Help me create the perfect DRM

[similar.squirrel]

What if.. Publishers dedicated a team to filling torrent sites with fake versions of the product that were hard to distinguish from the real deal, and kept on doing it? You'd be less inclined to try steal a game if you knew you had a one in fifty chance of actually getting what you were looking for and not ending up with, say, an endless Rickroll loop.

 

[geldonyetich]

The best DRM is probably ones that never let people get their hands on the software. They're working on that, they call it Cloud Gaming, you actually play the game through a video feed on a browser window without it actually existing on your computer. Suffice to say, there's a technical hurdle involved: the Internet has latency, so there will be a lag in reaction time, and this ruins a lot of game concepts.

The thing is, if you let the entirety of the software reside on the end user's computer whatever DRM you put on it (even if you have a hardware-based DRM) will inevitably be coded around on the software level to produce a stand-alone, pirate version. There are no clever solutions, it's the entirety of the pirate community on the Internet versus you, and no DRM development organization has a chance versus that.

So the solution is clear: the entirety of the game cannot exist in a way that the end user can reach. MMORPGs already do it this way, where the actual client contains only the face of the game, with the heart of it residing on a remote server kept under lock and key and never distributed in a form executed by the public. Pirates have to write server emulators to play an MMORPG without subscribing to it, but those emulators take a whole lot more work than a DRM workaround, eat up a lot of expensive bandwidth to host, and still produce a substandard experience.

 

[dududf]

DRM will never be a good protection service. Simple as that. Your idea, while somewhat creative, would require a constant internet connection, and we know what happened with AC2 for that idea. Also, if the legit owner could get blocked simply because a confusion in the servers or simply because he bough a used game that was pirated.

What if the game had online multiplayer. That would mean pirates only get single player (if any).

Pirated MW2 on PC has superior multiplayer. It has servers and mods and lean.

So Yeah.

That's another problem. If the game is poorly coded, there's no incentive to pay for it.

The point was that pirated game=/= worse multiplayer.

But if you want to prevent piracy, you want to make sure that professionals being paid to make a game do a better job than hobbyists.

All of these were intentionally done by the devs, and they chose to make those decisions despite knowing that it was not well received.

Devs with a brain in their head would know this. (apparently Activision lost theirs)

 

[DazBurger]

include pictures of naked women and i am sure it will sell. and we won't even need drm then. i assure u it will sell. it's the fact of life sex sells

Please take this tread seriously.

But in case you are serious

Spoiler

Its when looking at pics like these I wish I wasn't partially colour blind

Well it's a picture of a guy from Star Trek facepalming made out of a lot of other facepalm pics.
(what you said implys that you can't tell what it is)

Nope, cant see it Ty^^

 

[Asehujiko]

Well adobe photoshop has that and....their keygens get around even the code>phone>code system so....broken already

the best drm form is the one arkum asylum had. Gimped game features.

That wasn't DRM, that was a QA failure. If it was DRM, why did they send out a patch a few hours after it was discovered, before release, which fixes it? And how come legal, unpatched copies suffer from the same bug?

 

[jasoncyrus]

Well adobe photoshop has that and....their keygens get around even the code>phone>code system so....broken already

the best drm form is the one arkum asylum had. Gimped game features.

That wasn't DRM, that was a QA failure. If it was DRM, why did they send out a patch a few hours after it was discovered, before release, which fixes it? And how come legal, unpatched copies suffer from the same bug?

Even if it wasn't, then they COULD'VE quite easily made it DRM. You register your serial online and get a "standard" update through the game which fixes the gimped stuff with a patch.

 

[MetalGenocide]

*Snip*

People have already got used to seeing fake uploads, and download from trusted sources. Also there are proxies.

Fake uploads, yeah, but if it's the 'full game' that has been 'accidentally leaked,' anyone could download it -- why would you instantly assume the upload was fake unless you knew the company was doing it?

The proxies won't do anything, though -- the game would automatically send your IP when you start up the game. And even if you switch the internet off to play the game, surprise! It copies your IP Addy to a registry file and as soon as you turn the internet back on, the reg file is sent to the developer.

