[Paul Eres]

here's another relevant story: my first commercial GM game, immortal defense, was on sale for about one year without any piracy at all, even though it had no drm. eventually i put the game on a portal, called reflexive (this portal doesn't exist anymore and was later bought by amazon.com)

after it was put on reflexive, it got reflexive's drm "protection" (which had a single crack that cracked all reflexive games). it was immediately pirated after that. so the lesson from that for me is: it might actually reduce piracy more not to use drm, because with drm all they have to do is download the demo from your site and use a crack, without drm they have to go and download the entire full game somewhere

besides, separate demo and full versions save file space. the demo can be a lot smaller in file size than the full version, which helps with bandwidth on your site. the demo of immortal defense was 17mb, and the full version 40mb. if i had used drm, the demo would also have been 40mb, which would have cost a lot more in terms of bandwidth