Let's Talk: Slowing-Down Game Piracy (PC-Only) Thread

Remember: This is just a thread of your(or someone you've heard) constructive opinion of how piracy would be dealt with, how and so on. Keywords; Slowing Down Piracy
Why make a thread about this subject? This and this are some of the reasons why.

P.S. No idea why it has a black backing of the main text.

Edited by: Lucífer

Yeah, the idea of improved demo's, containing more essential game content, is a very nice one. Also decreasing the prices could help - in some cases, lower prices decrease the earnings, but on the other hand, in some other cases, lower prices can help the game sell even more than expected.

Then there is a couple of crazy ideas, such as:
+ moddable demo's
+ open beta's
+ entirely customisable games (additional modding tools, etc.), only with the core protected
+ more fan stuff (fansite kits, wallpapers, etc. anyway, MUCH more of them)
ASO.

A game demo already has genre's that split the consumers, adding moddable demo's won't increase sales in my opinion.

If the first idea of how to slow-down piracy was used and it actually worked as well as the demo idea then that should immediately result in cheaper game prices, even if its only going back down to £25-£30. (it'd be something)

I'm pretty sure that if they went up if the ideas were successful then there would be a lot of pissed of consumers.

Edited by: Lucífer

Now the moment I upgrade my hardware, my games don't work - genius plan there.

Not to mention, post release, you now have to never-endingly support new hardware revisions as and when they arrive...

Graphics card series, majority of series' would supported, those that aren't would be those that are 12+ years out of date(or what a Corp. like nVidia still support) , you'd be fine! Considering that not many (majority speaking (assumption)) will be replacing their graphics cards (series-wise) on a monthly or even yearly basis then there shouldn't be an issue.

Anything else about the technicalities involved, I would assume, would be able to be worked out during the coding of making this possible.

If you're upgrading your graphics card to one that's better but still in the same series,then there wouldn't be any issues.
If you go and get one of a new series then the game should recognise it upon start-up of loading the game again and like before it'll download the new support file.
If the graphics card requires an update, that doesn't necessarily mean you need a new version of this file either.

Lucifer wrote: Graphics card series, majority of series' would supported, those that aren't would be those that are 12+ years out of date(or what a Corp. like nVidia still support) , you'd be fine! Considering that not many (majority speaking (assumption)) will be replacing their graphics cards (series-wise) on a monthly or even yearly basis then there shouldn't be an issue.

What are you, stupid? What happens when a NEW series of graphics cards comes out...? Everyone with new hardware gets locked out of the game, that's what. And let's face it new cards come out fairly frequently. Plus, for the first time ever, now we actually need GPU manufacturer's support just to get our games installed and running.

Edited by: ambershee

When a new series is released I'm sure that the games company will be well aware of the new upcoming series of graphics card and be ready with the appropriate file.

After 2-4 years of a game being out the games company would then release something that frees the game from needing the graphics card series file. This release would be available for manual download.

Edited by: Lucífer

nothing will work. 2DBoy let you pay $0.00 for WoG & people STILL pirated vs did that. Steam has "free" demo's (giving away your info isn't free, at least it wasn't considered free 15 years ago! it was a trade!) have steam DRM & those get pirated.

This about slowing it down, not stopping it.

Lucifer wrote: When a new series is released I'm sure that the games company will be well aware of the new upcoming series of graphics card and be ready with the appropriate file.

After 2-4 years of a game being out the games company would then release something that frees the game from needing the graphics card series file. This release would be available for manual download.

Most companies throw the game out of the door and barely support it again. Many games didn't survive the hop from XP to Vista, despite being released within 6 months of one another.

Plus, there's nothing I hate more than the idea that a 10 year old game I've got boxed and on my shelf is going to require yet-another layer of useless shite in order to get it to run.

And even then, whatever check you're going to make to do with that graphics card is *still* only going to come down to a few bytes somewhere in the game that can be fiddled with, and completely avoided in it's entirety, thus rendering the whole thing the biggest waste of time anyone has come up with yet.

DRM does not, and quite simply can never work. It's fundamentally impossible, because there's always going to be something on the client that can be cracked.

Edited by: ambershee

Lucifer wrote: This about slowing it down, not stopping it.

yeah, nothing will work. Mothing will slow it down. Nothing will stop it. Period. People still pirate FREE stuff. Steam encourages that in fact (with everything, including free, now having mandatory DRM. Infact, I'd call it DRR: Digital Rights Removal because with a game with DRM you have more rights with the game then Steam).

