Editorial The Final Answer to Prevent Piracy

[JaySn]

So... Vogel's solution to preventing piracy is to let people pirate?

No. What he is saying is to offer enough protection to NOT inconvenience the paying customers but enough to be an inconvenience to pirates.

Well . . . dude. It's hard. Right? Have to type in [torrent site], then type in [game name], then look for the torrent with the highest number of seeders/file size*. Then. Like. You have to click on it. Then download the .torrent or allow Firefox to pass the magnet along. And . . . Wait. And hope your ISP doesn't notice. Then, fuckin' rars, how do they work? And, and . . . What do you mean this is Spanish? Wait. I wanted the x86 ... Oh hell, why didn't I read the description or save the link! Woe, I am the mindless.

Man. It's hard.

NOW WITH VOGEL, you just go to his site, download the game, pay some money. And ha-cha-cha, it's like. Awesome. :D No guessing, no risk, no thinking. Just a bit of cash.

So, how much effort avoided is 25$ worth, when you're not tech-savvy enough to reconstitute multipart rars?
*to avoid rips

 

[Sceptic]

Dongles don't work for shit. Most of the high end 3d software like Maya or Lightwave uses or at one time used dongles and they were some of the most pirated apps ever.

All professional software of the early 90's like 3D Studio, AutoCAD and CorelDraw used dongles. Every single one was cracked.

I don't think anything short of using a fucking dongle will piracy-proof your software.

Actually the only anti-piracy measure that still seems to work is FADE. Of course it requires manually blacklisting every key that is known to be pirated and the only way to update the blacklist is to force players to install patches, but it seems to have worked pretty well for BIS.

What he is saying is to offer enough protection to NOT inconvenience the paying customers but enough to be an inconvenience to pirates.

It kinda fails at the latter, as do 99% of copy protection schemes, but at least he seems to have realized (ahead of the vast majority of the industry) that inconveniencing your paying customers is not a good idea.

 

[Aikanaro]

I don't think his plan has any 'inconvenience pirates' aspect. The registration's just to nudge people who pay for games to go and do it - pirates gonna pirate and there's no point inconveniencing them.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

What have been the most successful games? Piratable games.

Yeah, if certain game would ever be pirated, maybe people would know that there's a quite interesting game after the Gamma 15 dungeon.

 

[AlaCarcuss]

Assassin's Creed 2 got cracked well and thoroughly (I have verified this firsthand for journalism purposes) so at this point I don't think anything short of using a fucking dongle will piracy-proof your software.

Serial numbers for patches work a treat. See Stardock and Matrix games for example(and Dominions 3 ). Other strategies like Supreme Ruler as well. Unless someone has been kind enough to leave their key on the internet (and this can still be blacklisted in future patches), you'll find it impossible to play the games in any but the most basic, buggy and featureless states. As everyone knows, these types of games rely very much on ongoing refinement and having a pirated basic version that is barely playable without patches(like the Close Combat remakes) is of no benefit.

Of course this type of thing seems to work mostly in the niche strategy genre where the lack of polish in initial releases almost seems like an anti-piracy measure in itself for the above reasons!

Agreed. This is the most effective form of DRM (well, not technically DRM but anyway...) I know of.

If user's think they're not going to be able to get patches, addonns, DLC etc, unless they register - most will consider it just not worth it and either skip that game or... buy it!

Of course, most of the more popular games will have all these extras cracked and made available as well - though it can still be hit and miss and becomes a real PITA.

As a gamer who's preferred platform is the PC, what concerns me about the general gist of this thread - that all PC software/games are just so damn easy to pirate, why even bother with DRM at all? - is without doubt the major contributing factor in the decline of PC gaming and the continual rise and rise of consoles.

The fact that once a console is modded/flashed, piracy actually becomes easier on console (because all games are then essentially DRM free - with out the need for extra files/cracks) is not really an issue, as the vast majority of consoles are never modded in this way. Therefor consoles simply become the safer bet for developers.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

As everyone knows, these types of games rely very much on ongoing refinement and having a pirated basic version that is barely playable without patches(like the Close Combat remakes) is of no benefit.

Of course this type of thing seems to work mostly in the niche strategy genre where the lack of polish in initial releases almost seems like an anti-piracy measure in itself for the above reasons!

