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Inside The Game Copy Protection Racket
simoniker writes "German game company and Accordion Hero creator Schadenfreude Interactive have been carefully considering what copy protection to use for their next game, and have documented their process in detail in a new Gamasutra article. After rejecting scratch and sniff cards, dongles, and musclebound Russian copy protection outfit NovaHammer ('You would not want any of your computer games to get hurt, would you?'), they come to the (fictional but agreeable!) conclusion: 'We decided against using any sort of copy protection on our games. After all, you shouldn't feel you are being forced to buy our games. You should want to. And if you do not want to, that is really our failure — not yours.'"
I remember losing my Prince of Persia manual and having to guess the first letter of the last word on page 30. That was annoying enough. But it's perhaps frightening commentary on the current state of DRM that I can't tell if the scratch and sniff card is or ever was real. Honestly. Was it? I can actually see a proprietary happy company like Sony coming up with something like that...
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
Are people still copy protecting games? Why? Has a single game been rendered uncopyable because of some dodgy disk format or some stupid `squint at page 23, col 2, line 4` nonsense? Time to give it up, guys. If unprotected media works for music and films, it's good for games too.
While the gamer in me rejoices when reading this, the practicality of things are such that copy protection is needed. I agree all attempts to thwart the pirating of games never succeed 100%. But what about the vast majority of people that don't know the intricacies of bitsettings and book types and after toasting a few CDs they give up. Sure, they can get a torrent of the packaged release that circumvents these measures.
/some/ piracy will result in more money in their pockets.
But in the end stopping
How many more roubles would they get if just 1% of people intending to pirate the game bought it instead?
----
This writing may not necessarily reflect my thoughts and beliefs -- but it probably does.
a joke going right over your head. How can you take seriously an article supposedly on copy protection when it's about the designer of mockeries of real games? The site is a (good) joke, but no comments should be posted with serious thoughts on the ins and outs of copy protection. Enjoy the funny and propose something more interesting than the scratch-n-sniff dongle. The Fast and the Furriest: Drunken Swerve with a breathalysing dongle could prevent copying and unlock new swerve powers and furries for each increase of 0.01% alcohol by volume. Drink up!
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
Games companies need to stop being so reasonable, I'm going to go broke!
All my games have been cracked before I even download them.
Heh. Silly me. I was really expecting an account of the state-of-the-art of copyright protection schemes. Y'know, Valve's details, current other mechanisms, etc.
TFA instead gives a belly-laugh of some strange russian software copyright company. Pardon the ignorance here.
I guess if I wanted to get a real summary, we go yet again to the Grouptionary.
To make sure you'll sell your game, just make sure that the official game packaging is so INCREDIBLE AMAZING AND COOL that the gamer will miss having the experience of owning it. Include a fantastic shining printed manual in full color with high-quality paper (a detailed manual, by the way), a CD whose cover has bright 3D effects, a futuristic or medievalistic box, one or more game character miniatures, coupons with codes allowing a gamer to obtain things he would love (such as game magazine subscriptions, calendars, official strategy guide etc.) at noticeable discounts as well as coupons to access ultra cool sections of the official website, such as, let's say, one where the buyer would be able to register his name and have the chance to win a trip to know the game developers with everything paid, and so on and so forth.
In short, add value to your official package by offering things a pirate would never be able to provide and people will simply prefer buying from you.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
"Are people still copy protecting games?"
Rhetorical question?
"Why?"
Start creating desirable content and find out.
"Has a single game been rendered uncopyable because of some dodgy disk format or some stupid `squint at page 23, col 2, line 4` nonsense?"
Has a single crime ever been render impotent because of police?
"Time to give it up, guys."
Funny how the only one's telling other to "give it up" themselves have never created anything the buying public wanted.
"If unprotected media works for music and films, it's good for games too."
CSS is "unprotected"?
Funniest damn article I've read in a long time - seriously get to page 3 it gets good.