Will a cheap price slow it down? No. It will just let people who want it legitimately get it cheaper is all (many games on gog.com are pirated too).

The only company that CONSTANTLY updates games related years ago is Valve and that's just to try to slow down pirates. Two days ago they even "fixed" any offline "piracy" (making the game run in offline 100% of the time so you can then put it on another computer & Valve will never know) by breaking the offline feature so nothing works any more. Accident? If so it's like Microsoft accidentally putting a silent format command in everyone's startup folder on windows. in the next patch.

FFS

Its not about STOPPING or SLOWING piracy.

Its about increasing incentive or reason to buy.

I pirated Fallout 3 b/c there was no demo (brilliant decision) and I found the game so good that I went out and paid full price for it and havent regretted my decision since.

I bought Red Alert 3, was hassled by the install limit DRM, and had to use a crack anyways for a product I paid for.

In my eyes, piracy and the cracking scene supported my purchases more so than DRM or the publishers did.

"Plus, there's nothing I hate more than the idea that a 10 year old game I've got boxed and on my shelf is going to require yet-another layer of useless shite in order to get it to run."
Old games aren't affected by this graphics card file requirement. All games before such an idea that even comes into existence aren't affected.

"Most companies throw the game out of the door and barely support it again."
This would make them support those games.

"And even then, whatever check you're going to make to do with that graphics card is *still* only going to come down to a few bytes somewhere in the game that can be fiddled with, and completely avoided in it's entirety, thus rendering the whole thing the biggest waste of time anyone has come up with yet."
True, but the scene-groups need to find and crack that and the longer it takes for them to find it (it'd probably be different per game) the longer it takes for a scene-group to release it via pirate means. Even still, they would have to test the cracked version(s) on other versions of other graphics cards and their series' and if they do not have a series then they have to risk it to see if it'll work.
It also creates a hassle for other people since they'll have to download the right one, games are getting bigger and bigger these days.

The code of the game, I can only assume, would require a lot of work to make sure that it would take scene-groups a while to crack the game, this of course means the programmers of the dev team would have to look even closer into the game from a scene-groups perspective and see if they could figure out the shortest length in time to cut it up and stick it back together.
It may slow down the scene-groups and if you slow down how long it takes for the scene-groups to crack the game then you're slowing down piracy of PC Games, even its only by a few weeks or a month. Its something.

Just to direct this at Friar.
The average PC user I would assume is capable of getting a part-time job, and if the game industry started pumping out demo's like the secondary idea I made about demo's, then I'm sure that people would be able to make their choice of whether they can enjoy the game or not.
Yes, people will still and always pirate, however more and more people are aware of what this does to the little indie devs that try hard to make the game fun and enjoyable for as long as possible and most people with the money and awareness will support them if the game is enjoyable by buying the game after they pirate it. (Maybe not so much if the...)
If the bigger Gaming industries released demo's like the idea of mine describes then people will find out for themselves if the game is even worth pirating, let alone worth buying, so at least then the figures in pirating may drop slightly.

There's always a chance that you can trust people to act more like the humans described in books.

-Edit--
"Its about increasing incentive or reason to buy."
By slowing down how soon the scene-groups are able to release a working cracked version of the game is another way of increasing the incentive or reason to buy it.

Edited by: Lucífer

"Its about increasing incentive or reason to buy."
By slowing down how soon the scene-groups are able to release a working cracked version of the game is another way of increasing the incentive or reason to buy it.

i remember when bioshock came out, "best copy protection ever" they basicly said, it was cracked within 24 hours of release
the gfx thingy won't work, even if its for a serie, shee said all there is to say (especialy the argument that no company will be supporting the game for that)
how to increase incentive/reason to buy? make games cheaper again and/or stop with the stupid 1$ = 1€ rate =/.
i pay 60€ for a average game since it costs 60$. BUT 60€ is 81$
might look like a big problem, but the new standard is 70€ or 80€ wich is 95 (or 105 for 80€) wich in my opinion is a big difference :/
i stopped buying games like i used to since its starting to get unpayable

this is only for my region tho :p

FFS, you still just don't get it.

Lucifer wrote: "Plus, there's nothing I hate more than the idea that a 10 year old game I've got boxed and on my shelf is going to require yet-another layer of useless shite in order to get it to run."
Old games aren't affected by this graphics card file requirement. All games before such an idea that even comes into existence aren't affected.

Games age. I want to buy something NOW that I can still use LATER.

Lucifer wrote: "Most companies throw the game out of the door and barely support it again."
This would make them support those games.

