Released on portal and cracked the same day!

[Olivier]

Yeah another sucess story: Bonbon Quest was released on October 3 at Big Fish Games. Today I just downloaded a cracked version of it, the date of all files is October 2. It seems just too easy to crack BFG's DRM system, not easy as Real one's though. :D Crackers must visit BFG's website each day to crack their daily release.

I'm pretty disgusted and disappointed but I guess that's the way it is, welcome to the real world. AFAIK Bonbon Quest wasn't cracked before the BFG release, certainly because it didn't get much exposure.
Have low exposure and no crack, or higher exposure with lots of cracks: the choice is yours! And we all know that some devs here have already made their choice according to other threads on these forums.

Portals make better to pay well, otherwise it's business suicide. Any thought appreciated.:)

[Olivier]

Ok portals might tell:
-What makes you think that your own protection scheme is harder to crack than our own one?
My answer:
-I do not have the budget to develop a stronger one. But you probably have. *Hint*hint* Real.

[soniCron]

While I'm sympathetic of your plight, I must remind you that any reusable DRM solution is highly suseptible to abuse and crack-once crack-anywhere. That said, it's not unreasonable to want your distributor to use a solid protection system.

[DanMarshall]

Gibbage has zero copy protection, and as far as I know there are zero freebie versions of the full game floating about online...

Given that games can be cracked in a day, you have to ask yourself whether it's worth all the extra hassle for your legal customers...

[DanMarshall]

(that's not an invite for everyone to start giving away copies of Gibbage in order to prove me wrong, by the way)

;)

[arcadetown]

Sillysoft posted a message a while back about his method to combat the issue by setting up a "please don't use a crack of my game" page. See what comes up #1 on google for Lux crack (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=Lux+crack&btnG=Search) and Lux warez (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=Lux+crack&btnG=Search).

Users that download cracks get what they deserve, which is typically a bunch of viruses. So a marketing scare tactic with a #1 google spot may do nicely to convince the adult casual user. Kiddies and users from countries where theft is rampant don't matter as they won't buy anyhow.

[Andy]

Given that games can be cracked in a day, you have to ask yourself whether it's worth all the extra hassle for your legal customers...

Legal customers always understand and appreciate the efforts developers spend on game production. That's why they always easy accept your need to protect your job from thieves - even when they ask to resend their License information they never complain. At least not ours.

So I believe these is mostly pirated public who step up with such ideas - "why to protect if it would be broken anyway".

[svero]

Love the lux pages. I should definitely look into making some similar pages for my games. Its a nice idea.

- S

[Olivier]

Yeah Sillysoft had a great idea, thank you arcadetown for reminding us.
We should all do the same, hopefully it will educate some people and make 'em sensitive to our *condition*.
:)
I'm already on the way.

[Sharpfish]

That is a good idea from Sillysoft... I think we should all do it!

[arcadetown]

Was thinking about adding a boilerplate page like that here for each try/buy game on our site. Thought is the more slots taken by "please don't use a crack" on google the better. Think it could be great but also a little concerned it could make us a target of hackers, seo wise "crack" could incur a penalty in future, and not sure if developers would see that as positive or negative. Feedback?

[Olivier]

Yes Sharpfish! We could even go further by linking to each other's similar webpages (don't-crack-me-kind-of-webring) with a sentence like:
"They think like us" or "Who else thinks like us". Good idea?

[tewe76]

seo wise "crack" could incur a penalty in future
Hmm, good point...
Dangerous... :(

[Alan_3DAGames]

I think the only longer term solution is to have each game dial home so to speak to a server, with the registration code when its first installed. Allow say 3 or 4 installs per month, and that will allow people to reinstall the game without any problems.

(1) That would seriously hinder the bulk piracy.

(2) It wouldn't stop someone giving the code to a friend, but it would also stop a series of friends spreading it via email.

(3) Plus its easy for end users as no extra steps for them.

(4) Another advantage of this method is that each of us will be protecting the games with our own code. Its not a crack once, suits all kind of crack.

Also, if a game is installed with a copied code, then don't fail immediately. Make the game run for about 20 minutes, then exit with a demo mode screen. Also don't exit directly after detecting its time up. Spread it out in your code etc.. and have a counter triggering a counter etc.. to finally make it time out.

