[whughes]

Note: This is a PlayStation game!

It's a key fact which you have to keep in mind when reading this article and considering it for use on PCs. Console copy protection is today important, but not critical as PC copy protection is. Chances are, this protection would have been instantly defeated on a reasonably high-profile PC game.

[ajg1977]

That's quite an assertion - care to back it up with your reasons?

FWIW I've written similar "time bomb" crack prevention techniques that were used in a couple of reasonably high-profile PC games (e.g. 500k to several million copies sold).

Some of the strategies were inspired by this article when it was originally published in gdmag, others were based on certain benefits of being a PC title. What helped a lot was that we had a surprisingly sensible publisher who acknowledged that safe disc prevention was (at the time, I'm not sure about now) virtually worthless and allowed us to ship without it. This gave us the benefit of knowing ahead of time the hashes for various areas of our binary and being able to use and layer those into different checks.

While non of these were crack-proof (or even close to it!) they did serve their purpose and prevent any zero-day or launch window warez releases - which as the author states in this article is about the best you can really hope for.

[viraptor]

I always wanted to ask this to someone who makes the games/protections: do you take into consideration the sales lost because of the protection? I know about games from friends mostly - if I can see it, I may be inclined to buy it. That's the only reason for me to buy the game really, as I don't follow the gaming news at all. Naturally they have illegal copies sometimes - that means if the protection is good, they cannot show me the game, or show me only something that suddenly breaks down (because of protection). That means I'm not going to be impressed by the game and will never want to have it myself.

Example: I never bought Settlers (2? 3? - the one that exchanged production of pigs and gold when you were playing a copy) - I've seen it and thought it's just so buggy it's not worth getting. Learnt about the copy protection a lot later.

I know many people who buy games this way - mostly grownups who want to have some fun once in a while but aren't interested in gaming every day. They also earn and spend their own money, so usually they're more ok with buying a good game than teens who need to request it from parents / buy for allowance / ....

I've always seen advanced copy protection as games producers shooting themselves in the foot. But maybe I'm just not part of the market that makes a difference for producers. Do you remember if this was an issue at all?

[ajg1977]

To be honest no.

While there may be people who buy the game after being able to sample it, there are far more who would happily pirate a game and never look back. Of course, it's foolish to equate every pirated copy as lost sale (as the RIAA/MPAA do), but I do believe many titles lose a respectable number of sales through piracy.

It is important to ensure that any anti-piracy measure that affect gameplay can be identified as such and not as bugs. This can be difficult to do in the game since providing messages/warnings gives crackers a place to begin backtracking, so at least on my games we would carefully seed FAQs message/boards with questions/answers that if X occurred it was because you were running a pirated copy.

As a developer my bigger concern, both at the time and ongoing, is ensuring that any demo we release is produced in a manner that's both expedient and forward looking. If you go back 5+ years it was fairly standard for developers to release demos way in advance of a retail release - infact far enough in advance that it was possible to make changes to the final game based on feedback/metrics from the demo version.

This practice now seems to have all but died. Many games never release a demo, and games that do have a demo version often wait until after the retail version hits the shops to release it. I think that's a real shame and driven largely by fear of possibly bad press for games that need to recoup multi-million dollar investments.

[mambodog]

The crack protection described in the article was based on the game code being modified... most PC games these days don't need to be modified to be pirated, they are just duplicated accurately enough to appear identical to the original media (usually through drive emulation, ie. daemon-tools). Additionally, modern copy protection also usually incorporates a black list of drive emulation utilities, but these have always been circumvented by pirates. When a new copy-protection tech comes out it often takes a few months to be overcome (eg. starforce) but it is not feasible to bring out new copy protection tech for every game, so if its 'off-the-shelf' chances are its as good as cracked.