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Copy protection, Customer Prevention: Letter to Game Producers

Date Published:
03-24-2005

Written By:
Millsy

Sponsored By:
N/A

Pages: 1 2

Copy protection, Customer prevention!@#!: An open letter to game producers on game copy protection.

Let me start out by telling you my views on game piracy right out. It all boils down to one phrase with me. "If it isn't worth my money, it isn't worth my time." As the picture below will show, that belief has cost me a lot of money over the years, not all of the games have been worth all the money I paid, but I'll get into that later.

Click to Enlarge

Now while I don't pirate games, I have many friends who do. More than one of them has virtually the same collection of games shown in the above picture, but they didn't pay for a single one. Others have paid for half, pirated half, and others fall into differing ranges.

What it boils down to, is I have experience with both sides of the coin when it comes to piracy or purchase. Over the years, this has led my friends and I to come up with some very strong opinions on the different ways game makers go about trying to prevent people from copying games, and the various ways it affects our two camps. I'll let you know now, that both our camps have come to the same end conclusion, it affects me a lot more than it affects them.

What am I talking about? What do I mean? How can something designed to deter theft actually affect the legitimate buyer more than the thief? Well that's what I hope to explain during the course of this letter. Lets start out with the most basic way a game producer can implement Copy Protection (CP from here on).

"Insert Play disk":

This is as old as the hills, though not the oldest, it is the most basic. If you don't have the disk, you can't play the game! During the time when CD burners were $400, and the CD's more expensive than the games, this was actually very effective. The average user couldn't afford to copy their games and give them away to friends. As everyone knows, CD burners are cheap enough now that you gave your old one to the 5 year old next door to play around with when you got a nice DVD burner. CD's themselves can be as little as $0.05 a piece! And that's only one way people can get around that method of CP.

There also used to be a time when hard drives were small, and games didn't install all their content to them (many games still have options to leave some content off the hard drives). So it wasn't even meant to be a form of copy protection, it was just needed to save space. Now, in today's wonderful times, you can get 1 Terabyte of storage for under $1000. People put images of dual layer DVD's just so they don't have to swap out the disk to play a movie or a game. Once again, this isn't really meant to be CP, it just works out that way. And to be fair, I can't blame any game maker for wanting to save space on my hard drives.

What I can get mad for, is games that require a play disk for no other reason than to tick me off! Games that don't use the CD to play any music, load map files, textures, movies or any other data. These games are as common as they come. Probably 80+% of the games I have do this. Exceptions being the Unreal Series, though they usually require the CD till the first patch comes out, then there is an official "NO-CD" patch built in.

Thankfully, there are groups out there that modify the launch files of games to remove this 'feature', but game makers are sometimes rabidly against the unofficial "NO-CD" patches. Valve banned many users who grabbed the NO-CD/DVD patch for Half life 2, which I thought was particularly asinine to require in the first place, since no one who had that patch would be pirating the game in the first place!

When you sell your game online, and that doesn't have a CD/DVD to begin with, which version do you think is going to be pirated and distributed on the net? Valve too removed the DVD requirement after a patch, though unlike Unreal, it was because of the thousands of people who were unable to play due to a bug in the safedisc protection on the DVD's, not out of the kindness of their hearts.

Bottom line, requiring the disk to play doesn't stop even the most timid pirate, and only serves to annoy legitimate users who end up having to search through a pile of CD/DVD's and switch them out every time they want to play a different game. And when the games are pirated, many of them come with the NO-CD patches built in, so the pirate never has to deal with the annoyance of downloading the patch themselves!

"What color is X on page X of the manual?":

Near as I can tell, this is the oldest form of copy protection around (I stand to be corrected), and is probably the one I have the least problem with, but that is mostly due to it's rarity, and the fact that I have fond memories of playing "Tie fighter" and looking through the manual to get the right code. If I were faced with it in a new game, I would probably change my opinion on the spot.

With this system, once you know the pattern of questions, you can simply write down the answers on a piece of paper when you give a copy of the game away. So in the end, it still becomes just another annoyance to the end user. While I haven't seen mass piracy of games that require this method, I'm sure the downloadable copies of the games come with the list, or even don't require it to be inputted. My example game Tie Fighter, released versions years later on CD that didn't require the codes (or the CD!).

"XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX":

   "Now where the **** did I put that CD case/manual/case!!!?!?!" I can't count the number of times I've had that thought over the years, whenever I've had to reinstall a game after a hardware or OS upgrade. It's beyond me why they never started putting the CD Keys ON THE CD!!!! All the places game producers put the keys, making you save a small manual or frail scrap of paper stuffed into the games box, who actually thinks it's a good idea? Inevitably people lose whatever piece of cardboard that has the CD key on it, and all you are left with is a useless CD and a company that won't give you a new key because they think you will just give it to someone who didn't buy the game.

   The only situation where CD keys become a nuisance to pirates, is in the case of a multiplayer game that has external authentication of a users CD Key. Counter-Strike, Warcraft III etc. Of course with both those examples, there are servers that have been modified to not require verification of a users Key. If that were the only way around it, it would greatly decrease the instances of piracy, but of course it isn't the only way. Through various means, most of which I don't have a clue how they are accomplished, cracked copies of the popular games are made available that circumvent online verification. For both verified and unverified games, there is almost always a small program distributed with the pirated game (Keygens) that will provide a valid CD key. Some will just have a text file with a valid Key inside for you to use.

   For the legitimate buyer, CD keys can backfire. I've had many situations where I go to play a game online, and somehow, someone has the same CD key as me and is already playing (I have never once given out a CD key for a game I've bought). Now, this can happen due to some Keygen creating the same key as someone else, the pirates might have to go through hundreds of keys before they find a working one, but generally they don't have to wait long. More often though, the biggest cause of a legitimate gamer having problems playing, is due to the external servers being out of reach, due to a crash, or problem along the route over the internet. I will get into this more in the next topic.

"Online verification":

   It sounds simple enough, you input your CD key, then make up an account with the games online service. After that point, your CD is linked up to the account you've made. Best examples are Valve/Steam, and most MMORPG's. Some MMORPG's are smart enough to not require CD keys as they realize they are providing an online service, rather than just a physical copy of the game.

   Requiring a set of servers to be running 24/7 to authenticate gamers has some obvious pitfalls. How many people couldn't play Counter-strike:Source when it was initially released? I know I was one of many who couldn't connect to the servers for hours after I installed Steam and Half life 2. And what is going to happen 10 or 15 years from now if Valve dies and someone wants to fire up that old game for some retro fun? Gamers still play Doom 1 and 2 all the time.

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