(If they only play for 10 minutes, they aren't interested in your game anyway, so no chance of getting a sale out of them).

This 20 minutes delayed exit has two big advantages. It turns the copy into an advert for your game. (They have just played a demo copy without realising it! ... so tell them it is, when it exits). But it also means that a hacker has to wait 20 minutes to know if their crack is working. A lot of 20 minute sessions will slow them up cracking it as well. Its like trying to trap a very infrequent bug, the hacker will have to take a lot longer to crack it.

Beyond that its a case of making sure they don't hack out code and do things like trying to mess with the transmitted data (make sure you encrypt it) ... I could talk all day about all of that, but the main thing is having the game dial home with an encrypted version of the registration code and you record this on a server.

No protection system is perfect. Everything can be cracked, but the thing is currently its crazy how much is getting stolen and as download speeds increase, its going to get worse over time. So I think we have to do this kind of protection.

[Sharpfish]

Yes Sharpfish! We could even go further by linking to each other's similar webpages (don't-crack-me-kind-of-webring) with a sentence like:
"They think like us" or "Who else thinks like us". Good idea?

Well I was going to write about maybe a master page somewhere with all the included games + bad keywords all linked up from each other (to increase it's rank and SERPS over the actual bad guys).

However, Arcade Town has me worried that if you put it on your own sites it could be detrimental in the long term, especially if google start filtering out sites with the keywords "warez" and "Crack" on them from their results.. I mean whole sites and not just pages.

Then I thought about one single URL that lists all games that want listing (on seperate pages as well as a master page) but then realised you would get max of 2 results at #1 and #2 and then the "real" crack pages from #3 onwards.

So logically we would need to cover the top 50 results which would mean every game that has opted in must be on 50 distinct pages (prob with seperate IPs) so that they don't just show one result. Also the engines could omit the other 49 "similar results" so each page couldn't be a pure copy of the others or it would be dupe content.

As you can see it turns into a logistical nightmare.

In the meantime I would be inclined to use a free web service to set up a few pages with your game name + bad keywords with a message about where they can buy it etc (same as sillysoft) though I wouldn't put a clickable/robot friendly link to my site in it just an image of some text to the url.

Sure it needs refining but just a few more ideas for the pot.

edit > there is also a danger that someone searching for "Gamename" could hit this red herring site and miss the real site (and the download/sale). They could also be quite interested in this stuff you call cracks n warez and possibly you could LOOSE a sale because the guy suddenly realises he could get it for free.. after all if there is a specific page about it then it figures "it must be somewhere on the net for free".

Probably just best to ignore it all and carry on coding I suppose. :)

[sillytuna]

That just isn't going to work I'm afraid, and what's more you're more likely to annoy your buyers. Copy protection schemes must always be invisible to buyers, and people like me seriously object to applications "calling home". I firewall my machine for good reasons. If I don't want Microsoft phoning home, I certainly don't want a game from an unknown company doing it.

Also, I think some of you underestimate how easy it is to break these schemes, and - although I know many of you disagree - overestimate the damage that "freebies" do.

The people who charge for the titles - a few bucks anyway - are the ones perhaps taking cash away from you. Those downloading from torrent sites are not [directly] - and these versions are not full of viruses [sorry arcadetown - we keep an eye on torrents for our own stuff] unlike many web sites.

I'm kinda surprised by how much of a problem people here think it is. I can only think it's because we've done this so long that we're used to it. It's mostly a waste of time trying to deal with it, although I applaud those who try. Personally, I'd rather get on with creating games than engage in a never ending puncture repair job.

It's all about opportunity cost - i.e. the economics of shutting one person down - and having another spring up, or the same one elsewhere as others here have found out - vs creating new content. The later wins every single time for anything but a very large company, unless you're dealing with highly specific audiences.

Personally speaking I think the best method is as someone else stated here - get on the search engine links, try and get the "don't support piracy" message in the game (not always possible due to portal www link restrictions), and most of all - not to get stressed about it.

Only a tiny % of these people are lost sales from your core market. Loath it as much as you want, the economics are pretty clear if you have your eyes open. Market to those with money who are less likely to pirate, especially if you can give them a more personal touch.

