Ways To Fight/prevent Pandora Games Piracy

[javaJake]

they make up some technobabble about using the subnets and the intertubes and interpolating them but its garbage

But not totally, er, crap. Read the article again.
http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/

Fact is, the only reason the industry is buying into the DRM thing is because there's good reasons to buy into DRM. If pirating suddenly didn't exist, there wouldn't be a need for companies to dump hundreds of thousands of precious dollars towards protecting their merchandise.

The article's asking whether or not DRM makes sense. Apparently it doesn't, if this article is accurately predicting piracy rates, because people will do whatever they can to get around protection schemes to get whatever they want.

So, with that in mind, it's doubtful whether any of the points made here (even community pressure - when has a criminal ever bowed to social pressures?) will actually work.

 

[kin]

They think they can make non-customers customers?

hah lol! Exactly...

 

[Klaus]

I don't think DRM will do any good. It will get cracked anyway and for any person you "force" to buy with DRM, there will be one who won't buy it because of DRM.
As others have stated, pirates can't be forced into being customers!

 

[PoisonedV]

they make up some technobabble about using the subnets and the intertubes and interpolating them but its garbage

But not totally, er, crap. Read the article again.
http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/

Fact is, the only reason the industry is buying into the DRM thing is because there's good reasons to buy into DRM. If pirating suddenly didn't exist, there wouldn't be a need for companies to dump hundreds of thousands of precious dollars towards protecting their merchandise.

The article's asking whether or not DRM makes sense. Apparently it doesn't, if this article is accurately predicting piracy rates, because people will do whatever they can to get around protection schemes to get whatever they want.

So, with that in mind, it's doubtful whether any of the points made here (even community pressure - when has a criminal ever bowed to social pressures?) will actually work.

Like they say (they don't, but they should) - if you can't fool them with embellishments, dazzle them with NUMBERS!
oh bad math, you never cease to amuse me

 

[MDave]

I see a lot of posts that generalize DRM as one and the same and saying they won't buy anything that has it in any shape or form. So its OK let piracy be rampant across the PC platform to the point commercial and indie developers are leaving it and moving to safer platforms like consoles? And people are saying DRM is the reason to support piracy even MORE? If there weren't piracy in the first place, there wouldn't be DRM.

There needs to be something in place to stop piracy, and consoles have had it right since the start.

EDIT: Typo fix.

 

[truekaiser]

never said to make it free el duderino. One of my solutions was to let the buyer choose what he thinks its worth = may be better for smaller teams.
Or put on some reasonable prices = Better for big companies.

And I think you're just being grouchy because you hate Christmas.

I love Christmas- after all, I just got 'el duderino' on dvd...

truekaiser: you have the option of buying it retail

not really, they push for online distribution only on some titles not to mention the retail versions are not much use for you as a stand alone because of the requirements of steam. the rest of my post still stands.

 

[absolofdoom]

I see a lot of posts that generalize DRM as one and the same and saying they won't buy anything that has it in any shape or form. So its OK let piracy be rampant across the PC platform to the point commercial and indie developers are leaving it and moving to safer platforms like consoles? And people are saying DRM is the reason to support piracy even MORE? If there weren't piracy in the first place, there wouldn't be DRM.

There needs to be something in place to stop piracy, and consoles have had it right since the start.

The point is, you can't stop piracy. EVER. If people WANT to pirate something, they will. DRM merely reduces the amount of legitimate customers, not the amount of pirates.

 

[truekaiser]

I see a lot of posts that generalize DRM as one and the same and saying they won't buy anything that has it in any shape or form. So its OK let piracy be rampant across the PC platform to the point commercial and indie developers are leaving it and moving to safer platforms like consoles? And people are saying DRM is the reason to support piracy even MORE? If there weren't piracy in the first place, there wouldn't be DRM.

There needs to be something in place to stop piracy, and consoles have had it right since the start.

The point is, you can't stop piracy. EVER. If people WANT to pirate something, they will. DRM merely reduces the amount of legitimate customers, not the amount of pirates.

