Game pirates phone our tech-support says SIN Episodes developer Ritual Entertainment

[Steven W]

Cheeky buggers! Ritual Entertainment receive more calls from gamers who haven't bought a copy of their game than those who have!

Check out the Headline for more info.

[Ferral]

I remember working in the PC shop a few years back and someone sent their mother in with some faulty blank disks for refund. I decided to take the disks upstairs and check them out on the shops PC and they had tried to copy C&C : Red Alert onto the disks but it had failed.

Needless to say. When I told the woman that she left the shop pretty quickly !

[Bluecube]

Sad thing is that people these days don't see any difference between shop bought software and pirated stuff.

[Steven W]

I remember working in the PC shop a few years back and someone sent their mother in with some faulty blank disks for refund. I decided to take the disks upstairs and check them out on the shops PC and they had tried to copy C&C : Red Alert onto the disks but it had failed.

Needless to say. When I told the woman that she left the shop pretty quickly !

At least have the deceny to hide the fact that you've copied a game.

[chuckskull]

some people have some cheek (and an inability to find well cracked games )

[Spud1]

I expect this is a problem for many companies these days.

I can see many more moving to the console market too, where pirating games requires alot more work. These days anyone that can use a computer can find a pirated game thanks to the widespread use of p2p software such as Bit Torrent. It was different a few years ago before Bit Torrent took off, as to pirate games back then people had to have contacts, know how to use ftps, get into a good private messageboard, hang about on IRC, etc etc. It was much more complex, and no-where near as widespread as it is today.

One big problem that I see is that while piracy has moved on from being an elitist thing to being general (thanks to the huge number of leaks from groups these days - remember all pirated releases are not meant to be spread outside of the groups themselves), copy protection has not.

Developers still waste thousands of $$ on CD checks (very easy to get round with a basic knowledge of assembler), and copy protection methods such as safedisk and securom which are all based on old technologies that the pirates know about..so even though with each revision the protection changes crackers still have a starting point.

Wouldnt it make more sense to add in an old, very cheap method (basic CD check and say, an old version of safedisk) which would stop anyone who didnt know what they were doing from pirating - since if you know what your doing expensive protections wouldnt stop you anyway..

We need a new tactic for copy protection. Starforce was a good attempt at this but ended up causing more problems for consumers than it solved, and it was cracked in the end anyway. I don't know what the best plan is to be honest, if I did I would be making millions off it right now lol..but I don't understand why thousands of $$ are wasted on copy protecting games when the protection is cracked minuites after a game is released?

just my 2c

(disclaimer: i'm not a pirate myself yaaarrrr, all of the info above is freely available by means of public forums or google . Wikipedia has some very informative articles on all this )

[schmunk]

I remember Sim City (or was it Populous?) had the manual with the one-time access codes printed on purple unphotocopiable paper - that's proper copy protection.



(I also remember back in the Atari ST days, where I had loads of floppies with about 5/6 games each on them.

More impressively, F-19, which on its own came on (I think) 3 disks, was cracked down to one, with an extra menu and the manual file...!)

[Koolpc]

I prefer to use my Playstaion for gaming even though my rig can handle any games really. A couple of my mates never buy games for the PC, if you know what i mean! I stay away from that as i prefer the Playstation or my Nephews XBox!

[Spud1]

Yeah I remember that kind of protection.

Monkey island for example had the pirate wheel =)

The problem with those protections is that they are essentialy even easier to break - simply scan the manual, or in monkey islands case every possible position on the wheel, create a PDF and your done.

Oversizing has been done too..Commandos had it - you couldnt copy it or anything as it wouldnt fit on a CDR due to some fake 'big' files. ofc that was easily broken too ;/

[Ferral]

Rocket Ranger by Cinemaware had some really good protection.

It had the purple paper (like Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders) to stop photocopying but all the numbers were relevant to fuel levels that had to be spot on to get from one destination to the next. It was pretty clever at the time.

[Koolpc]

These companies who make the games must lose loads with people making pirate copies. Why don't they just come in with a better more reasonable price for the game? Something like £10 - £15 for a game instead of nearly £40. I am sure they could do that.

[Spud1]

Why don't they just come in with a better more reasonable price for the game? Something like £10 - £15 for a game instead of nearly £40. I am sure they could do that.

Not really, and in any case its not them that sets the prices - its the publisher.

The game makers themselves get pittance for each game sold, which is why every pirated copy impacts on them. I remember finding a breakdown somewhere for how much they cost and how the profit gets split..will see if I can dig it up. The basics of it though are that they will actually sell the game for around half what we pay - it has to go from the developer to publisher to distributor to secondry distributor to trade supplier to shop then to consumer - and the price jumps up at each point with transport costs, business costs + profit for each person in the chain.

Removing copy protection could actually save them money imho - case in point - stardock don't copy protect any of their games, and look how well GCII sold? Went to top of the charts iirc..

[ExceededGoku]

I will not say that I am not a pirate because I do have a dabble... but I would never call tech support complaining about the bugs and stuff. If I enjoy a game enough I will definitely buy it, I just don't have enough money to buy all the games that I can "test" as it were.

On copy protection it would be soo much easier to introduce an internet verification server for every game, and if you don't have the internet you don't deserve to game. Or you have to call a phoneline (I think Earth 2160 had this and it was very hard to crack but when I did crack it I enjoyed it and bought it!)

EDIT: Yes I bought that GC2 game just because it had no copy protection, I didn't even like the game... but I bought it

[DavidM]

I remember Sim City (or was it Populous?) had the manual with the one-time access codes printed on purple unphotocopiable paper - that's proper copy protection.

It's not the first to do this... some of the coding packages I bought many years before this used lime green paper with dark ink.. not easy to copy apparently. (But they where also a lot cheaper then as well!)

[Spud1]

internet verification doesn't work =)

Steam has (clearly) been cracked, and every other internet verification system that I have used has been cracked...granted ususally because the developer puts in place a system to activate without needing the net but still.

[kalniel]

I prefer games that include so much gubbins in the box (cloth map, pendants, nice spiral bound manual etc.) that you want to buy it to get all that stuff as well as just the game.