I have a game ready to go on Windows, Macintosh, and various mobile platforms. The goal is to sell it on my website with somewhat low-cost copy protection. My objective is simply to make piracy more difficult, and I want to move on to creating more games rather than getting bogged down in coding my own solution. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I’m especially interested in hearing from anyone who has implemented a third party solution. Thanks
Most store fronts offer their own copy protection. This works great for things like mobile platforms where nearly all software is distributed through some store front.
Windows and Mac on the other hand is a little harder to get on store fronts like Steam and the sort.
In which case… low-cost & effective don’t exactly go together in the same sentence.
For mobile, just releasing in the stores (apple, google, amazon, etc) would cover most of your basic copy this to another device.
For desktop, depending on the game, you could try Facebook gameroom which has just added a premium game feature so you can charge for the game itself. It’s probably easier to get on this then onto Steam. However, gameroom doesn’t work for Mac. I’m not sure what is available on the mac side other then Steam. You may get more sales on Gameroom also (it just uses a zipped up pc build and handles the rest for you.) Downside to Gameroom is I think 500 meg is currently the largest your game can be. There are a couple of other limitations. Nice thing is, they will host the game for you as well.
But if you want a low cost solution, chances are if the game is worth it, there is a group that knows how to beat the protection and will crack it.
I already have an established customer base and, as stated, want to sell the games on my own website. I cannot believe that there aren’t some kind of third party solutions that would work for me. Surely, people don’t release valuable games with no copy protection. The people who would spend much effort cracking my games are not people that would buy any way. So I simply want to discourage people to whom I sell my games from giving the games to colleagues. I’ve looked at several third party solutions and the problem I’m running into is that most seem to require a license server which I can’t use because my site is hosted on a “shared” server on a managed WordPress site. Running a license server would require a dedicated host which would cost around $200/month. Also, I’m unwilling to set up my own server. I may make mobile versions available on certain store fronts but at the moment I’m concentrating on how to protect the desktop (Windows & Macintosh) versions. I’ve been looking at ExcelSoftware & Sciensoft as third party vendors but neither looks ideal for me at the moment.
We didn’t say they don’t exist.
To repeat myself:
Of course, this also applies to what one may consider ‘costly’. And you mention a 200/month server cost for a dedicated host.
I’m unsure where that calculation comes from… I don’t know what sort of traffic you anticipate.
But I know that you can get a t-sql database, and low-cost web service, up and running on Azure for far less than 200/month.
Furthermore Microsoft offers the Bizspark plan to get a new company up and running with 3 years of MSDN, that includes 150$ Azure credit a month. You could try looking into that.
As you said you’re looking at 3rd parties like ExcelSoftware… but that don’t “look ideal for [you]”… well nor do we know what is ideal for you.
What sort of solution are you looking for? What IS ideal for you?
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You may want to consider having no copy protection. If I buy a game, I often want to copy it to my laptop to play there as well. The internet connection at my house often goes down during the winter. I may want to play the game again 10 years from now. Copy protection breaks all the time for me, I always buy DRM-free games because of this.
Copy protection can usually be easily removed from games, and in the end it really only punishes your own customers. 99% of copy protection doesn’t actually prevent any piracy, if your game is popular enough to be pirated then it’s going to be pirated and there’s very little you can do about it. I know that sucks as a developer, but punishing your legit players is not the way to handle that.
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I agree with @lordofduct but it seems like others are missing the mark here. There are advantages to license management solutions that are not expressly DRM; or at the very least not the “evil” version people are touting. For instance, if you release an update for your game - folks who already bought it should be able to go download the new version. Licensing solutions provide that type of functionality.
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Agreed, we’re currently using ‘itch.io’ as it offers a way for people who purchased the game to redownload all they want. As well as taking care of the payment process.
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We distribute through them as well. This is notable because itch (along with several other platforms) require your releases to be free of third party DRM.
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Copy protection on your game is a complete and colossal waste of your time.
The best you can hope for is you don’t introduce a grievous bug that prevents legitimate users from playing it.
Instead of spending any time on it, as people above have noted, use the built-in systems of whatever storefront you distribute through, or use nothing at all.
I’m sure that your game is amazing and all, but if you are selling a game for money, even $0.99, you are going to be absolutely astounded by how few people actually purchase it. It’s the cold hard reality of gaming today. There isn’t any money in it at the onesies and twosies level.
If you are giving it away you will still be astounded by how few people actually even launch it. You should be using analytics at a minimum to see if the game ever even gets launched by a customer. You’ll be amazed.
Keep in mind while I typed these paragraphs (and I type fast), there were probably about 20 new games posted to the iTunes appstore alone.
Good luck!!
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