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Macrovision Adopts Fade Anti-Game Piracy Technology

Posted by simoniker on from the my-CD-has-disappeared dept.

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."

4 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. So what happens... by DJayC · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Great... but what happens when my legit CD gets scratched and the pattern mentioned in the article is altered, or no longer recognizable? This seems like a really great attempt, but I think this is going to start causing problems with people who own the legit CD. Also, I would assume the check happens at startup, so I think something similar to a no-CD patch may still be a workaround, so maybe they are playing this up a little too much. I'm interested to see how this holds up.

  2. So basically.. by OutRigged · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If one of my CD's becomes damaged, the game will start to screw up. If I try using a backup of said game CD to prevent this, the game still becomes screwed up.

    Of course they're going to replace damaged CD's for free right?

    --
    RaGe
    We're all just noise on the wires..
  3. Re:Pointless attempts? by NanoGator · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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.

    --
    "Derp de derp."
  4. Read the article again... by DoctorRad · · Score: 4, Insightful
    New scratches won't affect gameplay. The point is that the 'fake scratch data' won't be copied verbatim by disc copying software[1], so the code knows the disc is a copy.

    Read errors caused by new scratches on an original disc will just get corrected as per normal. The 'fake' scratches will still be there, so the game will play fine.

    Matt...

    [1] Yet...
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