If you really want to beat the system, make your game free and have pay per downloadable item, with the game more server-client based. Obviously this isn't feasible for most games. Or you write your own system - which may or may not be worth doing, I can't say, but as soon as you can't use your own DRM then you're out in the open again.

As harsh as it sounds, if you can't handle piracy, don't release software. It's been this way since the first home computers when I started out and it isn't going to change however much we might want it to.

[Alan_3DAGames]

"Copy protection schemes must always be invisible to buyers"
Its is, if they enter the registration code, then its no different from an unlock code. The game itself does the dialling home.

"people like me seriously object to applications "calling home""
I was expecting this kind of comment. I know I'm not happy about this as well, but in the future, I think its inevitable.

Also piracy isn't going to stop and so over time more programs are going to do this kind of thing. Eventually I can see it going as far as a client-server model where the client is free and the user is paying for a connection to the server, if they want to play the game. Effectively this is what I'm suggesting already, but the server is a very small part of the game.

Plus it can be included as a feature where the game can fetch a list of freebies that are available etc.. plus notify the user that an update is ready to download if they wish it etc..

I think its going to go this way. It will have to be like this to limit piracy.

I know its possible to crack anything, but that's not a reason to give up.

"if google start filtering out sites with the keywords "warez" and "Crack""
Sorry, no good as things evolve. New words will replace the old.

""don't support piracy" message in the game"
People know what piracy is. They know its stealing. The ones who pirate things just laugh at messages like that while the ones who don't pirate, waste time having to reading "don't pirate this" messages... it will not limit copies. Its like DVDs.

The method I'm suggesting is a pragmatic solution. Its not bullet proof, but its a way to limit copies. Yes it dials home, but only when it first installs, or maybe once every few weeks. Eventually a lot of software is going to go down this route, and yes a few people will protest against it, but thats not going to stop it happening. Eventually it will become the normal way companies distribute and manage software ... look at the way Vista is itself moving towards etc...

[Sharpfish]

"if google start filtering out sites with the keywords "warez" and "Crack""
Sorry, no good as things evolve. New words will replace the old.


Huh? I was saying that if you put those keywords on your site (your red herring page) and google started to censor sites with those words (as I think has been talked about in a similar thread) then your site could be restricted from SERPS... in other words I think it's best to leave those dodgy words well out of your website.

I didn't say if google restricted them it was in any way a "solution" to piracy, I think most pirates would use usenet or p2p anyway.

I do agree that it's generally far better to use our time making games instead of waging war against something that is far bigger than us.

[joe]

hmmm... i just had an idea - but dont know if its either a good or a bad one. here it goes...

why dont we create a general website together with information for customers why they should buy our games and support the developers. we also create a nice logo that ev'ry developer who participates can put into his game and/or website.

as exchange on the website all develepors will get a back link.

we could also try to make some charitable donations (something like evry developer who participates will spend $1 or something of each game sold for charity - to show the customers if they buy our game the legal way they not only support the developers but also help to make this world a better place - hey and dont forget the fun they have with our games... ;) ) ?

okay, just some thoughts... what do you think?

[cliffski]

""don't support piracy" message in the game"
People know what piracy is. They know its stealing.

I wish this were true, but its something people like to ignore. they might know intuitively thats its not right, but sadly there are enough muppets at places like 'the pirate party' who try to cover theft with a thin veneer of respectability, that people can sometimes superficially kid themselves that its perfectly ok. Its a GOOD thing to remind them what they are doing is wrong.

As for the dialing home thing, I agree, in the long term it is inevitable. I've been gradually making moves in that direction. Kudos has an option to connect to my server, check for updates or upload your character stats. Right now, its quite a simple thing, and although the capability exists, it doesn't ask for your order number or do any verification. I took this first step to get my web coding knowledge off to a start, so it won't be too bad to go the next stage later, if it becomes neccesary.
I think someone like plimus needs to step in and provide a back-end solution for this stuff. (Im presuming they don't yet). Steam for indies.

[sillytuna]

Couple of points.

1) Can you explain how phoning home is going to stop piracy in any way? If you have a DRM solution, Joe Bloggs can't copy the game and that's all the protection you need (if any, as Dan says). When a game gets cracked, that includes stopping them from phoning home.

