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The Problems With Game Copy Protection
Next Generation has a piece looking at the sometimes overly enthusiastic copy protection schemes used in PC games. From the article: "In the late '80s and early '90s, the games industry could do little more than ask nicely that you not pirate their wares. These days, however, copy-protection software is ubiquitous, and any PC game bought at retail is going to have it embedded on the game disc(s) in one form or another. I'm okay with that in theory, but some of these anti-piracy software programs are so potent that they cause issues for legitimate game buyers. One of the leading brands, StarForce, is notorious for not only making it difficult for a small percentage of legitimate users to load up StarForce-protected games, but also for leaving potentially problem-causing StarForce software behind on your PC, even after you've deleted the game it was protecting."
There to easy to crack and anyone determined can find a way around it....
The best defense against this sort of this is the operating system. The ideal mechanism for software management is for the OS to only permit software to be installed in a specific directory tree, one per application, instead of allowing software to sprinkle DLLs all over the place. Installation should be a recorded transaction which can be replayed in reverse by the OS to verify that software has truly been removed. This, along with really good privilege separation, will ensure that rogue applications cannot evade detection and removal.
Too bad Linux doesn't do any of this...
- I wanted to call myself Anonymous Coward, but that name was already taken by somebody
Step 1: Buy game
Step 2: Install game
Step 3: Download NoCD crack from MegaGames, install crack, copy ISO to hard drive, run Alcohol %120, run program to hide Alcohol %120, yadda yadda yadda...
Step 4: Play game
Step 5: Realize that you probably spent more time protecting your computer from DRM perversion than actually playing the game
and the only people not affected by these copy protection issues.
The pirates.
Oh the irony, best get your eye patch on and set sale to bittorrent and usenet!
Did you return all the stolen software to the respective stores where you stole them from? If so, did any of them prosecute you for shoplifting?
Most people don't take kindly to thieves. The computing world is no different.
My brother and I both bought copies of Galactic Civilizations 2 - one of the primary reasons I decided to buy it was because there was no copy protection. It's a good game, although I personally still prefer Ascendancy. Definitely worth the $40, but it's also nice to know that I don't have to worry about where the CD is.
Most of my other PC games I play are hacked versions (even though I own a legal copy) because I hate having to deal with copy protection. I hate having to swap disks on my PC, and I hate having to wait the extra pointless time for whatever copy protection they use to "validate" my game CD. I've got 2GB of hard drive space used by the game, I shouldn't need to deal with the CD.
So instead I use the warezed versions of the games I actually purchased...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Please, don't play victim here. You're conviction screams the fact that you're the average Joe and this is what happens to Joe. It's just the way the world works: Joe gets a big stick in his behind with the Law as lubricant.
Copy protection schemes do little to nothing to stop real piracy. At best, they slow down some of the Average Joes who don't have the savvy to circumvent it themselves. Instead, they slow down all the legitimate purchasers
As a matter of policy, I eschew copy protection schemes on all software I write with plans to distribute to the general public. I don't see the point in punishing people who paid for my work just so I can toss a spitwad into the hurricane of software piracy. Instead, I use a registration-for-bonuses policy. Legitimate customers get support, discounts on future purchases, and various other individual perks.
Sometimes, the carrot DOES work better than the stick.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
That most games are *easier* to pirate than buy legit. The *valid* reasons are actually pretty extensive. I've played demos. Liked them. Then I bought them only to find that it doesn't work on my computer, and there is no patch. (Gawd-dammit EA! I hate you fuckers!) To make matters worse, I can't return it (Even WAL-MART fears I might be a pirate, aaargh!) An AMD XP 2500+ with 512MB and an ATI 9600XT isn't a flame thrower, but it should run everything to some degree.
...No wonder consoles are "winning."
Also, I have kids. Young kids. And any gamer-parent knows that the first rule is to hide your CDs. I keep my originals SAFE. I MUST copy them onto the harddrive and use an image, or copy the disc. One minute alone with my computer is all it takes...