The guy has a great point - I've bought a lot of games in recent times, sometimes long time after they were released so that the price goes down (Valve episode 1 price down you bastards - its been out long enough) and they are games I'm rather devoted to. Half-life anything, Jedi Knight and Dark Forces, Quake, C&C, AoE, Duke, Legacy of Kain, Mechwarriors, Wing Commander anything (I want more of the last three and I still hold out hope for DNF!)... its a long list. I'll probably cae on Galactic Civilizations 2 in a bit because I've been told its the games Masters 3 ought to have been.
There are games I've pirated and deleted, the latest being Prey. Meh. Make your game worthwhile to me and I will buy a copy. I remember when I was in the midst of LoK each game cost more than the last and I still bought them - fricking Defiance was 50 bucks when it came out. It was worth it and I wanted it. The prices have gone up a fair bit so I'm not surprised that piracy has. Especially when a large chunk of your target audience is under 25s and a lot of that is still in school and college earning 6.25 an hour.
The cd protection is just annoying - fricking cd-keys are such a pain to keep and I hate that I cant legally back up so many of my cds now. I tried reinstalling Diablo last year and was heart broken when the disc had a CRC error all of sudden. I bought the damn game and now I can't play it because some money grubbing bastards at Blizzard were more bothered about their profits than my fair use. Bought it used again but I really ought not to have had to. If they have to have copy protection it'd be nice if game companies just made their games FOSS after a few years because they aren't going to sell it anymore really. Abandonware is a great idea guys!
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
I remember getting some games from Loki Software, and they were not copy protected. I dutifully purchased
my copies and requested others to purchase also, rather than just burn copies for them (though I made
backup copies for myself.) But Loki went out of business. I was under the impression that it was
because too many linux users were pirating their games, but maybe it was just that the linux market
was too small.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
"In short, add value to your official package by offering things a pirate would never be able to provide and people will simply prefer buying from you."
Adding value? Is that what Wal-mart does by offering what the consumer demands? The consumer's cheap, and a lot of gamers don't have any money left after spending boatloads on the latest geewhiz hardware. You have to pirate just to have something to play, and you want to increase the cost in the hopes that the cheap will suddenly see the error of their ways, and start buying it?*
*The irony of your suggestion in the face of slashdotters complaining about the cost of content (movies, music, games, books, you name it slashdot has complained about the cost of it before) is boundless.
The practicality of things is that most copy protection schemes inconvenience legitimate users.
I hate having to find/switch CDs. I really hate programs which prevent me from even running off of virtual drives so I can image the CDs rather than having to listen to my buzzing CD drive all the time, and I can't stand programs that will not let me legitimately run the game with a legitimate CD in the drive if I have virtual drive software installed on my machine.
And when I find a form of copy-protection annoying enough, I no longer purchase games which use that method, because it's less effort to warez it than it is to fiddle around with my system to get the copy-protection working.
So, game publishers: Get with the program. If you release good games which don't inconvenience the user, I'm a potential buyer. Otherwise, the best you can hope for is that I'll check it out with warez and buy the sequel if you've learned your lesson.
Today's object example:
Battlefield 2: Copy-protected to some degree, but mainly relying on individual CDkeys to encourage players to purchase for online play, doesn't hassle me about running it off an image, and since I've got my CD key stored securely and everyone I know has the game, I don't have to worry about losing my disks. Excellent game. Total sales to me: $50 + $30 expansion pack.
Silent Hunter III: Copy-protected with StarForce, known for being nasty and occasionally *damaging DVD drives*. Since they still haven't released an official no-starforce patch for SH3, the only way of getting rid of the Starforce crap is warezing it, so total sales to me = $0. Great game though,and SH4 won't be using StarForce so I'll definitely pick that up when it comes out.
Galactic Civilizations II: No copy-protection, legitimate purchase provides the option of free access through an online account for new patches/content, no hassle, ongoing support. Total sales to me = $50.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
Instead of this, we get a single CD in a paper sleeve, a 1 page manual with the CD-Key that is 50 character long and a boring-looking box....
