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Also; if steam goes down, you’ll be losing quite a bit of stuff. GameTap has had this problem, with games going “off the catalogue” making it impossible to play them even if you paid for them.

Not to say it doesn’t stop piracy/remove CD checks or whatever. There are ups and downs, not all ups ;)

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The people in that forum made the same mistake. He didn’t say “The copy protection detected the piracy and initiated a game crash”, he said the copy protection system had been gutted by the crack, and thus crashed when it was used. Presumably whoever cracked it had checked the game started up, but hadn’t bothered with additional testing.

I can’t think of any online game that ISN’T using DRM techniques (via online account or similar) because they don’t have to rely on copy protection and client-side-only checks. And more power to them, if only because tying a person to a unique ID makes banning idiots easier.

The best system out there at the moment is Steam, simply because
a) It removes the annoyance of needing the CD in the drive
b) You can install over the internet, meaning you can throw away the CD and you actually get value added from it
c) You can have the content encrypted / only distribute the exe at the last second, meaning no zero-hour (or minus hour) cracks

It’ll be interesting to see how c) plays out with their new Steamworks system (the first game to use that – audiosurf – probably got most of their sales from steam download ANYWAY so the difference wasn’t there) as imo point b) is the major reason I’ll buy games on Steam in preference to at retail, even if it costs me a tenner more

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Let’s see:
(A) Game pirated before retail release.
(B) Stealth DRM still in place made pirates think the product was faulty, and not the crack.
(C) The overwhelming majority (upwards of 90%) of copies were pirated.
(D) PC is a configuration nightmare, and there’s a lot of “gaming PCs” with crappy components.

(D) is perfectly valid, and much of the blame goes to Microsoft (see the Intel 915 affair, above) for caving to the demands of manufacturers.

(A) and (B) are extremely questionable. Built-in DRM is powerful poison, especially considering (D). False positives have always caused huge problems, and DRM can only slow an attacker. When the game runs, it is open to the scrutiny of those who would crack it. So you try to obfuscate DRM: put the obvious traps in plain sight, have a couple of secondary ones behind the treeline, and a few surprises that nobody will find. Yes, if you flag the occurrences as DRM-related, it gives the cracker another clue about what’s happening. But if you don’t, you’ve just wrecked your code.
In a sense, designing copy protection is an inverse QA job: you insert various show-stoppers and nuisances with a sophistication necessary to discourage those who find them all. If someone does find them all, then they have a superior, “debugged” version of the game.

Stealth DRM bit them in the butt. So did piracy. One question: with over 90% of the players downloading the game, why make the game available only via retail?

Piracy is a problem, but when your method of distribution differs greatly from how most people get your product, and when you fail to make clear how your (legitimate) product is superior(if in fact it is) to (illegitimate) copies, beyond a fuzzy feeling of “being right with the law”, you make that problem worse.

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There’s always places that are on the rise at the same time that good places like this are on the fall, though, so I’m confident every last one of those poor guys is going to wind up somewhere good. It’s too bad they won’t get to work as a team again though.

As a friend put it, “the studios that deserve to go under never do.”

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thanks for the link, a good read (as depressing as it is).

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[What's weird is that often I have observed that the pirates are also usually very vocal PC gaming cheerleaders, precisely because they can pirate the games. It seems the irony is lost on them helping to undermine the platform they cherish]

Also the other issues are just a big of a factor when it comes to Q/A and support, Bethesda had similar problems to them with rare & obscure hardware/software conflicting with Oblivion. The vast increase of complexity in games is proving to be increasingly troublesome for devs & consumers.

Anyway sad to see Iron Lore go : (

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