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[nunix]

The trouble I've always had with the whole idea of "lost sales" is, well, you're assuming someone's going to buy your game, OR pirate it.

This is ridiculous.

Casual piracy doesn't mean "easy to crack", it means they're playing it because it's there. They load up a torrent site, or check an IRC channel, and say, "Hey, that's new, I'll play that." And they do, for a week. Then it gets forgotten, and they're playing next week's releases. They were NEVER going to buy it. If it wasn't there, it simply wouldn't be played.

So if you're not going to use DRM as some kind of protection (because it is worthless and only serves to irritate folk who buy the game).. why use it?

To sum up: any kind of DRM or copy protection is dumb, it has never worked (even hardware DRM gets cracked), but it's your dev money to throw away. If you're really looking to secure some kind of money-loyalty, you should be looking at paid tech support or subscription forums; access to a server that you control.

[Al King]

Sure, there are people who will never buy your game, but that doesn't mean there aren't people who would have bought it but pirated it instead - the concept of 'lost sales' is entirely sound. And casual piracy is a problem - friends copying games for each other etc. Sure, all DRM can be cracked, but it's generally not serious pirates that you're trying to discourage.

Copy protection which irritates and drives away people is certainly undesirable, though. I've said it more times than I can count, but the aim of the developer is maximise sales, not to minimise piracy. It doesn't matter how much a game is pirated if you've sold as many copies as possible.

[Alec]

If you're really looking to secure some kind of money-loyalty, you should be looking at paid tech support

YEAH. Paid tech support for games makes a TON of sense. (okay, maybe it does for MMOs)

Nobody thinks you can stop piracy. Believe me, nobody thinks that. The point is to keep the honest people honest. i.e. Make it slightly more difficult to share the game than to buy it.

[Oracle]

Its a different type of protection than serials/whatever, but i always thought it was damn amazing that bleemcast! never got cracked. Im not sure what the programmer used but it was a standard CD that couldnt be copied or something like that.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

The trouble I've always had with the whole idea of "lost sales" is, well, you're assuming someone's going to buy your game, OR pirate it.

This is ridiculous.

Casual piracy doesn't mean "easy to crack", it means they're playing it because it's there. They load up a torrent site, or check an IRC channel, and say, "Hey, that's new, I'll play that." And they do, for a week. Then it gets forgotten, and they're playing next week's releases. They were NEVER going to buy it. If it wasn't there, it simply wouldn't be played.

So if you're not going to use DRM as some kind of protection (because it is worthless and only serves to irritate folk who buy the game).. why use it?

To sum up: any kind of DRM or copy protection is dumb, it has never worked (even hardware DRM gets cracked), but it's your dev money to throw away. If you're really looking to secure some kind of money-loyalty, you should be looking at paid tech support or subscription forums; access to a server that you control.

Of course not all people who pirate a game would have bought it if they couldn't find a pirated version. But some percent of them would have, and it's not 0%. It's ridiculous to say that 'not everyone who pirates it would have bought it' leads to 'preventing piracy probably doesn't get you a single extra sale', but that's the argument I see people making all the time (on places like digg.com and the like).

[sega]

Really subtle, random stuff which is hard to notice but eventually render the game unplayable. Then when people whine about it on a forum you know why too.

YOU may know why, but most people won't.  They'll just read all these mini-reviews on forums about how unbalanced and sucky the game is.  That would probably lose more sales than the worst of DRM.  Especially with the flow of information we have nowadays.  If people "find out" a game sucks, they're not going to investigate far enough to find out the subtle details of why the particular opinion they read may or may not be valid.

I personally think people just need to be reminded that you're human, and you'll be hurt by their not paying for your work.  It's so easy for most people to only see the product, and it's amazing how many people don't even think that there even was a programmer/designer/artist/musician, let alone the sacrifices they may have made to release without outside funding.

[adamrobo]

Does anyone know a way to implement copy protection that will deter honest people from copying the game to friends, but won't be a pain when they want to reinstall it themselves?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

CD/DVD-checks work well for that. They can be cracked, but they deter copying to friends, and deter "casual piracy" a bit, and aren't that bothersome except for multi-CD games.

