• 4 Simple Tips for Combating Game Piracy
    46 replies, posted
[url]http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/10/11/4-simple-tips-for-combating-game-piracy/[/url]
4 simple tips for pissing off your users.
[quote]The sad truth is that no matter what platform you’re on or how well you build your system, you’re never completely piracy-proof. That said, you can make your game so difficult or time-consuming to pirate that the majority of would-be offenders will give up. No one should let their lives be consumed by fighting pirates, so hopefully you can “set it and forget it” with these tips and endure much lower piracy rates with minimal maintenance[/quote] The sad truth is that no matter what platform you're on or how well you build your system, you're never completely piracy-proof. That said, you could stop making your games so locked down and restrictive in order to stop your potentially paying customers from turning to piracy to bypass the DRM bullshit.
"How to fight piracy: Make your game shitty and add more DRM" Brilliant ideas!
Valve had an answer long time ago, how to fight piracy. Deliver a better service than piracy. And Steam is this service.
The title should be "4 ways how to NOT combat piracy"
[QUOTE=Antimuffin;39202495]Valve had an answer long time ago, how to fight piracy. Deliver a better service than piracy. And Steam is this service.[/QUOTE] When I originally preordered Portal 2, I downloaded the files from a computer on my network, moved it to my network HDD and then moved them back to another computer on release day. However, due to the new DRM, it took me approximately 6 hours to launch up the game, as it required a few cache validations for it to notice that the game DLLs were signed for another computer. While I did all that, I contacted support, and I only got a reply a week later, saying that I had already played my subscription without any issues.
More like 4 simple tips for not getting your games sold and only gaining hatred by customers
Free to play, silent monitoring of geographic login locations and the like (to have an idea of how many people are trying to use one account), a login in general, and the securing of data transfers. There is nothing inherently awful about these things. The wrong way to do them would be to require login for games with singleplayer capability, or to make a game pay to win. Let's use TF2 as an example. Valve made TF2 free to play, without making it pay to win. You bet Valve keeps track of logins; this is very easy, and so better to have just in case it is needed. Valve requires you to login to play it. TF2 is multiplayer only, and the login system even has the added bonus of Steam IDs, which make banning users much easier for server administrators, and VAC. Especially in the case of non free Valve multiplayer titles. Obviously Valve keeps its data secure, or should. Just because this article is about anti piracy, that doesn't mean it is wrong.
The anti piracy bullshit causes more damage than the piraters themselves All this DRM and garbage isn't going to help, its just going to annoy the honest people who payed money
Point number four seems fair, beats having your info being sniffed out via packet readers (I guess you'd call them that) and number one is so-so, because in effect it turns most games into pay-to-play over time. Now onto two and three, essentially always-online DRM. Because this article was made with Android/iOS in mind it means that battery consumption will be through the roof while using the application and can potentially chew through the data plan that the phone is on. [b]Thus inconveniencing the user and if the application isn't good enough to warrant the battery/data usage, [i]will put them off from playing/using it.[/i][/b]
[QUOTE=jechtman;39202718]Point number four seems fair, beats having your info being sniffed out via packet readers (I guess you'd call them that) and number one is so-so, because in effect it turns most games into pay-to-play over time. Now onto two and three, essentially always-online DRM. Because this article was made with Android/iOS in mind it means that battery consumption will be through the roof while using the application and can potentially chew through the data plan that the phone is on. [b]Thus inconveniencing the user and if the application isn't good enough to warrant the battery/data usage, [i]will put them off from playing/using it.[/i][/b][/QUOTE] Number three is registration. Not even close to always online DRM. Number two is about knowing extra data taking place behind necessary communications with the server (a large focus of this article is about the piracy of fooling the server running the game's store into thinking you paid for something). Also not even close to always online DRM.
the only RULE to fight piracy is Make good games thats it if people truly love your game then it will sell like hotcakes thats it no super extra DRM, no freemium, no weird encription thats it
Why are there suddenly a million computer related news threads being posted by this bot? The articles are shit quality and its clouding all the other bots.
The best solution is to make awful DRM that pirates find a way around and people that buy it suffer from.
Can we please have this news bot disabled, this guys a fucking idiot.
so much spam wtf. And the article itself, it's like they think they know what's best for everybody.
[QUOTE=werewolf0020;39202785]the only RULE to fight piracy is Make good games thats it if people truly love your game then it will sell like hotcakes thats it no super extra DRM, no freemium, no weird encription thats it[/QUOTE] Nope that's only gonna mean that more honest people are gonna buy it and more pirates are gonna pirate it. The thing that makes a pirate want to actually buy a game is it offering something that they cannot get by pirating the game. This is usually a good multiplayer. I know a good few people that pirate games most of the time, but they buy them sometimes as well. For example, I know 10 people that played Skyrim. None of them actually bought it. I know 5 people that played Battlefield 3. All of them bought it. I know 8 people who played Borderlands 2. 3 of them bought it, and at least another three really wanted to, the rest pirated it. Why did only 3 of them buy it? Because after the game came out, the other 5 found out after launch that it was possible to play MP on a pirated copy. I know 4 people that played Bad Company 2. All of them bought it, since they wanted to play the MP. (oh and, most of these people are the same ones)
Ban this bot please. It's not posting news, just personal opinions and really bad dev help. LOTS of opinions and REALLY bad dev help, it's like it's written for devs and players by people who don't know what games are.