:P
All the money for the good stuff went to pay the guys who made the Copy Protection
I hate Paper Sleeves... they are worthless, they don't fit in CD racks and are not protecting your CDs at all...
Manuals should give all the information that you need, so that you can read while installing the game, not in a ReadMe file...
The CD-Key is mostly bull ****, we all know that you can find them in 30 secs with a little bit of knowledge... making us copy those things are just a pain in the ***...
Copy protections are bad simply because the ones who get cracked illegal copies get a version of the game that works better than the ones who legally purchased the game, they don't have that "little program that won't harm your computer but somehow makes it slower and your optical drives can't read anything"...
Right now, NWN 1 has piracy protection done right. After patch 1.66, NWN doesn't need the CD. However if you want to play multiplayer online (and possibly automatic update, not sure), you need to have a valid CD key stored on Bioware/Gamespy's servers. Pirated CD key? It gets disabled in their database. Keygens? Yes, they fool the client, but because Bioware's servers have a list of genuine keys, it won't get far when going online.
This is enough protection to keep 95% of the people from pirating the game. The last 5% will end up finding a crack from somewhere and bypassing it, even if it entails yanking hardware cables to disable physical drives.
Thumbs up, Bioware.
"There are games I've pirated and deleted, the latest being Prey. Meh. Make your game worthwhile to me and I will buy a copy."
http://www.3drealms.com/prey/download.html
Sheesh! There's absolute NO WAY a publisher can please a pirate. The above is a FREE demo, so people can try-before-they-buy, AND THEY STILL PIRATE. Then to add salt to the wound, they complain. Maybe all the content creaters SHOULD go out of business, just to shut all the complainers up* (my money's on some BITCHIN about that too)
*And for those who do play by the rules, it'll be a perfect lesson were the fault truely lies (blame the car alarm, not the thief)
"The prices have gone up a fair bit so I'm not surprised that piracy has. Especially when a large chunk of your target audience is under 25s and a lot of that is still in school and college earning 6.25 an hour."
And they're running Prey on their 8088's with VGA monitors, and downloading over two tin cans and some string. Yeah! I can see why they're too poor to afford games.
"If they have to have copy protection it'd be nice if game companies just made their games FOSS after a few years because they aren't going to sell it anymore really"
Psst! Nostalgia! Nostalgia! Nostalgia!
"The cd protection is just annoying - fricking cd-keys are such a pain to keep"
I use a label-maker and put it on the CD itself.
"...and I hate that I cant legally back up so many of my cds now."
You might want to read the EULA's sometime. Some companies DO allow a one copy backup.
"Abandonware is a great idea guys!"
I'm waiting for the copyright to expire on some GPL code.
Then, there are the apps that start out with the carrot (software authorization), then suddenly give you the stick (telling you "We're not going to give you a software key. If you want to replace your computer, you have to go out and buy a dongle to reauthorize this.")
I'm going to leave it to others to dissect your larger point(s) and to weigh validity of your perspective (say, as to whether or not semi-serious copy protection really is treating buyers like "criminals" or not).
I am, though, going to go a bit off-topic and just comment on your use of "carrots" and "sticks" as if those were separate things. I know the meme gets used a lot that way, but it's simply incorrect. The concept goes like this: you've got a horse tied up to a wagon, and you're having trouble getting it to move ahead. You know your horse loves carrots, since most of them do. So, you use a long stick and some string to suspend a carrot out in front of the horse - essentially as a lure. The stick is mounted in the horse's harness, so when the horse moves forward to try to reach the carrot, so does the stick (and thus, so does the carrot). The carrot remains just out of reach, but is right there as an incentive for the horse to move ahead.
Thus, you've got "carrots and sticks" not as separate things (one good, one bad), and not as some bait-and-switch or prize and punishment... rather, the carrot and the stick, used together, form a system that's used to provide incentive or a focus for action.
