Slashdot Mirror
Garry's Mod Catches Pirates the Fun Way
UgLyPuNk writes "A few hours ago, Garry Newman – the creator of Garry's Mod – asked, quite innocently, whether anyone was unable to shade polygon normals. He received a few comments, mostly jokes, but a quick look at Google suggests that there are indeed a few people who are experiencing problems with their game. You can hear Newman's chuckling from here — not the normal response to a wide-spread bug report, but this is no normal bug. It seems that the developer has deliberately enabled an error in GMod, which will only affect people who have pirated the game."
Back in the 80's, the developers of a submarine game called Silent Service built in a piracy check that would cause the sailor guy's pants to fly up over his head if your game failed the copy protection. They got quite a few phone calls from baffled pirates.
Here in my car
Where the image breaks down
Will you visit me please?
If I open my door
In cars
It takes a couple minutes just to load the page banner, then once it does, it redirects to an advertisement page.
I like to RTFA, but you can be sure that I won't be visiting that site ever again.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Pirating GMod 10 is like visiting five ice cream shops in a row and getting enough "tastes" to fill a quart. Simply not worth the effort, considering that GMod10 is, was, and will remain ONLY. TEN. DOLLARS. If you own any of Valve's excellent recent games, you've fulfilled the only other requirement (a Source engine game). Chances are high that if you're interested in GMod10, you've already got one or more of those.
I can understand pirating a $50 game because you want to stick it to the publisher or you want to try it out before shelling out, but pirating something that costs $10 strikes me as a remarkably pointless gesture.
You should turn signatures off.
There's an incredibly loud auto-playing advert. Thanks for the warning, guys.
More advert submissions from the slashdot janitors...
You could do something like post on the forum "This problem is fixed in version 1.2.3.2. Registered users can download this update for free.". The real version is, and always was, 1.2.3.2, but when pirated it reports 1.2.3.1 instead. If it's easier to pay your $10 for a genuinely useful product than to try and find someone with a pirated copy of 1.2.3.2 then at least a few people might be more likely to register.
From TFA:
"Making the situation even sweeter, the number which appears in brackets after the error statement is in fact the gamer’s 64-bit steamid.
Y’see, Steam keeps a list of which accounts have actually forked over the $9.99 for a legit copy of GMod – so it’s a simple matter of checking ids and turfing out the pirates."
As such, only people who reported the problem AND whose Steam accounts lacked a proper purchase of Garry's Mod were banned.
Well, would you prefer a more intrusive form of DRM? Removing the shading from a game isn't as bad as some of the DRM schemes that we've seen before by the bigger publishers. The authors aren't looking out to catch the pirates, they're not looking to sue anyone, they're just comically (inside joke, of course) telling the people that they've received an inferior product instead of the normal way of big titles where the pirated versions are superior to the retail version.
I for one welcome this. It's so small that it doesn't cause too much harm to the pirates in terms of game play, yet big enough that the pirates know they can receive the feature for just $10-$15 depending on prior Steam purchases. It reminds me of when I downloaded the X-Men Wolverine production rip. The CGI was incomplete and it was a nice reminder that I should just wait and rent the DVD (a very effective piracy deterrent, if you ask me). Unfortunately for Fox, I was bored well before the missing CGI came into play (it really was a terrible movie), and fortunately for them, I'm interested in seeing the new X-Men First Class when it comes to theaters in June (let's hope it's not terrible).
Mod parent up. To the GP; there is a subtle irony in your post, when you think about it. In the same way the Vista Australis devs were accusing people of being pirates without properly investigating and getting the full story, so you've accused the dev of GMod of "over-estimating his cleverness and acting like an ass" without getting the full story. And now someone can explain to me about the incorrect assumption I've made about your post, and so the cycle wil continue.
It doesn't actually just stop shading, it makes the game crash out whilst giving a fake error message stating which says something about shading.
If a pirate saw a "stop being a douche" message, their first reaction wouldn't be to go and buy the game, it would be to find an updated pirate version that got around that anti-piracy system. By using something that masquerades as an error, their first stop is much more likely to be to go to the forums to try and fix the "error"... thus outing themselves publically.
It turns out that the people who like to hack the copy protection and share the game aren't the real gamers.
I've read a success story about a game in which the finish of the first level wasn't there when the DRM check failed. It was cracked multiple times & uploaded but none of the pirates notices the game could not be finished. It took 2+ months for a real crack to be made while lots of gamers got frustrated with the cracked version and the game had higher sales then normal in the first 2 months.