Thats not going to stop them from trying. Heck look at the tcpa junk, the aim of that drm scheme is to turn what is a open platform, the general computer, into nothing more then a device which you have to either pay or ask companies to do stuff that you can do now if you want. like change pieces of hardware in the computer and run what ever operating system and software you want.

 

[MDave]

Here's one example but yeah, you can't stop it completely, but you can do a damn good job at locking all but the most hardcore of people from playing copied games.

QUOTE
The Sega Saturn has very strong anti-piracy measures. All games feature a ring around the outer edge of their disc containing data that ordinary computer CD drives cannot read and CD burners will not write. A dedicated CPU is embedded in the CD control circuitry to detect unlicensed discs and will completely refuse to read them. Extensive modifications are required if the user wants to play copied games.

 

[Mithrildor]

Trying to prevent in hacking in a software way will fail. DRM will only make the sales worse and things like Steam are easily hacked. The easiest and best is just letting people register online for way more content.

Check this list:

PC games- older games are easy hackable , newer games like GTA IV are harder
DS - Very easy
Wii - Very Easy - (hardware and software mods)
PSP - Very Easy (hardware and software mods)
Xbox 360 - Easy (hardware and software mods)
PS3- hard , but hackable
Steam- easily hackable with a patched (hacked) client

And the worse thing is that people use the hacking for bad things. I hacked my Xbox 360 , but only for using backups of my own games so the Xbox 360 doesnt ruin them and software hacks are so easy this days

 

[truekaiser]

Here's one example but yeah, you can't stop it completely, but you can do a damn good job at locking all but the most hardcore of people from playing copied games.

QUOTE
The Sega Saturn has very strong anti-piracy measures. All games feature a ring around the outer edge of their disc containing data that ordinary computer CD drives cannot read and CD burners will not write. A dedicated CPU is embedded in the CD control circuitry to detect unlicensed discs and will completely refuse to read them. Extensive modifications are required if the user wants to play copied games.


Yet those same measures ensured the failure of the Sega Saturn because they made the whole system unstable. errors on the discs like scratches triggered the drm. the drm made the games expensive to make and hard to program driving away third party developers to the simpler playstation. In the end it did what they wanted but not how they wanted, very few pirated the Sega Saturn because very few good games were made for the saturn and no one wanted to play the saturn because it got the reputation for being a buggy console.

Long story short, DRM not only hurts legit customers. It hurts developers who have to code for it adding un-needed complexity.

A counter example is that the nintendo ds is outselling the psp simply because one only needs a gba flash cart and some software on it to play copied games rather then risking bricking the machine like psp.

 

[MDave]

And then there's the Dreamcast:

QUOTE

The Dreamcast had a serious hardware flaw which gave it the ability to play copied games and downloaded ones from the internet. Many people chose to play the pirated versions of the games rather than shell out $40-$50 at a local gaming store for the real thing. As a result, Sega was losing money on the games that its developers had spent hours designing. I call that a sad waste of talent.

 

[CyruzDraxs]

Here's one example but yeah, you can't stop it completely, but you can do a damn good job at locking all but the most hardcore of people from playing copied games.

QUOTE
The Sega Saturn has very strong anti-piracy measures. All games feature a ring around the outer edge of their disc containing data that ordinary computer CD drives cannot read and CD burners will not write. A dedicated CPU is embedded in the CD control circuitry to detect unlicensed discs and will completely refuse to read them. Extensive modifications are required if the user wants to play copied games.


Yet those same measures ensured the failure of the Sega Saturn because they made the whole system unstable. errors on the discs like scratches triggered the drm. the drm made the games expensive to make and hard to program driving away third party developers to the simpler playstation. In the end it did what they wanted but not how they wanted, very few pirated the Sega Saturn because very few good games were made for the saturn and no one wanted to play the saturn because it got the reputation for being a buggy console.

Long story short, DRM not only hurts legit customers. It hurts developers who have to code for it adding un-needed complexity.