Close Combat series remakes are barely playable without patches only because the devs are talentless hacks. Their games are released when they consider them to be ready and then long-time CC modders have to explain to them what they did wrong and how to fix it.

 

[Norfleet]

Why does he even bother with serials, a few clicks on pirate bay you get a keygen for a few octets. Nothing easier than pirating avadon.

Because honest people don't search for keygens on TPB. If you are searching for stuff on TPB, you are a pirate, and nothing they do is going to stop you anyway.

 

[Volrath]

And the result of switching to a slightly less secure, infinitely easier to use system? Sales of Avadon are the highest of any game we've put out in years.

Fucking

 

[Micmu]

That's utter bullshit. It's just his most marketed game so far.

 

[felipepepe]

Dongles don't work for shit. Most of the high end 3d software like Maya or Lightwave uses or at one time used dongles and they were some of the most pirated apps ever.

All professional software of the early 90's like 3D Studio, AutoCAD and CorelDraw used dongles. Every single one was cracked.

Even now there are many professional software that try, like Avid Media Composer. All cracked. The only ones that (maybe) are impossible are those that require the companie's hardware installed, and even then there are some you can crack to make the newest versions useable on earlier hardware.

 

[ElectricOtter]

Yeah, Avadon's high sales probably have to do with publicity and non eye-burning graphics and interface.

 

[Azrael the cat]

What he is saying is to offer enough protection to NOT inconvenience the paying customers but enough to be an inconvenience to pirates.

It kinda fails at the latter, as do 99% of copy protection schemes, but at least he seems to have realized (ahead of the vast majority of the industry) that inconveniencing your paying customers is not a good idea.

His comment explains it pretty well. He isn't targeting pirates, because he knows most of them will get aroudn it while it puts off legit customers. Instead, his system is aimed at getting folks to pay who would otherwise procrastinate if given the game on an honour system. The full game is downloaded with the demo, but without the unlock code, fuckloads of folks would download it with the intention of paying but would never actually get round to it. He even says he doesn't think of it as people being greedy per se, just that they tend to procrastinate and have a strong tendency towards the path of least resistance, so if you make it easier to not pay than to pay, then many won't.

Personally, I'd add to that the many folks who take 'lol, what a stupid idiot, doesn't he know that won't protect his IP' as an excuse to pirate. Silly, but I've read a fuckton of forum posts reasoning from (1) Internet means that IP is no longer effectively protectable --> (2) Piracy is fine (or 'I can do it, therefore it's okay'). Also, even though I just spelt out that reasoning and am obviously aware that it's moronic, I myself would be MUCH more likely to pirate something that was just linked on a website, than I would otherwise. It's just the digital equivalent of leaving the sunglasses on the table - wrong to take them either way, but folks are much more likely to take them from the table than from someone's bag, even if they know both ways won't be caught.

 

[Norfleet]

"Preventing" piracy serves no real use, anyway. Pirates don't buy things. If pirates don't play your games, they just ignore them completely, and don't talk about them, either. It is better to have a game with 500K pirates and 100K users than a game with just 100K users. You cannot prevent piracy, nor would you really want to, any more than an aircraft designer can or would want to prevent air resistance. Sure, air resistance generally functions as a negative in aircraft design, but if you were to get rid of it, you wouldn't have a plane anymore and would have to lift yourself off the ground by pure brute force instead of flying.

 

[Sterno]

That's utter bullshit. It's just his most marketed game so far.

That's kind of irrelevant to his main point, though. His point was that he was worried that by going with even lighter DRM, he'd see his game massively pirated by people who were otherwise going to pay for it, go broke, and watch his kids starve. And whatnot. His point is that despite having less restrictive copy protection, his game is selling just fine.

From the cracker's point of view, I really doubt Avadon was any harder to crack than Avernum. They've been cracking keygen protection for how long, now? And from the pirate's point of view, you're still just clicking on the cracked torrent to download. No change there. Whoever was going to pirate is still going to pirate. Whoever was going to pay is still going to pay. But now the user doesn't have to put up with some random BS involved in getting a key unique to their machine to play the game, and Vogel doesn't have to waste time and effort on customer support to give out new registration keys when people reinstall his games on a new machine.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

We stuck by this system for fifteen years.

What.