For some reason, in the past couple of years (by my observation), people have started referring to the carrot as some sort of reward, and the stick as some sort of opposite. That's not how the concept goes, and the fact that people don't get it is just more evidence that a lot of the source material for our conversational idioms is so removed from daily experience that people simply stop bothering to think about what they're actually saying. It's sort of like "could care less" when you really mean "couldn't care less" (the opposite!) - it's just uttered without any real thought given to it.
But there's plenty where the anachronistic analogy lapses come from... like, "flash in the pan." People say it, and have no idea why they say it (two contenders: someone panning for gold in a creek may see a flash of metallic reflection in their pan, and immediately assume they've hit it big, only to discover that their treasure was a very fleeting thing (and thus not the hoped for riches, but only a flash in the pan)... or, the "pan" is the external tray on a flint-lock gun that is hit with sparks when a pull of the trigger releases the lock. The fine powder in the pan "flashes," creating noise and smoke... but if its ignition doesn't actually fire off the main charge in the barrel of the gun, you get no shot, and have only had a flash in the pan.
But you say it today, and kids will probably think it has something to do with cooking or interactive animation running on their web browser.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
...Spear of Destiny? Anyone remember that in Spear of Destiny?
id, who apparently was forced into copy protection by their retail publisher FormGen to put in copy protection, had some fun by putting in a bunch of back doors into the game.
*gets indicted under 17 USC 1205 for saying this*
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Damn, I never would've believed this could be used in reference to anything!
don't copy because they are cheap bastards, but because they don't have any money. I have at least half a dozen chronically unemployed friends who all use old laid-off scrapheap computers of mine. They can't come up with $50 to pay their bills, so if they copy some lame game to play on their AthlonXP 1800+ w/ GeForce2, it's not like some game producer was losing a sale.
In a previous job, I took kitchen designs that were hand-drawn, and entered them into planning software to produce 3D graphics of how the kitchen would look. The program would regularly throw a hissy, claim the dongle had been removed, and refuse to let me save my work. We even had a couple of replacement dongles as they on occasion committed honourable suicide and refused to ever authenticate again.
The authors of this fine piece of treat-us-like-criminals had various other ways of extracting money from their valuable customers - training days, setup so the program used your ranges rather than generic ones, charging questionable prices for additional modules of trivial functionality, etc.
Anyway, today's CAPATCHA is "police", so that's a nice note to end on.
who said Germans have no sense of humour ;-)
"Don't get me started on the more expensive programs out there. The whole authorization schemes are so ornery / buggy / crash prone that the illegal versions are simply far superior."
Hmmm. Funny how you all have the talent to crack a binary and get it to work properly, but none have the talent to write an open source driver for a Nvidia card. At least society has it's priorities in order. e.g. free (beer) entertainment vs free (speech) software.
By far the most annoying thing I've found about driver-based copy protection is that not one of them works on windows 64-bit. There are many games that I -have- to crack because otherwise they won't run on my pc at all. A friend of mine mentioned that he has a game that is like this (can't remember the name), but the company making the copy-protection HAS released a 64-bit version that works with 32-bit games, but atari (I think) won't release a patch for the game that includes it, forcing him to crack it anyway.
Just don't copy-protect games, ok? Microsoft don't stop people copying their disks, in fact the tools for ripping the image to iso, integrating a new service pack and burning it back to disk still bootable are freely available (Microsoft even make disk images downloadable, especially for the MSDNAA).
Instead make the game either need activating online or only restrict the online play to stop people who are using the same serial key. Don't do anything aggressive either, requiring a reinstall which nukes saves to change to a legally bought key will not encourage people to buy your game.
All in all, the best games for working on 64 bit edition (imo) are UT2004 (doesn't require the cd after a particular patch and there's a 64-bit version now too), any steam game (hl2 or cs:s etc) again, don't need a cd to play and are 64-bit, any number of mmo games (none that I know of need a cd to play, most don't even need a cd to install).