Or, just like anything before ever (e.g Starforce XP->Vista), nothing will change and you're just introducing a whole new level of software incompatibility. Or, because it costs so much to support such a ridiculous scheme, noone will bother with it and either won't use it, or won't produce games for the PC platform.

Lucifer wrote: The code of the game, I can only assume, would require a lot of work to make sure that it would take scene-groups a while to crack the game, this of course means the programmers of the dev team would have to look even closer into the game from a scene-groups perspective and see if they could figure out the shortest length in time to cut it up and stick it back together.
It may slow down the scene-groups and if you slow down how long it takes for the scene-groups to crack the game then you're slowing down piracy of PC Games, even its only by a few weeks or a month. Its something.

They'll do it in days - these guys are extremely good at reverse engineering, and usually have a good idea of where to look.

Case in example, I'd never, ever buy a game with such a ridiculous anti-piracy measure. It's pointless.

Case in example, I'd never, ever buy a game with such a ridiculous anti-piracy measure. It's pointless.

indeed the name of the game escapes me but they said:

We can either invest alot of time and money in copy protection or in making our game better, easy choice

so they shipped witouth copy protection and they sold alot of copies

Answer is simple, you have to treat your costumer better - Half Life 2 sold 6,5 million at retail and we should add roughly 25% to that (or even more) to get total sales - > PC games do sell if your costumers feel that they're getting their value for the money... Now let's do another twist to the story: Half Life series sold about 22,1 million copies (retail only!) which is easily comparable to COD series - they did all that with far less of marketing money. We could tell similar stories about Blizzard games( Diablo, Warcraft, Starcraft). On the other hand, games with shitty DRM won't sell - it's just too much trouble for the costumer...

Sins of a Solar Empire is a classic example; budget title that wasn't visually spectacular, came from a practically unknown developer, was barely marketed at all. It doesn't even have a singleplayer story mode or anything like that.

No copy protection. Don't even need a CD-key to install and play (but is required for online play).

Did it sell? For it's six digit budget, it scored a quarter of a million sales in the first month, and to date is probably reaching or exceeded 3/4 of a million. That's pretty good going.

Edited by: ambershee

Id say cheaper games would increase sales, though it actually wouldnt increase the profit. Any person only has a certain amount of money to spend. Iam for example have roughly 400Euros a year to spend on games. If i spent the money, its gone thats it for more games. One game here in Germany costs 49Euros. That is roughly 67,5 Dollars. Thats 8 games for me each year, maybe 10. Thats why i buy my games overseas, they are cheaper but dont count to regional sales.
After those 12 games? Most likely i start pirating, who knows.
For DRMs, i think the best way is the good old times. Games like Monkey Island hat little cards in their games box which was unique. You had to switch around some pictures to get a code to play the game. Something around that line would be quite useful And it would work with pcs without internet. Yes there are still some specimen out there without it!

Btw Borderlands sold quite good aswell though that game literally had no protection at all. No key, nothing. You can even play the game without the cd after install

Edited by: N0dachi

N0dachi wrote: Id say cheaper games would increase sales, though it actually wouldnt increase the profit. Any person only has a certain amount of money to spend. Iam for example have roughly 400Euros a year to spend on games. If i spent the money, its gone thats it for more games. One game here in Germany costs 49Euros. That is roughly 67,5 Dollars. Thats 8 games for me each year, maybe 10. Thats why i buy my games overseas, they are cheaper but dont count to regional sales.

the steam holiday sales are proof of this.

If I have a lemonade stand and I charge $5 a glass of lemonade, I can make a lot per sale, but I limit my self in sale numbers.

Its finding the balance. I should lower my price to match my sale point to maximize revenue.

So for example, I lower my price by half, but also double my sales. This would obviously increase my revenue.

What good is a PC game collecting dust in the store?

I've always wondered if it would be possible to design a system that would dynamically compile unique game exe's with a couple of kb or so of randomly generated constants for every single game just before it was written to a CD/DVD or downloaded ...

The games would all essentially be the same, except for those variables ... maybe there would be a way to have it in an almost compiled format to start off with, and then tack that extra information on somewhere to complete it the compile ...

The idea is that a server would randomly generate a number to fill in that blank spot, record the number in a database and compile the game with that number in the game itself, then make it available for download or write it to a CD/DVD to be packaged and shipped ...

Then make it so internet connectivity is needed to install the game and have it send that number back to the server along with some hashed data that describes your PC's specs ... the server then sends the same information back along with a verification allowing the user to install ...

