I thought of a new anti pirate measure.

[wootsniper]

I like what the developers for Arkham Asylum did, which was prevent (some or most) moves from being utilized, making the game unplayable.

I remember that. They took the gliding with your cape ability away if it was pirated.

This might be a little off topic, but how the hell did they do that?

 

[wootsniper]

If I had a small game company, I would try to have some fun with the pirates. No DRM, but instead I would flood the download and torrent sites with special pirated versions of my own game, until you would have a hard time finding a "legit" copy there.
Added features for them could be things like hard-coded jump scare pictures in random intervalls, every piece of soundtrack replaced with some Barney the Dinosaur-Song, lines of dialog replaced with out of context your mom-jokes or the naked pope as unchangeable character model.
And when someone comes on the forum and asks why his character is sitting down and taking a dump when he tries to walk backwards, everyone who hasn't wasted his time downloading a broken game can point at him and laugh.

Have fun, pirates!

That wouldn't work since most people don't just randomly google a game, they google a trusted uploader. (like Razor or Skidrow, who have way of finding a "legit(?)" copy of the game and then spread it)

Or maybe they just buy it, i'm not sure.

 

[Negatempest]

Oh sorry. I assumed it was common knowledge .

Earthbound would crank the difficulty through the roof with crap-loads of enemies. So pirates had to suffer through insane difficulty, and after they beat the game, their saved game is erased. So they did all that work for nothing. It was effective too. Pirates would just buy the game, or hear of the stories and just buy it. Same with Spyro. The game would crash and freeze at certain locations. Random languages would play (making certain directions and instructions impossible to know about) and it erased your game after you beat it. If you really don't want people stealing your game, put in quirks like that. Make it deep. Arkham Asylum had the right idea, but it should've gone all the way.

If I had a small game company, I would try to have some fun with the pirates. No DRM, but instead I would flood the download and torrent sites with special pirated versions of my own game, until you would have a hard time finding a "legit" copy there.
Added features for them could be things like hard-coded jump scare pictures in random intervalls, every piece of soundtrack replaced with some Barney the Dinosaur-Song, lines of dialog replaced with out of context your mom-jokes or the naked pope as unchangeable character model.
And when someone comes on the forum and asks why his character is sitting down and taking a dump when he tries to walk backwards, everyone who hasn't wasted his time downloading a broken game can point at him and laugh.

Have fun, pirates!

I approve of these methods. DRM is like the US citizens getting taxed more for a war they don't want to be in.....

 

[DarthRiko]

Here's my idea on how to stop/slow piracy for your game.

Build that game so that it fully supports Steam's features.
Allow Steam to gather basic information on the multiplayer server a person is playing on, so that friends can use "Join Game" and "View Game Info" buttons on Steam.
Regularly offer it as part of a Steam sale.
Go the route of many Steam games, and have your game interact with a user's other games (for example, Alien Swarm giving you a TF2 hat when you beat a level).
Make a truly fun and original game.
Embrace the modding communities.

No, none of those are going to -stop- piracy. But they will make it so more people are willing to pay for your game. That's what happened to me and The Orange Box.
I originally pirated The Orange Box, and loved it. I promptly went and got Steam, bought TOB for myself, and have since gifted TOB to 3 of my friends.

So yeah, Valve has the best anti-piracy policy out there. Make the games worth buying, and make their DRM IMPROVE the game.

 

[Treblaine]

The pirates have a large number of justifications for piracy
the game is buggy
the DRM is ridiculous.
are two major ones. well here's my idea
make the The code of the game that allows patches be a part of the DRM. if you remove the DRM you can't get a patch for the game, this means that the people who pay for the games get better games while the pirates have a game full of bugs and glitches. its like a buggy demo, its free but it sucks.

Thoughts?

Well that's been true for a while (mainly with Steam) and it hasn't changed much as there are several problems:

-the patches themselves get pirated eventually
-most developers are pretty slow with patches
-pirates aren't the most enthusiastic gamers (they were too lazy to pay) they don't care much about bugs

The main thing to counter piracy is service, a continuous stream of content on a weekly or monthly basis, far faster than the crackers (people who turn legit copies into infinitely copyable pirate versions) can keep up.

You just have to live with piracy, like every other entertainment industry. From music, to film, to TV, to books, to pictures to even IDEAS... people use what they have not legally obtained or used. Companies need to accept this like how some people will dare to buy imitation Levi rather than actual Levi jeans.

The best you can do is make the legit version more appealing than the pirated version by bettering that version in an intrinsic way rather than trying in vain to sabotage the pirated version.

 

[Treblaine]

That'd be cracked in no time in all.

I like what Earthbound and what Spyro Year of the Dragon does. Those two games are still stumping people to this day who try to play them illegally.

And what did they do?

You didn't really finish your post.

Oh sorry. I assumed it was common knowledge .

Earthbound would crank the difficulty through the roof with crap-loads of enemies. So pirates had to suffer through insane difficulty, and after they beat the game, their saved game is erased. So they did all that work for nothing. It was effective too. Pirates would just buy the game, or hear of the stories and just buy it. Same with Spyro. The game would crash and freeze at certain locations. Random languages would play (making certain directions and instructions impossible to know about) and it erased your game after you beat it. If you really don't want people stealing your game, put in quirks like that. Make it deep. Arkham Asylum had the right idea, but it should've gone all the way.

That's probably the better way to go.

See when someone is cracking a game, they keep hacking away at the code till it runs and they know it runs instantly as soon as the game starts... but how do they know if they REALLY have cracked the game?

The cracker would have to basically playtest the cracked version of the game, hunting down all the deliberate bugs.

Now play-testing is a very time consuming and tedious job, it is hard to find the bugs and when you do trying to find where in the code it went wrong when you don't have the source code or any input from the dev team, is exponentially more work than trying to hack the launch-command. It would take hundreds of hours of tedious work to iron out all the sabotaging bugs and you'd NEVER KNOW IF YOU GOT THEM ALL!

 

[Jodah]

Instead of 5 minutes to crack it this would cause the pirates to spend 6 minutes. Nothing would change. If it uses DRM in any way it can be cracked.

 

[Volothos]

Sadly, no drm will just get your game pirated more, look at world of goo.

 

[thedeathscythe]

I like what the developers for Arkham Asylum did, which was prevent (some or most) moves from being utilized, making the game unplayable.

I remember that. They took the gliding with your cape ability away if it was pirated.

This might be a little off topic, but how the hell did they do that?

I think the game needed a serial code of sorts, and wouldn't run without it. So the pirates cracked it. Once they cracked it, they could play it! Just like every other game. But what was different, was that if they didn't have the serial code, I guess they were able to disable certain functions of the game. They of course didn't advertise that this was how they were using their anti-piracy, they let the pirates find that out for themselves. I'm sure someones solved it by now, but I remember there was a famous post on the Eidos forums that claimed that the PC version was flawed and that the gliding function didn't work. The moderator replied that the users morals were flawed and that it was an anti-piracy measure and he was suffering his just desserts. I'm sure something like this can be hacked around, but IMO, if you're going to put something like that in your game, you probably put 20 something like that's in your game, so when they solve the first one, they hit another brick wall 20 minutes later.