Requiring the CD also introduces unnecessary wear. DVDs are exponentially more vulnerable. I bought MGS2:Substance on DVD for PC, and the installer won't run due to a CRC error, le cry! I should be able to send my CD back for another - I can't exchange w/o the packaging - 3 years later.
To copy the original that I got from a store, I need a daemon tools and alcohol, so protections that require I not own those programs piss me off - at least put it on the damn box - It's my money and I deserve to know.
*or*
I could fire up bittorrent, download, install/patch, visit gamecopyworld, and start playing without having to go to the store, get bilked, figure out how to *keep* my game, and *then* play crappy FPS XXI (barring hardware issues and lack of patches.)
Shit, I've had freaking pop-cap games not work! Diner-Dash, crashes randomly - even after reinstalling windows. (Only thing left is to install new/more memory, and maybe a mobo replacement...) "Tech Support" doesn't exist, I get the middle finger for my $50.
Why can't all fpga/microcontroller manufacturers just release free optimizing compilers???
...if we could rent PC games. (And I'm not talking about services like Gametap that only offers really old games that came out years ago.)
I'd rather pay $15/mo to a Netflix style service and get PC Game DVDs and CDs delivered to me than go to my local retail store and spend $60 (or go online and spend $40 + shipping) on something that MIGHT be fun and may provide me with a few hours of entertainment depending on how quickly I finish the game. If I rent the game and really like it so much that I'll want to spend days playing it and playing it over again whenever I want, I'll buy it so I can do just that!
Oh, but people would just rip PC games from the CDs, crack the protection, and keep them forever? Before there was affordable broadband Internet, I would agree, but you can do that today by downloading the game from public torrents and get it a lot faster than waiting for the CDs to arrive in the mail and without paying a monthly fee to some rental company. You can do that with PS and X-Box games with a modded machine or with DVD movies, but that hasn't stopped companies from offering PS/X-Box games and movies for rent.
Am I missing something? I don't understand why there is no place to rent PC games these days.
They could protect them if they wanted to.
:(
My 1st retail game (for XT! in hercules mono graphics!) had a required play disk AND an ID the photo in the manual.
All this activation stuff sucks tho, what if you want to show your kids/grandkids what you used to play 20 years from now? Is that online activation still gonna work
Not that putting in the 5-1/4" key disk is much better but it DOES work.
"I used to steal software left and right (please feel free to tell me how it isn't theft so I can summarily ignore you)."
It's a violation of the contract artists made with society.
"Yet I am annoyed by all the inconveniences that I have to put up with in the name of protecting someone's profits. "
I find that not buying or illegally copying quickly takes care of that problem. Shame none of the "victums" have the backbone to give it a try.
"I am tired of being assumed guilty."
Will the "guilty" person please stand up. Now you see the problem.
"Yet, I see nothing improving. I fear than in 20 years we will look back at this era and view it as a "golden age of computing". Things will be locked down so tight, and all software will be pay-as-you-go."
Here's the lesson that humanity has yet to learn. Bad people have a negative effect on a society. Now will society continue to make excuses for these bad people, or will it apply social pressure against those who seemingly can't live in a structured environment aka society.
Here's my solution,
They should give *all* the games away for free and charge $5/month to access their gaming servers. If the game is good and I play it for 2 years, they get $120 of my money for their game, more than double the $40 they would have got. If the game sucks, i'm out $5, big deal.
Since they will no longer charge for the games, they will get distributed by p2p costing the manufacturer $0 in distribution. Money they can put back into their online servers.
They could charge $50/month for people/clans to be in control of their servers and reduce the price of them hosting the games. Give the people/clans paying for the servers a cut of the action. If they run a clean server and keep it full of paying customers then they might not only end up not paying their monthly server fee but making a profit. Paid to play and admin a server. This would create great admins who would make sure customers are paying and keep out the riff-raff and team killers.