It isn't a new solution, and it isn't one that works. At most it's only valid as part of your DRM solution, but it isn't even valid in other DRMs which most people here will have to use at some point anyway.

2) Having a website for "why you should support indie games" is one of those very nice ideas - and one which should be supported in fact if you could garner some press attention as you may boost sales from independent's websites - however it's going to make little practical difference.

The absolute most important thing to consider is this. Would the person who pirated the game have bought it anyway. The answer is virtually always "absolutely not".

The titles in question are even less likely to be bought than a pirated console game or retail game because you already get to play for an hour free anyway. Those downloading pirated games will often just be looking for freebie collections anyway, and if they are bothering to find a specific game then they weren't prepared to be a measly 20 bucks.

What about those selling big collections on CD and charging a pittance for them, or putting entire collections on Torrent sites? Well the people downloadinig them are still not going to pay 20 bucks for most of those games. At the absolute most they would maybe buy one or two, and in fact you may well find they'll find your forthcoming titles and buy them anyway.

In summary - piracy is frustrating and annoying, but in most circumstances you are not losing money, simply gaining players. Sure you could argue that some of those players should have no right to play the full game, but honestly - they weren't buying anyway.

This isn't a message to give up, purely that you target your customers and not those who will go out their way to get freebies (who are mostly younger players I suspect due to human nature).

For all the grand efforts of people on this site, all I can see is real players being demonised (extra DRM requirements) and developers getting stressed unnecessarily. Your efforts should be in finding more customers, and you honestly won't do that by picking on individual pirates, satisfying tho it may be.

Sorry to be speaking an uncomfortable truth and not following "the party line" but I stand by everything I've said. Step back from your anger and see things for how they really are.

[sillytuna]

Just an update to my post re: phoning home. Where the system does work is if you release only through one DRM and can log buyers, then have a system of updates/patches etc which bugger up the game.

Pirates crack through it easily enough, but the players can then not get any updates, or connect to any networked based games. Reminds me of Counter-Strike cheat/anti-cheat systems.

This takes considerable effort to support and you still assume your sales will be boosted by enough to make it worthwhile.

[Bad Sector]

People know what piracy is. They know its stealing.

Ha! Nope and i'm the living proof of that:

I'm programming since 7 years old and until i was 11 or 12 or somewhere around that age i thought - actually i was sure - that copying games (and other software) was absolutelly right. In fact, i thought that the means to get new games was to exchange them with others.

I was swapping games with schoolmates - and that was what everyone was doing, so it was a normal thing and i never thought the opposite. I was in a very fortunate position back then: a magazine had posted listings of code and information on how to put sprites on screen and the CGA graphics most games had were crude so i was able to create similar or new graphics with a little tool i wrote. I was able to create small platformish (was a hell codewise - a few of them was drawing the sprites at the same time they were loading the sprites from the disk! - but somehow they worked) games of one or two levels where you could practically do nothing except going up or doing. But they served me well enough as "money" to obtain more games.

I learned that this is supposed to be wrong when i exited a pirated game. At the 'exit screen' it said something in English with 'nice colorful letters' (well, actually 'nice shades of gray' - i had a B/W screen :-P) and some ascii art. Back then i didn't knew English so i asked my father to tell me what this is. He told me something along the lines "it says that you shouldn't copy this game since lots of people worked on it for a long time and blahblah like that". I wondered then, how i am supposed to get games if i don't copy them? Later a friend who knew English told me that they say that i just buy them like everything else (of course it seemed strange to me to buy something that can be copied).

Once that thing settled in my mind, my world changed: i could make money by making games and i can use this money to get whatever game i want! (note: when you were swapping games, you were getting whatever game the other guy wanted to give you - in most cases some crappy thing that crashed your PC or refused to run because of that strange 'not enough memory' - but i have 640K of memory dammit, it's the highest a PC can have! - Note2: most have a CGA-based PC/XT back then, only the few fortunate have a 286 with EGA or *gasp* 386 with VGA, but these were known as ATs, not PCs).