So making sure that an illegal version has a worse game experience then the genuine article will make people pay for it. If the copy protection is totally obvious then crackers won't upload buggy cracks and thus the illegal version will have a better game experience.
My freeware games
I'm not too sure if I condone this behaviour, nor do I think this is a 'fun' way to catch pirates: A fun way was how the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience made copied versions of the game unplayable and taunts gamers with the blaring sound of vuvuzelas: See here
The problem I have with these kinds of protections is that they also might affect paid customers; Same as with strict DRM.
I already bought Garry's Mod after having played it for free (as the HL2 mod).
It was less than 10 dollars, so a real bargain. But I would have reconsidered it if I heard of this beforehand.
Nonetheless, all power to the developer to protect their property.
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
Well, I stand corrected. +1 informative
and the game had higher sales then normal in the first 2 months.
Compared to what? How did they know how many sales there would've been if it hadn't been for that? I admit it's kind of a clever tactic, but I'm interested in how they know this.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
A few hours ago, Garry Newman – the creator of Garry's Mod – asked, quite innocently, whether anyone was unable to shade polygon normals.
A few moments ago, Googlebot visited the sites.
A hour from now, a puzzled evil pirate gamer types "Unable to shade polygon normals" in Google, and guess what pops up? They're going to think "oops, I'd better not report that issue. In fact, it's better not to report any issues in any of my pirated games! Glad this issue has already been documented!"
This is the information age. People document things openly. Don't build DRM that is built on top of ignorance and secrets. It only works for a while and you wasted time.
They don't. Some bean counter somewhere estimated sales and then sales may have been higher than what was expected and they attributed it to the copy protection.
The logic failure of these companies is beyond absurd.
Apparently it had hit #1 in the pop charts in the UK the year before. A true one hit wonder..
Maybe he's viewed the way in the states. However he had a previous number 1 single and album in the UK.
Nice catch. Gary Numan did a new wave punkish synthpop song called "cars" that I liked back in 1980 when it made the top 40 charts in the US. Apparently it had hit #1 in the pop charts in the UK the year before. A true one hit wonder. So maybe he switched from writing music to writing code.
He is also known for 'Down in the Park' which was covered by The Foo Fighters (on the X-Files soundtrack, no less) and Marilyn Manson in the '90's.
I believe he toured internationally sometime in the last few years - he's still going strong.
But some people won't try to fix the error - and that's actually a much bigger problem.
We tried something similar in one of our software products. If the software detected modifications to the binary, it would run, but some features would perform 'erratically', and periodically we'd slow the execution down to a crawl. We thought we were being clever until we started seeing a few reviews appearing that panned the software as slow / buggy / unreliable. If you add a scheme of this sorts, you're potentially sacrificing the reputation of your product, and of your company / development team. For every person stupid enough to seek support for a product they don't own, there are another 5 or 6 who aren't that dumb (and will forever remember your company as the one who makes buggy software)
Ultima III wouldn't let you interact with NPCs - they'd say "Honesty is a virtue, I will not help you" or something to the effect.
Personal experience. As a teenager I bought Ultima III (I think) for the Amiga for $many_weeks_allowance. The original floppy was corrupt, and being an expat in a remote country meant I couldn't get it replaced. A buddy mailed me a pirated copy to replace it. A "fun way" to catch pirates for sure, but there I was with a box, shiny cloth map and a game that would tell me I'm dishonest. Never got to play it. Guess whether this experience motivated me to (a) buy more games or (b) pirate games instead.
</childhood_trauma>
I understand the rationale behind copy protection and DRM, but they can make life hard for legitimate users and end up counterproductive.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Because prospective legitimate customers will still read their comments and decide not to buy your software.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
The point is to make the entire exercise a timesink. And woe betide anyone turning up to report the issues on popular forums because they'll become sport for gaming blogs to make fun of.
Everyone loves to jump to the conclusion that DRM in games is always going to break. I have only ever experienced this once.
And now scale your experiences up. A DRM scheme that undergoes even basic testing will always work in the most common cases, but there will always be some set of people for whom it doesn't work correctly. These people now have the software that they've paid for exhibiting bugs because of the DRM.
