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As an independent game developer I’ve spoken to crackers about why they crack software X over software Y and there are usually 2 main factors – 1) Demand, if a lot of people want to use it then groups are more likely to try and crack it. 2) Challenge, if the DRM is complex and hard/difficult to break then whoever cracks it first gains prestige in the cracking community for breaking/reversing it first.

Developers need to see downloading for what it is, its a way of advertising your game essentially without cost to you. If your game has been cracked its a good indicator that your game has a fair bit of interest.

It is undoubted that id (to give one example) has made a very nice amount of money off Quake III down the years, yet the copy protection system was laughable, one of the simplest keycheck algos I’ve ever seen. Did the fact that Q3A was widely pirated hurt id? I’d say quite the opposite, it cemented it as THE pure deathmatch shooter for many people (and infact it remains one of, if not the best pure deathmatch shooter ever made).

Another example. M$ Windows. If Windows wasn’t so heavily pirated, M$ would never have reached the market dominance they currently enjoy. Its reached the stage where the only OS choice many people will make with their pc is which Windows flavour to get.

The same goes for Half-Life and many other games.

Often the first opportunity someone has to play a game is with mates at a small private LAN party. certainly LANs and pirate copys of games opened me up to the Quake series, Halflife, elderscrolls and uplink to name but a few. More importantly I would never have bought ANY of those games if I hadn’t played the pirated versions.

To cut a long rant short :P So long as the internet remains such a convenient content distribution system there will always be crackers, reversers and warez monkeys out there to pirate our software, the sooner the rest of the industry starts to see things the same way as Introversion the better.

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Many FPS games already have pitifully short SP campaigns and rely on the MP side. There’s more to MP than just competition.

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I’m all for taking a step back and re-evaluating the entire situation, as the system in place simply isn’t cutting it. But from a technological point of view, what other option is there for developers?

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a quick search on The Pirate Bay shows that crackers have figured out a way to get Valve’s single player games to *think* they have authenticated [...] So what choice do single player game developers have but to be more aggressive in their DRM systems?

Huh? It’s not working, so we have to do more of it?

Since day one (ie. the 8-bit era), copy protection has comprehensively failed. It has only ever inconvenienced the customer, whilst failing to stop mass bootlegging. I’ve seen lightly-protected products pirated, I’ve seen heavily-protected products pirated, I’ve seen my own products pirated. The only products that get away are the ones no-one’s interested in, that aren’t even worth the time to copy.

It’s a good opportunity to step back—like Chris in this article, and Stardock, for example—and find alternative ways forward. Because the answer to failing copy protection is not more copy protection.

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I’m not sure how that ad is meant to work. And god, the music for it is annoying!

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So game developers should come up with a central form of DRM that makes purchasing the legitimate copy more desirable. But what about a single player game like BioShock that doesn’t have this option?

And digital distribution is not an answer to that problem, as a quick search on The Pirate Bay shows that crackers have figured out a way to get Valve’s single player games to *think* they have authenticated at a Steam server, allowing for unencumbered, illegal play.

So what choice do single player game developers have but to be more aggressive in their DRM systems?

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You tape something off the radio. A single that the artists wanted to give away. You give it to your friends, family. One song to a dozen or so people. The internet is a different beast. A *full* album is released day-of or before the album hits retail, and is downloaded by thousands of people.

Singles weren’t for giving away. Singles were the lifeblood of the industry until Napster scared them to death. Single after single of Britanny Spears et al bought by 12 yr old girls (and then the remixes, the compilations, the album) was the economic backbone of the recording industry. They pretended the economic machinations of radio royalties didn’t exist for generations, happy to let people believe music could be free in the air. When the internet came along and people treated downloading songs like radio, suddenly they wanted us all to know about rights and royalties and how it was stealing yadda yadda, to generations for whom buying a recording was merely a way to conveniently possess air. People didn’t become criminals, the behind the scenes legal and economic structures that the made the recording industry rich became irrelevant and individual consumers were demanded to be morally aware of structures that had only mattered to organisations previously (and the organisations liked it that way). But too late, pandora’s music box is open. Creativity won’t die, neither will music (I don’t really see any shortage of the stuff) and someone will surely find some way to make money out of all of this. (me, I reckon the old radio station system was pretty sensible, only now we’ll have ISPs paying royalties and handling distribution. This could work for games as well.)

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Why punish your customers when you can reward them?

Anybody who does get tired of pictures of Darwinia has no soul. Sometimes I open that game just to look at it.

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