Macrovision Adopts Fade Anti-Game Piracy Technology

Thanks to the New Scientist for their report that Macrovision are adding Fade anti-copy protection, which "makes unauthorized copies of games slowly degrade", to their SafeDisc copy protection scheme for games. The technology, devised by UK publishers Codemasters, first debuted in Operation Flashpoint for PC back in 2001, and "affects gameplay aspects" in that title if it believes the game has been altered, including "reduced accuracy of some weapons, reduced weapon performance, increased enemy hit endurance and increased player injuries." The piece also claims that Fade works by "...exploiting the systems for error correction that computers use to cope with CD-ROMs or DVDs that have become scratched."

Comments

Re:Pointless attempts?

[NanoGator]

"What's going to stop someone then cracking the main executable to bypass the degradation?"

Time. By the time they get all of it cracked, the game will have been on shelves a while.

Spyro the Dragon had protection sort of like this in the late 90's. If it detected one of the protection schemes was broken, it'd make something in the later level disappear. The cracker had to play through the entire game to check that the crack worked. They kept a fully cracked copy off the streets for roughly a month, after that, it wasn't so important that it be protected anymore.