[QUOTE=Antimuffin;39202495]Valve had an answer long time ago, how to fight piracy. Deliver a better service than piracy. And Steam is this service.[/QUOTE] I agree, I haven't pirated a game in forever.
[QUOTE=Mastahamma;39202909]Nope that's only gonna mean that more honest people are gonna buy it and more pirates are gonna pirate it. The thing that makes a pirate want to actually buy a game is it offering something that they cannot get by pirating the game. This is usually a good multiplayer. I know a good few people that pirate games most of the time, but they buy them sometimes as well. For example, I know 10 people that played Skyrim. None of them actually bought it. I know 5 people that played Battlefield 3. All of them bought it. I know 8 people who played Borderlands 2. 3 of them bought it, and at least another three really wanted to, the rest pirated it. Why did only 3 of them buy it? Because after the game came out, the other 5 found out after launch that it was possible to play MP on a pirated copy. I know 4 people that played Bad Company 2. All of them bought it, since they wanted to play the MP. (oh and, most of these people are the same ones)[/QUOTE] portal 2 sold a shit load of copies and anything you had in the pirated game was exactly what you had in steam so..yes
If this guy really loves making games, why the hell is he even talking about piracy, i don't know about you but most game devs that really are passionate they never mention piracy or even worry about it, only time a dev should worry about piracy is if their game is gonna be really bad. I mean even the guy who made Hotline Miami didn't seem to worry about it and he sold quite a few copies of his game, and now he is even making a sequel.
[QUOTE=A_Pigeon;39203089]Ban this bot please. It's not posting news, just personal opinions and really bad dev help. LOTS of opinions and REALLY bad dev help, it's like it's written for devs and players by people who don't know what games are.[/QUOTE] They inspire discussion though. These aren't journalists writing articles, these are the actual developers. It gives a great look at how different developers tackle issues. And if you think they're wrong, say why in the site's comments section. They might actually change their mind then. By the way, can you guys stop complaining about what bots to keep and which ones not. Just don't read the posts if you don't like them.
[QUOTE=Clavus;39203572]these are the actual developers.[/QUOTE] yes, mobile / social games developers though.
How can you combat piracy if it's sometimes hard to convince users to just download the game from the official site, even if it's completely free and and doesn't require any accounts to do that. The only way to combat piracy is by convincing the user that the game is worth the money and that what they get for paying is more than what they could just pirate anyday.
[QUOTE=Clavus;39203572]They inspire discussion though. These aren't journalists writing articles, these are the actual developers. It gives a great look at how different developers tackle issues. And if you think they're wrong, say why in the site's comments section. They might actually change their mind then. By the way, can you guys stop complaining about what bots to keep and which ones not. Just don't read the posts if you don't like them.[/QUOTE] These "debates" shouldn't really be in the news section. None of it is news, it's just GD. Shitloads of GD. So much GD it's hard to find any other news because there's 1/2 a page of this shit. Kinda hard to ignore when it takes up that much space.
[QUOTE=Clavus;39203572]They inspire discussion though. These aren't journalists writing articles, these are the actual developers. It gives a great look at how different developers tackle issues. And if you think they're wrong, say why in the site's comments section. They might actually change their mind then. By the way, can you guys stop complaining about what bots to keep and which ones not. Just don't read the posts if you don't like them.[/QUOTE] You do realise this bot posts every god damned thing this blog posts and it seems to be a lot. The entire page is filled with this blog, which gives a lot of terrible advice from what I've read. You can't just ignore it if it's pushing down other, better threads.
[QUOTE=Janus Vesta;39203661]You do realise this bot posts every god damned thing this blog posts and it seems to be a lot. The entire page is filled with this blog, which gives a lot of terrible advice from what I've read. You can't just ignore it if it's pushing down other, better threads.[/QUOTE] It was just added, the whole feed was dumped in this section. Normally there's just a few posts per week.
What I don't get is these big industries shell out tones of cash to this anti-piracy groups for DRM and what not yet their games still get cracked and playable for free. Right there that is a big loss to me for no gain.
[QUOTE=Gran PC;39202516]When I originally preordered Portal 2, I downloaded the files from a computer on my network, moved it to my network HDD and then moved them back to another computer on release day. However, due to the new DRM, it took me approximately 6 hours to launch up the game, as it required a few cache validations for it to notice that the game DLLs were signed for another computer. While I did all that, I contacted support, and I only got a reply a week later, saying that I had already played my subscription without any issues.[/QUOTE] I contacted steam support a while back telling them of an exploit I had found in steam. I got a reply about 3 weeks later telling me to reinstall steam to fix it. I sent a somewhat rude reply saying the problem wasn't my steam client but an actual exploit in steam itself and I also made sure to emphasise that I wanted an actual reply from somebody who wasn't following a script. about 2 days later I got a reply thanking me for reporting the exploit and that they would look into it. Kinda strange that it takes longer to received a scripted reply than an actual human response. Either way steam needs to work on their support system.
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