OR HERE'S AN ALTERNATE THING DEVELOPERS COULD TRY:
Rather than chasing people and slapping heavy fines on them in court, put up a notice on your website: "If you have already [illegally] downloaded our game, and enjoy it, please consider making a donation [$50/$60] to the developer and we'll call it even."

I know it's shocking but people are so much more inclined to do the right thing when you ask them nicely, rather than attempting to sue them for a hundred million dollars.

There are always a few fools who fall for it, but then, they usually warn other people. Suffering from viruses and such, made users learn to use certain programs that detect registry changes in the first place. Heck even regular anti-virus programs do.

"And even if you switch the internet off to play the game, surprise! It copies your IP Addy to a registry file and as soon as you turn the internet back on, the reg file is sent to the developer."
Yes, and that IP that was just send is temporal, probably will be changed in less than a day, either automatically or on a whim.

Edit:

snip

But publishers are under the impression that everyone will pirate there games if they don't use some kind of DRM, and if we end up with a good enough DRM, I would like to let publishers know about it. I trying, to the best of my ability to get rid of DRMs, and the only way I can think of to do that is to find a way to rebuild the publishers trust in the gaming community. If you have a better idea let me know (anything you come up with can help).

Publishers =/= Developers.
The bold part made me LOL. It's the other way around. They have to rebuild our trust in them. Assuming "we" had any in the first place.
I know never I did.

 

[uppy]

i think blizzard got it right, if its a multiplayer game just make it depend of having a valid cd-key(you cant just make up whatever you want) and evey drm ever exept for multiplayer ones will allways be cracked... so start focusing on making the game sellable rather than raping the customers, there is one thing that works. a one time activation online, it should be doable for people with crappy and unstable internets as well.

 

[SenseOfTumour]

How about this -- the company (Activision, Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, etc.) 'leak' a version of the game to Torrent Sites -- naturally, these files will get spread around to other sites by pirates. Naturally, a lot of people will download this and install it... and then be incredibly disappointed when they find out that their version of the game only has the first few levels (or in sandbox games, a severely limited area of the world map)... but also that their IP Address has been reported for piracy.

Not exactly DRM, but would be quite effective nonetheless. And after that, how many people would be willing to take the chance downloading your next game? Or the one after that? Effectively, if all game publishers bought into this, you could stamp out video game piracy.

The problem with that plan, although it's good, is that most torrent sites have some kind of rating or comment system, and torrents with viruses, faults, or just plain broken torrents very soon get flagged as useless and die away.I dont think the time spent programming a special version would be worth the amount of pirates you'd annoy.

Steam works, just use it I've got around 100 games on my Steam account now, and I sure as hell don't own 100 boxed PC games from before I bought the Orange Box and installed Steam.

 

[cerebus23]

FADE system for ARMA 2 far as i know noone has cracked the fade, that has a number of random triggers set if your using a no cd crack that causes the game to "glitch" in a variety of a ways.

Batman AA's system worked well enough tho i was informed that a working patch was released that cracked it, tho from what i saw of people complaining about the game not many "pirates" found it.

Many mmos have hacked private servers. ubisofts vaulted online drm was cracked fairly quickly.

DRM in general often punishes the person that buys it more than the people that pirate it, ubisoft with its servers going down, darkstar 1 that had so many cd checks it bogged the game down for anyone that did not crack it, they eventually just patched the disk checks out of the game so many legit customers complained. EA's 3 install limit that many people that bought the games that used it complained so much they had to release a revoke tool.

I wish all drm would just go, make good games people will buy them. There are some good games with lite or no drm that back this up like sins of a solar empire, then there are other good games that prove the opposite and people pirate them in droves, not sure what the magic bullet is, but stop hurting the paying customers, and limiting their rights as consumers, because piracy will always exist in some way shape or form, lest nothing sofar has slowed it down to any great extent other than trying to throw the pirates off a bit.