License Management

[otaku]

I'm curious as to what sort of license management systems people are using. On our first game we used a system developed in-house that just wasn't robust, but it served the purpose at the time. Time moves on and products get better. I've looked around at quite a few, many require a royalty (eAlladin, TryMedia), or they handle the entire transaction for you, or are relatively weak, easily cracked and no better than home grown technology (Armadillo, CryptoSDK).

Do you prefer wrapping your entire application with a 3rd party product? Or do you link to a library (activex/dll/lib) and provide your ownin-game screens?

[nalenb]

I'm interested in the same sort of opinions. Anyone?

[Sirrus]

Wrapping preferred...

Atleast on my end, since I use MMF to develop, I cannot integrate most technology and home-grown attempts are very easy to bust.

I prefer Armadillo...
This notion that Armadillo is easily cracked is false. Some time ago there were copies of Armadillo being distributed online - this has nothing to do with Armadillo' actual liscence protection.

I have had no trouble with it - great software, decent price, and very nice features. Even incorporates a Stolen key list.
Highly recommended.

Alex
weaponstudios.com
dopefarmer.com
injoygames.com

[nalenb]

Thanks for the info. A couple follow up questions, do you use the basic or professional version? Does you payment processor generate the keys for you? If not, is it difficult for you to generate the keys and what process are you using (your own web site as a callback, email, etc)?

Thanks

[Sirrus]

I use professional only because there was a feature in the Pro version that was required for me to be able to use MMF with it.
In most cases, Basic is fine.

As for key generation, my order processor, Digital Candle (www.digitalcandle.com) generates these for me and automatically delivers to the customer. I am relatively sure that many processing companies will handle this for you.
Other than that, you can generate the keys directly from the program (one by one, or generate a huge list of generic keys - no names). In addition, I am pretty sure it is easy to setup some cgi scripts to generate for you as well.

But it is alone worth the 10% to have another company do this for you.

Alex
weaponstudios.com
dopefarmer.com
injoygames.com

[nalenb]

Thanks for the info. The $150 for Armadillo seems worth it compared to all the programming I'd have to do to get all the stuff working in the program and getting keys to users.