Slashdot Mirror
Pirates Vs. Publishers
1up is running a piece looking at the fight between pirates and publishers in the games industry. They use StarForce, and their frustrating copy protection scheme, as a basis for their discussion of both sides of the issue. From the article: "The goal isn't to encourage people to be honest, or to drive innovation in the hacker community, or to be an irritant because you've lost your CD and want to play. The goal of a publisher in picking a copy protection service is to make more money by selling more copies. The logic is that if it's impossible to pirate the game, then people have to buy it if they want it. Why doesn't that work? If your copy protection is StarForce, then it doesn't work because people are boycotting your copy protection. StarForce, which installs a hard-to-remove driver onto your computer, has an unproven but generally accepted track record of causing computers to slow down -- at best. Some reports have complained of permanently damaged physical drives or hard drives."
The typical Slashdot response to one of these articles is that they pirated the game, found they liked it, and then shelled out money for the game. They justify this by being screwed over by some terrible game in the past, having limited gaming funds, or preferring the copy protection free software. That's fine if it gives you a warm, happy feeling, but you are still breaking the law and there are plenty of ways to avoid this. Find a game reviewer that you trust, and select your games based on their opinions. Or if a developer puts out quality games, stick with that developer. But let's be realistic, people are always going to pirate, and they are always going to come up with some dumb justification for it.
The thing is, if no one pirated games, then the overly restrictive copy protection would not exist. Now they add copy protection. Copy protection would not be so horrible if they just did what they were intended to do: make it difficult for others to copy and distribute their games to others. Unfortunately, we have copy protection that infects our system causing it to slow down the game, the system, and sometimes even make parts of it fail to function. All that copy protection does is cause more people to go down the pirate route.
Ok, so this next part is important for the game companies: THERE IS NO COPY PROTECTION, NOR WILL THERE EVER BE, THAT CAN STOP PIRACY. They will always be able to crack it or find a way to get the source. They will then distribute it. I am going to say something that won't be popular to Slashdotters now: copy protection is necessary. Because people will always justify their piracy, they need to make it hard enough so a casual user is unable to take their discs and stick it online. They do not need to license some expensive, over-bearing copy protection that install drivers or root kits. Just something cheap that prevent a casual user from doing it. Why do I suggest this? 1) If you put no protection on it, you are guaranteed to sell less units 2) It's going to be pirated anyways, so spending money on licensing expensive copy protection is pointless 3) A simple scheme will make it hard enough so that Joe User will have to go buy it, but unobtrusive so that it will not turn people off from the game.
But really, not much will change as long as we don't prosecute the pirates. The Internet is still very much the Wild West...anything goes. Until authorities actually go after people pirating software (and I am betting in 10 years, cyber crimes will account for the majority of fines and penalties), people are going to do it. Using what I stated above is the best "in the middle" approach that I can think of.
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I had waited with much anticipation for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. I went out and bought it the day it came out, so you can imagine my surprise when it refused to run! Why? Because I'm on XP x64. The copy protection wanted to install a low level driver and it didn't come with an x64 version, so it wouldn't let me play. So I went through all the fun of returning an opened game. A little over a year later a crack was released for it and I finally got to play the game. Thank you, RELOADED, for letting me play the franchise I love. And shame on Ubisoft, which I held in very high regards before that experience, for tainting their software with such crap.
I tend to immediately rip any software I buy to HDD, and mount it with Daemon Tools when I need it. This created an extra problem for many other games, which will refuse to run if it detects any virtual drives. Thankfully Daemon Tools tends to keep ahead of them.