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Farsight Studios
The Pinball Arcade / Farsight Studios
Platform Specific
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Timeframe on DX11 (Side Debate on the Effects of Piracy)
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<blockquote data-quote="Retron" data-source="post: 128091" data-attributes="member: 3685"><p>Good luck with that. Do you know how cracks work? At their most basic, it's simply finding the code that checks for DRM and skipping it. All that's needed then is for a pirate to ZIP up the files along with the patch and bam, a pirate copy. It's simply not worth going overboard with protection, as that ends up inconveniencing legitimate users (SecuROM, anyone?) The reason is people who are going to pirate a game will pirate it regardless... back in the early 2000s you could find every game pre-cracked, or cracks available to download from newsgroups. </p><p></p><p>When I was at Uni at the turn of the millennium there were all sorts of pirated games doing the rounds and pretty much everyone who had a connection to the network in their room had them. They were sourced from the likes of MySpace (the original one, not the social network pap) and XDrive, not forgetting the newsgroups. The daft thing is people would hoard them with little to no intention of playing them - there were genuinely few lost sales there. </p><p></p><p>FWIW, I paid my way through Uni by writing Shareware games for Symbian handheld PDAs. Piracy was common and there was a program which generated keys (including for my games) which was very popular. Nonetheless, I still sold hundreds of copies of my games. Those people motivated enough to find a keygen would not have bought my games anyway, so I didn't count that as a loss. One pirate even emailed comments on my code, suggesting I use hashing for keys... I should have done, of course, but didn't think to use it. And even if I'd added it, the old versions of my games would still be out there. Once something is online you can never get rid of it!</p><p></p><p>Steam changed all that. All of a sudden there were legal, guaranteed working downloads and prices were pretty reasonable too.</p><p></p><p>Steam does it well - light-touch DRM which prevents a casual "I wonder if I can copy this?" piracy but which won't stop cracked versions (as there's very little that will). Even things such as World of Warcraft get ripped off - there are private servers which emulate the official Blizzard ones.</p><p></p><p>Piracy will go on no matter what is done. IMO a light touch with DRM, a la Steam is best, you don't want to cheese people off with overblown DRM and hardcore pirates will just laugh at whatever DRM you come up with anyway.</p><p></p><p>Comparing it to theft of a physical object isn't the right way to look at it IMO. If you steal a PC, the owner no longer has use of it. Crack a game and nobody who already has a legal copy loses it - there's a potentially lost sale but even that's not guaranteed. And there's no easy way yet of monitoring what people are doing with their PCs... if they run a game under a debugger or using ProcMon to see what it's doing, then circumvent its protection, nobody will ever know. It doesn't make it right, but it does mean it's almost impossible to prevent.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Retron, post: 128091, member: 3685"] Good luck with that. Do you know how cracks work? At their most basic, it's simply finding the code that checks for DRM and skipping it. All that's needed then is for a pirate to ZIP up the files along with the patch and bam, a pirate copy. It's simply not worth going overboard with protection, as that ends up inconveniencing legitimate users (SecuROM, anyone?) The reason is people who are going to pirate a game will pirate it regardless... back in the early 2000s you could find every game pre-cracked, or cracks available to download from newsgroups. When I was at Uni at the turn of the millennium there were all sorts of pirated games doing the rounds and pretty much everyone who had a connection to the network in their room had them. They were sourced from the likes of MySpace (the original one, not the social network pap) and XDrive, not forgetting the newsgroups. The daft thing is people would hoard them with little to no intention of playing them - there were genuinely few lost sales there. FWIW, I paid my way through Uni by writing Shareware games for Symbian handheld PDAs. Piracy was common and there was a program which generated keys (including for my games) which was very popular. Nonetheless, I still sold hundreds of copies of my games. Those people motivated enough to find a keygen would not have bought my games anyway, so I didn't count that as a loss. One pirate even emailed comments on my code, suggesting I use hashing for keys... I should have done, of course, but didn't think to use it. And even if I'd added it, the old versions of my games would still be out there. Once something is online you can never get rid of it! Steam changed all that. All of a sudden there were legal, guaranteed working downloads and prices were pretty reasonable too. Steam does it well - light-touch DRM which prevents a casual "I wonder if I can copy this?" piracy but which won't stop cracked versions (as there's very little that will). Even things such as World of Warcraft get ripped off - there are private servers which emulate the official Blizzard ones. Piracy will go on no matter what is done. IMO a light touch with DRM, a la Steam is best, you don't want to cheese people off with overblown DRM and hardcore pirates will just laugh at whatever DRM you come up with anyway. Comparing it to theft of a physical object isn't the right way to look at it IMO. If you steal a PC, the owner no longer has use of it. Crack a game and nobody who already has a legal copy loses it - there's a potentially lost sale but even that's not guaranteed. And there's no easy way yet of monitoring what people are doing with their PCs... if they run a game under a debugger or using ProcMon to see what it's doing, then circumvent its protection, nobody will ever know. It doesn't make it right, but it does mean it's almost impossible to prevent. [/QUOTE]
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The Pinball Arcade / Farsight Studios
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