This would of course create server admins who keep trying to out do each other by creating new and better mods and maps so they can get more people to their servers. The more people that play on their servers, the more money they make. Once admins start making serious money by running a good server you'll see a flux of basement dwellers creating incredible gaming experiences and getting rich at the same time.
On top of everything else, it would be much easier for the companies to find people running illegal servers than to track illegal copying. Much easier since they would have an army of server admins who would be more than happy to hunt down illegal servers that are taking away from their potential profit.
Or, the companies could keep cripling their games and pissing off their paying customers.
Likewise, MS-DOS worked the same way. deltree c:\gamedir would pretty much eradicate any the game from your system.
I've had runins with this sort of thing myself. Such as a game that used SafeDisc or some other hard to copy method where you need a 3.5 sheep burner or whatever to have even a chance of duplicating. My disc got scratched up, and I could no longer play the game I'd legally spent far far too much money on. The thing is, very very few stores will allow you to returned an open box of software, so the companies get away with this. It's only when users can return an item that the message gets back to the manufacturers that a particular method is unacceptable. The manufacturers are vaguely aware that people may be stealing their software, but, for the most part, they just pay the mafia -- excuse me, the ESA (aka ISDA, too many people were beginning to realize what they were, so they changed it again) -- and they handle all of it for the company, including protecting those games they made ten years ago and no longer produce in any way whatsoever or even still employ the people who made them or even actually still have the original copies of the data. In other words, your average company just is scared they'll loose money, so jump at the chance for something like StarForce if they can afford it. As far as they are concerned, what few sales are lost are just because the game wasn't as popular as they'd thought. Since you can't take the game back, most people just give up and go the illegal route, using patches and cracks and such to get the game they bought to actually work. They spent $40+ on the peice of junk, the least it can do is run, right? I think right now, more than anything else, the issue is lack of communication.
The thing that probably ticks me off the most of all though is the fact that you may not legally backup your game. Oh sure, the law says you can make a backup, but, they managed to get a law passed adding a loophole that ensures you may no longer make a backup. You are not allowed to circumvent any copy protection (however minor) to make a backup as I understand it (please correct me if I'm wrong, it really worries me that they can actually get away with this, but, as nearly as I can tell, they somehow did with the DMCA.) If there's a game out there without even the cheapest most basic copy protection in it, it's because it's an illegally released internal beta or an opensource/otherwise free game. (Ok, I exagerate, I'm sure there's some exception somewhere, I just haven't seen it in a long time.) So, we may no longer make backups even though the law says we're supposed to have a right to, and my discs have a habit of getting scratched somehow even though I keep them in the cases and take good care of them, holding by the edges, not leaving them lying around, etc (I swear there's some kind of mini gremlin that gets in there and runs it's claws across my CDs or something.) It just bugs me so much knowing that I've bought the right to play the game for as long as I darned well please, but, they lied to me because most of us mere humans can't make a disc last as long as some games are actually worth keeping for, so they actually just sell us the right to use them for a while while falsely advertising that we can use them as long as we like. If the disc breaks well, off to the store with you to increase their revenues a bit further if you want to keep playing. BTW, has anyone else noticed that lately discs seem to be a little cheaper and softer, or is it just my imagination?
Anyway, I once tried a friend's copy of X3. Or I tried to try it. We couldn't get it working with his legitimate IDE drive (and if you're a SCSI user, well, the game no longer costs $50, it actually costs $70 because you are required to buy an IDE drive to legally play X3 from what I've read since StarForce is poorly designed enough to assume there's no such thing as a SCSI cd-rom.) After what I swear felt like an hour of it trying to verify, it failed. Needless to say, he wasn't particularly happy considering that he bought it soon af
Take them to the small claims court.
"the industry should just realize that $50/game in the US probably wouldn't be as profitable as $19.00 and minimal CD protection."
yes... and no.
I sell my games for $22 and no copy protection. And no surpise, some assholes bung them on p2p. Thanks guys, you are the people encouraging me to use online activation and authentication.