How the fuck do you use that system for more than two weeks without realizing it's complete shit, specially when you are the guy developing the games (so you're not some supa-smart suit applying his l337 Business 101 skillz)

 

[sgc_meltdown]

We stuck by this interface for fifteen years.

What.

How the fuck do you use that interface for more than two weeks without realizing it's complete shit

indie games are not for mainstream gamers

 

[sea]

That's utter bullshit. It's just his most marketed game so far.

That's kind of irrelevant to his main point, though.

No it's not. At the end of the article he sums himself up and basically tries to justify his argument by claiming the changes in DRM led to higher sales. I think we all know that's completely wrong, and I think we also all know that cracking one of Vogel's games is only harder in the sense that getting a crack might be more difficult due to lower demand.

Fact is, there is no copy protection that works. Any time you have software installed and running on someone's computer, it can be cracked. You can't have a software program running and 100% safeguard against reverse engineering. Sure, you can make it more difficult, and more time consuming, and a bitch to do (like Assassin's Creed II), but in the end you have to have the software on your system to play it. The uncrackable game is a logical contradiction. At best you can buy yourself more time, and in doing so you are delivering an inferior product. The ultimate irony is, of course, that when the activation servers go down (and they will), the pirate versions will still be there, and they will offer a better experience to end users.

I also don't think that DRM has, or ever will, prevent people from pirating a game, or convince them to buy the thing for real. Pirating is easy enough that someone with even a passing knowledge in using a computer can do it, with console piracy not too far behind. People buy because they either a) want to support the developer or b) want to own a legal copy for their own moral or functional reasons, and all the DRM in the world won't convince people any differently.

The only thing I've seen that comes even close to providing effective DRM is OnLive, but that's arguably not really DRM since there's no actual ownership to begin with, and even if Internet speeds were to improve 100-fold in the next year, the sheer physical limitations of web streaming mean that you will never get as good an experience as you can on your platform natively (there will always be latency due to the video compression and distance involved, unless you are running the server on your own LAN or something). OnLive has proven itself to be a niche product and I don't think that will change anytime soon unless publishers decide to start putting games out exclusively on it, games people care about, games that drive the industry. I can't see that happening.

 

[JarlFrank]

So... Vogel's solution to preventing piracy is to let people pirate?

No. What he is saying is to offer enough protection to NOT inconvenience the paying customers but enough to be an inconvenience to pirates.

1.Go to piratebay.
2.Search for Spiderweb keygen.
3.???
4.Profit.

 

[deus101]

oh god...thats just...sad....He's wants to be a creator....SOOOO MUCH!

 

[Shemar]

DRM has stopped being about piracy for a long time. It is about second (third/fourth) hand usage. A pirate will pirate the game no matter what. But an honest user will not buy/borrow a used game if it comes with reduced functionality, a gamer will not let his brother/friends play his game if it has limited activations etc. etc. Piracy is just an excuse.

The gaming industry has, for a long time, been pushing for their IP property to be legally limited to just the one person who bought it, and they have for the most part achieved that, since the sheep, excuse me, Steam customers, seem so enamored by the conveniency bubble that they don't mind buying what is equivalent to a book, music CD, movie DVD that they alone are allowed to read/listen to/watch.

 

[7hm]

Huh.

I liked his old system. I remember (my mom) calling to get my code for Exile 2. I got to play it that night, right after beating the demo. My first experience with instant shopping. Loved it.

I've also downloaded keygens for his games though. Mainly because it's easier than sending an email when I lose my codes and stuff.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

inconvenience to pirates.

1.Go to piratebay.
2.Search for Spiderweb keygen.
3.???
4.Profit.

Though simple to nerds like us, that's beyond most people - hence why even on piratebay, you get thousands of "what is a rar" comments.

 

[kasmas]

the final answer to piracy is either to give games for free or create a base of loyal followers by making good shit like let's say paradox

 

[Elzair]

What kind of algorithms was he using for this?

I am trying to puzzle it out

1. Generate a number, numa, for a specific installation.

2. Run numa through algorithm x to generate the unlock code, numb.

3. Run numb (and probably numa) through algorithm y to determine if numb is a genuine unlock code.

 

[Daemongar]

the final answer to piracy is either to give games for free or create a base of loyal followers by making good shit like let's say paradox

No, every person in this thread used torrents to get their copies or keygens. Seems pretty obvious what the solution to fight piracy is. What, are people going to go back to BBS's?