[adamrobo]

Thanks for the reply, rinkuhero.

I should have specified, however, that I meant for downloadable games.

[mildmojo]

CD/DVD-checks work well for that. They can be cracked, but they deter copying to friends, and deter "casual piracy" a bit, and aren't that bothersome except for multi-CD games.

CD/DVD checks are a reason to download a cracked version of the game, even if you bought it legally.  They are that inconvenient.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I've never found them inconvenient, except for multi-cd games as said. What is the inconvenience? Do you like to play music from your CD drive at the same time? I think that might be the only reason it'd inconvenience me.

As for downloadable games, if a game is just downloadable, protection from piracy is much more difficult. The two major ways are:

- registration keys, checked on a server (can be cracked, but it'll at least force them to go through that trouble). You don't have to limit installation number, Aquaria doesn't (to my knowledge), but it does use registration keys.

- make the game require online play on a server, i.e. design the game around being an online game. this doesn't have to mean mmo, it could just mean online vs or cooperative games being a strong component of it, as in starcraft or diablo 2.

[mildmojo]

I've never found them inconvenient, except for multi-cd games as said. What is the inconvenience? Do you like to play music from your CD drive at the same time? I think that might be the only reason it'd inconvenience me.

It's inconvenient because it means that every time I want to play the game, I have to find the CD and put it in.

This doesn't sound like much of an inconvenience, but my point is that I don't use that drive solely to play that one game.  I also burn CDs, watch DVDs, install other games, play other games with CD/DVD presence requirements, and rip audio CDs. 

If I don't play the game for a month, now I have to hunt around for the disc.  If I scratch or break or melt or lose the disc, it disables the installed copy of the game and any backups I've made.

Fortunately, as long as the disc isn't equipped with one of the more tenacious damaged-disc forms of duplication protection, I can rip the original CD to an ISO and (if I used Windows) mount it with Daemon Tools or Alcohol so I never have to look for the disc again.  Of course, now I'm trading hundreds of megabytes of hard drive storage for that convenience...

These are the reasons that I, as a customer, search for no-CD cracks.  I'm not a commercial game developer.  You may decide, as a developer, that it's a worthwhile tradeoff.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

For me, I think the time spend hunting down a no-CD crack, installing it, making sure it works etc, with the danger of possible viruses, far exceeds the time spent switching a CD in and out a few times. It also helps if you're organized, you don't have to hunt around for the disk if you keep all your games in one place and don't have a messy room or leave them in random spots.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Also, most of the time a no-CD crack involves storing massive amounts of data on your hard drive, especially if it's a DVD game. A lot of people don't have huge hard drives and prefer to keep that stuff on the CD or DVD. I don't have much room to spare so I don't use no-CD options even when the developer has it as an option, with the exception of Starcraft, which I play often enough and which is only about 200mb to keep on the hard drive, and Blizzard supports it anyway; a recent official patch allows you to use it without the CD. But for most games, I'd gladly trade a minute in switching the CD for a few extra free GB of space.

[mildmojo]

It also helps if you're organized, you don't have to hunt around for the disk if you keep all your games in one place and don't have a messy room or leave them in random spots.

You've seen the personal workspace thread, right? 

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Yeah, and I posted in it a while ago -- not sure if I saw yours there though.

[mildmojo]

Yeah, and I posted in it a while ago -- not sure if I saw yours there though.

Mine's not there, I mentioned it as an example of other workspace photos.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Oh, I've seen a lot of them, and there is some clutter but I don't see tons of CDs laying around. Certainly I've never heard of anyone losing a game's CD permanently, they're rather large and kind of hard to lose. And most people that I know keep them all in one spot.

[Neo1493]

earthbound is supposedly unpiratable it had random in game checks that would destroy game play for pirated versions of the game. If one could figure out how this was accomplished you would at the very lest have a game that would have to pretty much be completely reprogrammed. And also I heard that either the xbox360 or the ps3 would have some sort of protection that would fix a game to only run on that console.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Earthbound is pirated all the time, though. You can download a ROM of it from billions of internet sites and play it on an emulator.