A counter example is that the nintendo ds is outselling the psp simply because one only needs a gba flash cart and some software on it to play copied games rather then risking bricking the machine like psp.

umm...does the Japanese version have that too? I have a White Saturn that I'm certain isn't modded, but I have a bunch of imported games for it that I'm positive are bootlegs, and they all work fine.

 

[truekaiser]

And then there's the Dreamcast:

QUOTE

The Dreamcast had a serious hardware flaw which gave it the ability to play copied games and downloaded ones from the internet. Many people chose to play the pirated versions of the games rather than shell out $40-$50 at a local gaming store for the real thing. As a result, Sega was losing money on the games that its developers had spent hours designing. I call that a sad waste of talent.


The dreamcast failed because of the failure of Staturn. sega pissed off too many third party developers to get a good base to beat the ps2. piracy had NOTHING to do with it. nintendo almost died due to the same mistake. they pissed off allot of third party developers with the restrictive terms for making games on the nintendo 64 that many of them went to the ps2 and the original xbox.


QUOTE
umm...does the Japanese version have that too? I have a White Saturn that I'm certain isn't modded, but I have a bunch of imported games for it that I'm positive are bootlegs, and they all work fine.

yes. it also had region encoding. if you have a Japanese console you can play Japanese games because they are of the same 'region'.

imho region encoding should be done away with.

 

[Calmatory]

Piracy has come to stay. Fighting it is shooting oneself to the foot. Sad but true for companies, better advice would be to try to make money some other way if making money is essential.

 

[Xanas]

Dreamcast failed to sell the hardware... so piracy is .. really not the issue with it.

I only know one person who ever owned one, and I can hardly name a person who didn't buy a PS2.

That's the reason PS2 won and Dreamcast is barely remembered.

 

[truekaiser]

Dreamcast failed to sell the hardware... so piracy is .. really not the issue with it.

I only know one person who ever owned one, and I can hardly name a person who didn't buy a PS2.

That's the reason PS2 won and Dreamcast is barely remembered.

my brother owned a dreamcast. but could never find any good games for it.

 

[valhalla]

I see a lot of posts that generalize DRM as one and the same and saying they won't buy anything that has it in any shape or form. So its OK let piracy be rampant across the PC platform to the point commercial and indie developers are leaving it and moving to safer platforms like consoles? And people are saying DRM is the reason to support piracy even MORE? If there weren't piracy in the first place, there wouldn't be DRM.

There needs to be something in place to stop piracy, and consoles have had it right since the start.

copy protection on the consoles have always been cracked and people who plays pirated games on the PC also play pirated games on the consoles, and vice versa. There are reasons why developers are leaving the PC for the consoles, but it is more a matter of the hardware spending habits of hardcore games than a matter of piracy.

DRM is not a reason to support piracy, DRM can sometimes limit legit copies in such a way that people who bought the game may sometimes need a pirated copy to be able to play it; this of course doesn't encourage people to remain customers: some of them will pirate the next game, some will just buy a game from somebody else but remain legit, but they're both lost future revenues.

If there was no DRM, there wouldn't even be companies that produce it, who are probably the only ones to get benefits from the whole thing. I can understand that a big house may consider adding DRM a small price, get some slight benefit, and probably help maintain the belief that piracy is starving them and they need all of the cash they can get, or they won't be able to produce the next blockbuster title. But I wonder whether a small indie company should waste money on something that may prevent some non-customer to play their game but not turn them into customers, just to keep alive some other company that sells useless products.

P.S. copyright infringement is bad, at least as bad as parking in a non-parking area, but do we really believe it is as bad as "criminal acts of violence, detention, or depredation committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or aircraft that is directed on the high seas against another ship, aircraft, or against persons or property on board a ship or aircraft."?

 

[MDave]

I brought up those consoles as examples on how they tried to combat piracy, not to talk about how many people knew one that had one or finding good games for the systems. I had a bad feeling there would be console bashing just even mentioning those consoles. This topic is quite off-topic now.

One time internet check to see if the game is vaild (with a cd-key system) and then leave it at that, should be good enough. Not intrusive, and secure enough so the average person can't play it if they don't have a legal cd key.

 

[keaft]

ignore