Or, I have a suggestion if you really want copy protection: put it in the installer on the cd. Make the installer validate your key and check the authenticity of the disk, then let the installed game run without it. Combine with the "can't play multiplayer with the same key" protection and you'll have a relatively effective protection system that fewer people will complain about. Sure, people will crack the installer eventually, but it will take them longer to crack than the game exe (at least I think so, you'd have to ask a cracker really).
you'd think that the monthly subscription fee would be plenty good enough. Take EQ for example, it came with a month's play included. That seems reasonable to me, although 2 months would be better. After that, you get the monthly fee.
You'd think the companies would prefer more monthly subscriptions over the minimal profit of selling a boxed copy.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I'll put it out there as a prediction that the greatest barrier to piracy in the next few years, will not be any form of DRM, but will instead be the danger of infecting malware into your system with pirated copies of the software. Anti-virus vendors for years has been stringing the public along with subscriptions and downloadable signatures, that today the top anti-virus software isn't able to detect 5% of custom coded trojans. They've completely slacked in developing true heuristic scanning and detection, and a certified system image.
I remember way back in the mid-90s, when I used to code virus, that anti-virus vendors were starting to go beyond checking executables for virus signatures, and checking executables to match a known good hash value.
I quit programming entirely years ago, but if these vendors would simply focus their code on user-intervention when applications try to perform different categories of tasks common to virus, trojans, droppers, bots, and rootkits and forcing the user to certify their executables and system files and detect changes and attempts to modify binary files they could go alot farther than simply creating signatures for each malware they detect in the wild.
It's amazing that with even all the latest anti-virus software and sindows security policies in effect at an internet cafe, a quick trip to sysinternals and a glance at some diagnostic tools for open sockets and applications running under a windows process name in the wrong directory can identify malware long undetected.
Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do. - Benjamin Franklin
"No other industry gets away with selling broken products, so why the fuck should the software industry? "
That's why F/OSS gives it's "products" away.
"They're screwing the genuine consumer and, in some cases, causing damage to these peoples systems."
So explain this to me. Why is slashdot so pro-pirate then? Are you all pro-thief, or pro-burglar, or pro-extortionist? You all bitch when technology is used by content creators to defend themselves against a legitimate threat, but then cheer on those who would abuse technology (But he's only a kid! Whoo hoo! You rock, Jon!) What do you all get out of it? I have ZERO sympathy for all those "genuine consumers" complaining about being in the middle, for several reasons. One, you refuse to use legitimate means to change the system (and when this is pointed out to you. You come up with "I'm spineless"* excuses for why you can't even stop buying, let alone keeping your grubby mitts off the content). Two you absolutely refuse to use peer pressure to encourage others to not only stop purchasing, but give tact approval to the illegal infringing of others.(1)
"They're just as immoral as the pirates."
But God doesn't exist. Remember?
*My favourite. "But it's MY culture they're locking up".
(1) "Everyone does it: crime by the public" ISBN:0-8020-6828-6
Lets get real: given the choice between paying $60 for MechCommander (which came with an excellent bound manual the size of a small Bible) and paying $55 for the bare CD, 95% of the game-playing public would go straight for the CD. The paper box is getting thrown out within 48 hours of opening it. Coupons to buy the strategy guide at a discount could only possibly motivate a pirate if they were going to pirate the game but purchase the strategy guide legitimately, which probably covers a total of 0 people in the entire world.
You can certainly add value with packaging, but you can't justify anything near a game's price without presuming that the game in and of itself has value, which is what this line of reasoning denies.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
..that I tend to purchase games without the copy protection. Why? simple - I don't feel like wasting time downloading them.
Funny enough there's one exception - DRM'd games. The burden of downloading is far less tiresome than the burden of dealing with dodgy and buggy DRM.
Funny how that works.
Same thing with product activation, etc - no pirate with the activation hack is inconvenienced, but every legitimate user is, every time they need to re-activate, etc.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.