At the end of the day publishers and developers dont want to waste any time or money on DRM, but the ease with which pirates allow people to get free copies forces their hand. Next time some 'l33t sc1pt k1ddie' tells you where to get the latest hit games for free, remind him that its attitudes like that that cause the need for DRM in the first place.
The guys that add the DRM support to games hate DRM as much as you do, games coders are hardcore geeks, but they also know that crap feeling in your gut when you see the 4 year game you worked on on bit-torrent, and your employer lays of 100 staff.
Some DRM practices (starforce etc) are unforgiveable, ditto sonys tricks, but dont pretend that "if they stopped DRM piracy would end" because thats BS.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I started using computers with a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 (and later upgraded to a CoCo 3), around 1984. About a year later I got my first floppy drive (!) - yeah, I was stuck on tape until then, sue me! Anyhow, one of the first games I begged my parents for was a game by a Canadian company called "Diecom Software". The game was "Gates of Delerium". Basically, it was an Ultima clone for the Color Computer.
When it finally arrived in the mail (there was some kind of Canadian postal strike that happenned at the time, and a lot of mail got held up for a couple of months at the border or something), I read the manual, and saw, to my dismay, that there was a form of copy protection on one of the floppies. Basically, you could make a backup of the game floppy (the player data floppy was not protected), but if you wanted to restore the floppy for whatever reason, you had to restore the backup to the original game floppy. If the game floppy became damaged, you would need to send off to Diecom to receive a "new" blank floppy with the protection on it for it to work.
Oh well - I made my backups, played the game, enjoyed it - but never finished it. Fast forward about 15 years...
I get my old computer and all my old floppies from my parents, and I decide that I want to take all of that old software, and move it onto an emulation system. I build a PC running DOS and a few CoCo emulators (mainly David Keil's emus), with a 5 1/4 floppy drive I pick off of Ebay. I find out I need a new drive for the CoCo (my original died for some reason), so on Ebay I find another, get it installed, etc. I decided to try out some of my original floppies. Most of them work. I begin the process of transferring stuff (most of it my old BASIC code and stuff I typed in from old Rainbow and Hot CoCo magazines), and trying it out on the emulator. The majority of it works great. Some of it fails, the floppy is bad. Then, I get to Gates of Delerium.
I tried to run it on my CoCo 3, and it fails to work. I try it on my CoCo 2 - still fails. It gets part way (text title screen loads), then it just hangs. Nothing I do makes it work, I am at a loss. I put it on the "back burner", and continue with the conversion. I get it done, and I would say 95% or so of my data transfers fine - which isn't bad considering the age of the whole system and floppies. But Gates of Delerium - what to do there?
I decided I would try to contact the owner of Diecom software. Through a bit of googling, some link tracking, and whatnot - I eventually get in contact with one of the founders (Dave Dies, incidentally, and he was working as a programmer of cell phone games). I talked to him about Gates of Delerium, mentioned my problem, but he wasn't able to help me - most of the stuff from the Diecom days was gone, the rest was in some storage unit or warehouse that he didn't have the time to search through. I asked him if there would be a problem with me attempting to create a clone of the game from my memory - he said he didn't think there would be an issue, given the amount of time that had passed, etc. I also asked him about the status of the copyright on all of the Diecom software (there were some nice CoCo 3 pieces) - this he wasn't sure on at the time, and was hesitant to say anything, especially when I asked him about abandonware.
So - there I was - no closer to having my copy of the software, which I had the manual, original floppies, etc - ie, I owned a real license, not pirated - but the floppy was dead, and I couldn't get it to run - I had no recourse. What to do?
Some more time passes, and I eventually join the CoCo Mailing List, and I recount my woes there. One person responds to me saying he had a copy of the game as well. To make a long story short, me and two other guys eventually, through a bit of coding, some very deft hardware usage by one dude (without which we never would have gotten anywhere), who had a KopyKat (or
Reason is the Path to God - Anon