But where was i living? I was living in a small Greek island, Samos, which even if it was at some point ahead of the time (when compared to other places in Greece), mostly because of two computers shops which were owned by computer people (gods to my child eyes, one of them brought us the Internet back in 1992-93 and my father got an account almost the same month), there weren't software shops - let alone game shops. Again, back then i didn't knew that such shops even existed. So what i did was simple: i went to one of these and asked for games.

'Sure, select whatever you want - it's only 1000 drachmas per disk' (1000 drachmas is around $4) the owner's girlfriend (the first female computer geek i even met - she simply knew a lot about computers, i was spending hours talking with her and the owner about computers in their shop and the first programming books - including a legendary Assembly programming book by Peter Norton, which later i learned that it was the only Assembly programming book translated to Greek - i bought, was from them) told me while she brought out a large box with lots of black 5.25" diskettes. At that point i was like wow, lots of games! I got one, went back to my computer, runned it and... nothing. It seems that it wasn't compatible with my PC, but whatever, that's life :-). Well, later i learned that it wanted a 286...

That above, of course, was piracy. I asked to buy a game and she gave me a box with copies. But again, that seemed normal: i asked the same at other software shops too and the did almost the same thing. So this is how games were bought: in boxes.

It took me a while - a lengthy while - to learn that these were copies of some diskettes called the original (by the way, i knew them as "The Original", not "prototipa" - the Greek translation of the word, so since i didn't knew English, i didn't have a meaning to associate with the word - it just sounded cool) which were made outside from Greece and only a few had them (most of them in Athens, since there was where most of software and game shops were).

Still, at around age of 16, i didn't thought that it was a bad thing to copy games or software in general. When you copy something to someone, both you and the other one have the software. This is not stealing, as some magazines were trying to convince their gamer readers. You don't lose the copied software - you still have it. It's not like stealing a car, where if you get someone's car, he loses it. When copying software no one loses. It was pretty logical to me. And again, everyone was doing it, so why should i bother?

Well, i did got bothered. It took me a lot to change my mind on these things, but it sure changed. PC Master, the computer magazine i grown up with, had a new column called 'The Dark Side of Games' where the article writer was telling some backstories or 'side stories' of the gaming industry. And the stories back then (we're talking around 1999-2000) were that lots of companies were closing because of piracy (well, that was what the article was writing anyway).

That was at the same time when i got my internet connection back, so i started reading about the topic for a while. I read people's opinions on the matter, i read lots of posts on forums (including PC Master's forum - where the topic was hot back the time, in both the forum and the paper magazine where discussions between readers were spanning lots of issues). And all these made me think about the matter again.

Copying software is a topic very important to me because it's one of the core things one can do with his/her computer and computers are one of the most important parts of my life. I simply can't think myself without a computer.

I'm not one to take things lightly (unless they are of almost no importance to me), especially for such a core issue. After thoughts and re-thoughts and lots of discussions, i came to a point which i'm strict to it in the last five years. The important part of this point is that i consider piracy to be a bad thing which harms developers. Strictly speaking, i don't consider it to be stealing, at least not with the classic and original meaning of stealing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft). Also i never considered the law when thinking about it - i don't live in a fairy world where everything is perfect and lawmakers make no mistakes (see my comment on Greece's "game outlawing" in this post (http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=8623)) and that can't be controlled by large companies who want it (of course they think it is the right thing to do after all, who gives software for free (http://www.digibarn.com/collections/newsletters/homebrew/V2_01/homebrew_V2_01_p2.jpg)?). Besides Greece didn't had any real law about software copyright until around 1993. And even today, it isn't considered a crime anyway. So law was of no importance to me.

It is purely a moral reason that i consider piracy bad. But it took me four years to learn that copying is not the way to get new games, six (from the same base as the 'four' - ie. since i started programming which was almost the same period i started using computers - there weren't much else to do back then) to learn about piracy and around a decade to consider it bad.

And i'm a programmer, thus i'm more sensitive to piracy issues.

Do you still think that people know what piracy is and that they consider it bad? I don't.

