Original Post
Hi I have to say, to begin with as a developer, I do not want my software to be hacked/cracked/leaked or whatever else, but recently, I just honestly think that copy protection is useless. I do not want to post a link here as I will probably get told off! but take a typical information site that just lists releases and not actuall downloads, and you will see almost all the latest released games including quake 4, age of empires 3... just to name a few. it seems to me that all what copy protection does really is annoy the end user. I have to say, I am against people who simply just download movies, games, everything and do not pay for anything, but I am not ashamed to say I have downloaded a few games for the reason that either they were not available to the UK, or impossible to get oldies, (take SEIV, I loved the demo, but could not find it anywhere in the UK, I downloaded it, and then eventually I found somewhere and did buy it) I have also downloaded some older games on to a seporate machine in my test lab just to see what happens. I have chosen doom 3 and halflife 2, as these games were both big anticipated releases. (FYI I do not like doom 3 and will be removing it after, I do not like horror based games... and I own HL2) now then, both games downloaded at moderate speed, within 12 hours, on doom 3, I have nothing to compare it to, but it was a simple install, then copy over a couple of cracked .exe files, tried the game, and it worked fine... I like that duck minigame thing! but damn I dont like dark games, it scares me far to easily! now then as for halflife 2, if I am honest, I prefeared this install to the real thing! during the real install, it needed to connect to steam, I basically had quite a few diffrent problems that I will not mention, but basically the pirated version installed quicker, and not only that, to run the game and to play it, I found everything about it faster. From these 2 examples, I may be a programmer, and do a lot of technical things in my job, but I am no cracker, I am not in to music and download loads of mp3 tunes, but for this job, call me a normal computer user. I installed a p2p client, downloaded the game, and had it installed. I did not see any evidence of any copy protection anywhere. Pirates always exist, and I am sure they will always be there, copy protection honestly seems to be useless, and in the end only annoys the consumer, infact 2 nights ago, I finished some work early and descided to raid my old cupboard for old games I havent touched in years, I found incoming forces. I installed this on my XP machine, and when I played it, it crashed immediatly after a safedisc based splash screen. I remember that the game does not even initialise until after a settings box comes up, so it can not be any old direct x incompatibility, I descided to try a "no cd" program, (again these are only meant for people who own the game, and I am not ashamed to say I tried) and to my shock, the game started faster, and IT WORKS. in my experiance, copy protection, is just annoying, it hurts the consumer, and does not stop any sort of cracking attempts by the professionals, and in the end, if a person wants to get a game for free, they will not do the old trick of returning it to a shop, so a cd checker is needed to see it, people can just download and play. I really think that something smart needs to be done, copy protection at the moment only makes games slower at start up, and infact is one of the main reasons people do not like computer games, it annoys people, especially systems like starforce that leave horrible files everywhere, and in the end, none of them actually prevents piracy. To date, I can not think of a single popular game that has not been cracked, fine some of them take time, but in the end, they all have the same fate. The only things I can think of are, a type of single build distribution, this will take so long to do, but if you only have one serial number per copy, verification on a single server.... ahh, I can see this being cracked aswell! I just do not think there is a end to it, and my experiances show that with the modern fast internet, it is very easy to download a game without restrictions, I can play a game like doom 3 for free, but a game I paid for a few years ago, I can not even start without actually downloading a crack for it. I was wondering without a flame war, what are your oppinions on the current state of copy protection, and where do you think it will be going in the future. ---edit, did not want to make a seporate post here, whilst I was experimenting with this, and went in to doom3, I loved the graphics and my fav was those controls and how real they looked! I was wondering what is the name of that technology that allows for ingame panels where the mouse takes over and they are interactive? and honestly apart from that, I did not really like it, played the first bit, and did I miss or did it really have no head shot? I uninstalled it after that as I found it to scary and actually a bit boring... when I have more time, I may buy it for moding if that is possible! [Edited by - wilhil on December 10, 2005 1:58:15 PM]