I have a sneaky suspicion that the biggest complaints about DRM come from people who know that the perfect DRM system with no bugs would also affect them in some way
If, by some miracle, you find someone who can write a completely bug-free DRM system, don't waste their talents on writing DRM - they're well into the top 0.001% of all developers, so get them to work writing bug-free code in your real product. Any DRM scheme adds complexity, and those of us who write software know that anything that adds complexity is going to add bugs. Some of the bugs may be minor, some may affect only a single user, but a single legitimate customer having a negative experience caused by code that has no benefit to any legitimate customers is something that I find unacceptable. This is why I don't allow DRM to be included with anything that I create.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
There were plenty of games which tried to do something sneakily wrong to gameplay if they think you're a pirate.
The problem is that, basically, invariably there's the assumption that such a piece of code is 100% proven and bug-free itself. You know, unlike the rest of the program and unlike other shitty pieces of DRM.
A prime example of what I'm talking about was IIRC Gangsters by Eidos in the '90s. Among other things it would take as a clue that it must be a pirated copy running in an emulator -- until a later patch fixed it -- was if your CD is any other drive letter than D:. Because God knows that no honest customer ever would have more than one HDD or partition or have a RAM-disk or two CD drives or anything, you know?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If they are people who wouldn't pay anyway, and it doesn't cost you anything to support them, then you are not losing anything. They may still give you free advertising. Some people really do use pirated programs for evaluation - and sometimes unknowingly. For example, if you know one of your friends has a particular program, then you may try it on their computer before buying it. You don't know if they've got a legal or pirated copy, but if it crashes while you're using it and that say 'oh, yes, it does that periodically', then you probably won't buy it. If any time someone asks about a problem, half a dozen people who pirated it say 'oh, it's really buggy, I use a competitor instead', then your competitor gets the business from the people reading the forum, even though all of the people giving opinions may be people who pirated both.
This is a large part of the reason why I don't pirate stuff. If companies don't make their product available in a form and at a price that I consider acceptable, then I don't want to accidentally generate sales for them.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Before you salute this vigilante gesture, a lone captain taking on the high seas of piracy, stop and consider these necessary questions:
1. How does the developer determine whether the customer's version of the product (a mod, no less) is legitimate or pirated?
2. Is this method a 100% foolproof way to detect a pirated copy?
3. Could a false positive ever be detected, flagging a legitimate customer as a pirate?
4. Could a programming error, introduced either now or in the future, ever flag a user as a pirate?
5. Could a cracked game executable, modified content files, or lack of Internet connection ever flag a user as a pirate?
6. What does the developer do with this new list of suspected users? Is it merely for research purposes, or does he plan to turn it over to other authorities (i.e. could these users be perma-banned not just from the forums, but also from the mod, from the game, or from the Steam network?)
7. What makes the developer think the pirate community can't bypass this slightly more deceptive form of DRM, like they have so many times in the past?
I do not condone the actions of people who would pirate an indy developer's $10 game, but I also don't condone a developer running wild on an anti-piracy power-trip. By banning every single person who complains of this from his forums, he may be inadvertently banning users with legitimate problems. It wouldn't be the first time.
what he's suggesting is that people who have purchased it are using cracked versions anyway because its just easier. While this is not "correct" or "legal", many of us (techies) see it as morally correct. See also: grabbing a dvdrip of something when you own the DVD because you dont want to have to go looking for it.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Exactly. If it hurts just [i]one[/i] legitimate customer, it's a terrible system. Even if it only hurts pirates, it will still give off the impression that the game is bug-ridden. Those pirates could have been word-of-mouth sales otherwise.
Does this thing really need DRM anyway? I mean it's a Source Engine [i]mod[/i]... not a particularly inspired one either. It's essentially just a physics toy. How the guy even gets away with selling it in the first place is beyond me. I guess there must be just that many 4chan kiddies wanting to make gravity cat videos.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Just because somebody sees through the lies you're telling doesn't make them pro-piracy. It just means that they're in touch with reality. Any pirate that's likely to pay for a game will do so whether or not their is any DRM. Claiming otherwise is just disingenuous.
And if they weren't going to pay for the game anyways, it makes precisely zero difference whether or not they pirated the game as the developer isn't making any money either way.
The precise limit to any harm is on the basis of idiotic publishers like EA and Ubisoft that assume that they can force pirates to pay for software regardless of what it does to paying customers. And retailers like GOG who then have a harder time convincing said idiotic publishers to allow them to sell the games.