Game protection against cracks and piracy

[jasonf]

I think that average user knows better than to look for that stuff otherwise they get caught out by the spyware and virus traps designed to catch the gullable. Either that or average user doens't know about such things.

There are some people who won't buy a game if they can get it for free.. but I'm hoping that these are a minority.

I think the comment made by tpascal about the price is a relevant one. I know a load of people who use expensive software which they *aquired* They don't use said software professionally but they have it.. are they breaking the law.. technically yes.. are they hurting the companies bottom line? Probably not.. if there wasn't a cracked version available, they wouldn't use it.. they certainly would never buy it.. however, they are gaining valuable knowledge which they could take to a paid job using the real tools paid for by the company.. so in that way piracy is paving the way for ready trained Developers, 3D artists etc..

I think this is one of the reasons why Borland released Turbo Explorer for free.. to provide programmers with an honest entry into an application which they would otherwise have obtained illegally or by paying a fortune, so they can get Delphi jobs as a ready trained developer. More Delphi coders means more Delphi jobs in the long run, which means more business for Borland.. it's a good long term stratergy.

But the big apps, Delphi, 3D Studio, Maya.. they are all tools.. they have an almost infinite shelf life... and they all need trained users to survive.

A game is different. A game is good for a while, then another one comes along. The old game is dropped and sales end. The game dies. Every pirated copy of the game hurts the developer because you don't play games to make money or get a job.. you play for the act of playing, the experience itself. The developers have a fairly short window to collect as much revenue as they can to recoup the costs of writing the game in the first place.

I think there are different sorts of software piracy.
Pirating apps is like Assault.. It hurts a bit, but you get over it.
Pirating games is like GBH or Manslaughter.. the developers are left bleeding, sometimes they recover, othertimes they die.

[savage]

What do you think about injecting a String resource into the Exe during installation ( like the registered user's Email address or name ) and then adding something to the registry. Then on start-up it compares the internal string to the registry to make sure the Exe is still running on the registered user's machine?

On another point, why do most people ( including developers ) find it acceptable to copy music CDs or DVDs. I would wager that more than 50% of all music on today's iPods has not been legally aquired. I don't own an iPod or walkman, so am taking the high ground on this one .

[cairnswm]

A lot of anti virus programs prevet updating of strings in the EXE. Why not have a related file that is encrypted that stores these things.

In the Tuts section is a tut by me on encrypting data files.