Here’s a creative way to deal with pirated software:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/94524-Arkham-Asylum-Pirates-Get-a-Gimpy-Batman
I figured this would be of interest to a few developers, since the topic of hacking/cracking/etc comes up pretty often.
hahaha, marvellous.
PWNED! :lol:
It has been cracked ALREADY.
DRM does NOT deal with pirates
It does not deal with pirates, it makes fun of them.
Then it fails, hard. What’s the point of that if it got cracked already, and none of these problems appear even for pirates 
I see what you mean, and it’s quite true.
Well, then it makes fun of bad pirates 
Someone here obviously missed the point (and it’s not n0mad).
What point? There’s no point
It doesn’t solve piracy, no, but it does deal with it, at least those who were affected before the DRM was cracked.
It does something which (I think) is pretty interesting.
Instead of locking them out from the beginning, it actually allows the pirate to play the game, and then at a certain point, kills them. It effectively wastes their time.
The DRM was going to be cracked anyways, but this way, it wastes some time, of some people, who pirated it. Plus, it’s pretty amusing to cause the pirate player to die, because he pirated the game, rather than just not allow him to install it.
Heh, this method isn’t new or anything amazing. Obviously it doesn’t stop piracy but only pushes crackers to… well, crack the game code even harder (or to see who can do it first). It will only trouble some pirates for a few days before they get their hands on a proper crack in the end sooner or later (considering bugs already in these games those pirates aren’t missing anything).
The time it takes to crack and perfect such kind of protection may cause some pirates to just give up and buy the game but there aren’t any statistics to prove anything anyway.
What is funny is that every time some developer adds such protection (for example, GTA 4), some site or mag definitely post about it like it’s some holy grail of protection just waiting to be discovered (or something like that). It isn’t, it’s a waste of time for most developers who just stick to the usual protection.
Personally, I am ok with any protection in game (securom and similar stuff never gave me any problem) as long as I don’t have to come online to play a single player game (like using Steam or Rockstar club crap in GTA4), which forces me to just search for a NoCD even for my legit copy. Hooray for DRM. :roll:
More than anything, this method dilutes the piracy.
Most crackers will get a crack working, test it for 5-10 minutes, see that it’s all working and release the crack. The priority for them is being the first one out with the crack. This then circulates until a few people realize whats wrong, and so the crackers have to spend a lot more time testing. Once the proper crack is released, the faulty one has spread far and wide enough that it does actually make it more difficult for pirates to find the right one.
While your more “dedicated” pirates will be able to get the new one and know exactly what to do with it, your average kid probably won’t know whats wrong, and will probably just end up nagging his parents to buy the game.
You can’t stop piracy, people that don’t want to pay for something won’t. I prefer Valve’s approach.
Half of the piracy is due to the fact that it is easier to get a game by downloading it from a torrent than go to the store and buy a disc, and the fact that in many regions of the world, you have to wait up to 6 months for the game to become legally available there. By making legitimate copies of games more accessible than the pirate copies, developers will see a huge turn around in sales.
Then it’s not a clever move from them to make a public announcement of that “trick” :roll:
If they don’t announce it then all of the “fake” issues in the forum will look legit to people who are still deciding whether to buy it or not.
I myself search around forum to forum to see how many issues a game has and how are they being addressed (in the case of someone like UBI… NEVER) before I spend my money on anything. To someone like me, the issues posted by pirates can look like something developers are ignoring if the piracy method isn’t clearly talked about.
Also, if this is the method similar to GTA4 then trust me, there are a lot more hidden “features” in the game hackers will have to deal with before perfecting the crack. The best part about this protection is that unlike others, where once it gets cracked it’s easier to crack the similar simple NoCD protection for the pirates, the developers keep on adding more hidden surprises in a new update, which delays the crack for patched version even further.
So in the end, legit customers get the patch and get to enjoy the game while pirates will have to be happy with shitty 1.0 (face it, all of them ports are shitty these days anyway) until the hackers perfect the crack for 1.1.
Hell, if you are a dev just release a fake patch updating the protection over and over again to piss off the pirates…
I love such protection schemes
Its what I have on the list of potential consequences when a cracked version of my iphone game is detected, aside of advertising popping up in random positions, actions failing on random base and other things.
As they no longer can post their crap reports on iTunes, there is nothing to worry about with them and if they post publically, even better as you can openly take them appart.
Interesting in the entry there is that Square Enix plans to use similar copy protection which actually is a lie
As a mather of fact, the NDS games of SE have had such copy protection for quite some time now as R4 owners and similar will surely not openly state ^^
What’s your point in arguing, here?
It got cracked - yeah. So? Does this mean the programmers are not allowed to use a more creative approach to the existing system?
Your agrumentation is “it will fail - don’t bother trying it”. Actually to me this rather feels like “It may not work in the long run, either - but we’ll at least have fun with it and may catch a few idiots redhanded”.
Personally I find this method really witty and cool. One of the better one’s I’ve seen lately. No matter if this won’t miraculously stop piracy, either. 
It especially will bring joy to the designer and programmers: “Your homework for this week: name the top three cruel things you would like to do to pirates in the game”
I’d find it funny if Batman radomly started dancing like in the original series with Adam West :lol:
I think the key is annoying, not awesome. I could see people cracking the game just to see that!
I’d be surprised if this were actual DRM and not just the PC release being buggy as hell in its current state (it didn’t make the launch date and was delayed, after all).