The server would keep count of how many times you have installed a game on a different/changed PC and the frequency between installs and limit your installation after ... say 10-25 or so unique installs and 1 per day ...

that way if anyone distributed the game via large peer to peer networks the game would become deactivated relatively soon and no one would be allowed to install ...

It would be possible to get around this though ... however I think it would require some reverse engineering on the .exe itself ...

The idea would be that you wouldn't need a CD key, nor any anti piracy .exe's in the background ...

but i think that the carrot should be used when buying the game as well ...

Assaultman67 wrote: The games would all essentially be the same, except for those variables ... maybe there would be a way to have it in an almost compiled format to start off with, and then tack that extra information on somewhere to complete it the compile ...

Memory-Hack

Then make it so internet connectivity is needed to install the game and have it send that number back to the server along with some hashed data that describes your PC's specs ... the server then sends the same information back along with a verification allowing the user to install ...

No way to play on a laptop or otherwise without online connection. Besides you can remove such Auth-Hacks using the old tricks. So you punish legal customers while pirates have no troubles at all.

The server would keep count of how many times you have installed a game on a different/changed PC and the frequency between installs and limit your installation after ... say 10-25 or so unique installs and 1 per day ...

Why? I own a game so nobody has the right to tell me how often I install it. What would you say if you buy a care and you are only allowed to refuel it 10 times and then it stops working?

that way if anyone distributed the game via large peer to peer networks the game would become deactivated relatively soon and no one would be allowed to install ...

Doesn't work. A hack will be made to blank the activation bits and to remove the activation procedure. Lots of troubles, nothing gained.

It would be possible to get around this though ... however I think it would require some reverse engineering on the .exe itself ...

I've got news for you: this is done since many years. All important titles have to be rev-engineered. And this brings me to the one point which nullifies talking about this entire topic from the beginning.

Games have to be hacked exactly ONCE by a skilled person.

With other words it doesn't matter how difficult your copy protection is. It takes exactly one person to break it. All people downloading a pirated copy receive either
1) A copy with the modified EXE
2) An original copy with the crack.exe included (or key-gen, auth-gen, whatever)

Hence you piss off legal customers and make their live hell because of one person that always exists. There's a simple rule and I'm astonished the big AAAs didn't learn it yet so I'll bold it:

DRM => troubles for legal customers => less customers, more pirates => AAA make stronger DRM => more troubles for customers => ... ... ...
So stop the DRM devil cycle. DRM ruins the industries and sales because they declassify legal customers as pirates.

I still think that if they released demo's where the only restriction was that you could only do X amount of missions (or something similar, depending on the game) then people would at least have a chance to see if the game is worth pirating or not, and if its worth pirating then there must be something good about it that makes you bother to continue playing and of course this is a good enough reason to buy it.

Demo's seem to appear less and less because certain companies just can't refine their games of bugs.

No objection there. Lack of demos is a major problem. Because withholding a demo is the same as admitting to the customer that your game sucks and that you want him to pay first before he figures out he got pulled over the table.

The server would keep count of how many times you have installed a game on a different/changed PC and the frequency between installs and limit your installation after ... say 10-25 or so unique installs and 1 per day ...

Why? I own a game so nobody has the right to tell me how often I install it. What would you say if you buy a care and you are only allowed to refuel it 10 times and then it stops working?

my point exactly
to take the example of the car again, if you buy your car, you can crash it into a wall (of your own house) and no one will say you cannot (we are leaving possible insurance fraud out of the equation) since it is your car. They will have reactions to it like "your stupid" and such.
now lets apply it to the topic
you buy a game and hack it to pieces and it stops working, people will laugh at you since you broke your own stuff (nothing a reinstall won't fix xD) but who is there to tell you that is not allowed?

now i can bring up my point again (no one seems to take not of it >_>)
to me DRM = THEY decide when YOU are allowed to play with something YOU payed for, wich imo, should be made illegal :/
if i purchase i game, then i don't want anyone to tell me what i can and can't do with it, if i want to use it as a frisbee, let me. If i want to delete necesary game files to see what happen (or mess with them in an other way) let me :/

imagine if they would give the assasins creed 2 drm treatment to legaly downloaded music :/ you have to be connected to the internet, just to listen >_>
they are driving people to piracy because in the end, its easier, cheaper and usualy has less hassle. as in:
pirated game: extract files, run some setups if needed, sometimes apply crack, done
legaly purchased: install game, verify installation online, verify number of installs, verify if game is legal on start up, hope you stay connected long enough to do so and then, maybe your done >_>