[electronicStar]

-I don't agree with the "phone home" idea. I ,as a customer, am strongly opposed to that kind of practice and would never accept such a system.
A lot of people are also not permanently connected to the internet or can't for whatever reason (work firewall, etc...). Plus if you want to setup such a system you have to make sure YOU will be able to sustain the additional work. for example will you still be able to authenticate the game in 5 years from now? ten years?
Some antivirus softwares will also flag your game as suspicious or malware.
I think if it becomes more complicated to play shareware games and the games become suspicious, consumers will just switch to one of the existing alternatives (retail,consoles) instead of jumping through hoops to play casual or semi-casual game(I would).

-In olivier's example it's intersting to note that the potrals generally don't care about warez because of the way they make money (hit driven market, game makes a lot of money in a rather short time and then fall off the chart) .Of course the games' authors should definitely not partake this point of view on the question...

-Someone mentioned the idea of a fake warez website.
what game authors could do is to set up, each one of them, a fake warez website with a lot of links to themselves, actually creating a real "nebula" or a fake warez ring, that could for example occupy the top portion of the serps. Instead of actually hosting the cracked version of the game, they could host a crippled version of the game that would display an anti piracy message or just the game's demo.
That would be a lot of work but it should be possible to use some kind of advertisement on these sites like the real warez sites do.

[Alan_3DAGames]

SillyTuna : "Can you explain how phoning home is going to stop piracy in any way?"

Hi, I think we can both agree that no real world protection system is every going to be 100% uncrackable. Its impossible to protect 100% as ultimately our products can simply be thought of as a block of data. Therefore that block of data can be altered given sufficient time and effort.

Therefore, its the time and effort that is key to __reducing__ piracy. Its not going to stop it, but it can be reduced. Some pirates crack things for bragging rights, the attitude is kind of "hey I cracked this, so look everyone, how clever I am" and with that kind of attitude, these people will not be stopped from cracking something, its simply a red rag to a bull to encourage them more. Of course, there are other forms of piracy and another form of piracy that cannot be stopped are the criminal organisations who want to create disks of games to sell in countries like China. (But then a lot of these money earning pirates are non-technical, just look at DVD copies. Its binary data on a DVD so they could do exact copies, yet instead they copy with a camcorder or video to video etc..)

However, a lot of piracy is simply the pirate wants a copy of the game. If their friend has a game or they have a game they want to give their friend then they will crack it to give it to them. It becomes a barter system. They give them one game and there friends give them another game.

That's why I say the method I was suggesting is a pragmatic solution. Its partly psychology as well as technology. If a would be pirate could simply get a copy of our games without wasting time working out how to crack it, then they would be satisfied and the same is true if they want to
give that game to their friends then they can.

The problem with piracy is not that the pirates want a copy of the games or software. Its that as a result of them wanting to copy the software, they break the protection so that anyone else can leech/copy it as well. So it spreads virally thought out the Internet. (Just as it spread years ago on floppy disks etc.).

That's why I would allow a few installs of the game from the same unlock password. The pirates get what they want, they can just reuse the unlock install password code and a few more installs can be done each month as well, but it reduces the need to waste time cracking it, so it aims to prevent bulk piracy, as the game isn't worth the effort of breaking it.

Also this kind of protection can be uses with other companies wrappers. The only thing it needs is the unlock code which is as much a way of reminding people its their responsibility to protect their unlock code. And this unlock code can be generated automatically. I simply use their email address, so people enter their email address and a small code number generated from their email address. So if they want to give the unlock code to people they have to give them their email address as well :)

A company that sells the software can easily arrange to email you each time with that customers email address and you can auto-generate an unlock code and automatically email that customer. Its all automatic.

[luggage]

A company that sells the software can easily arrange to email you each time with that customers email address and you can auto-generate an unlock code and automatically email that customer. Its all automatic.Ermm.. no they won't. I can't imagine any of the portals happy to do that.

[Alan_3DAGames]

"Ermm.. no they won't. I can't imagine any of the portals happy to do that."
I'm talking about the future as well...

We all need to be helping to prevent piracy, distributors & developers ... not just developers.

Also its not difficult, in principle for them to setup something like this.

After all, they want to stay in business as well and the business of online distribution is changing ... especially for them, as big companies are moving into online distribution who will be doing more organised server style protection systems etc..

Its also not difficult for them to arrange to send a code to the user, even if they generate the code (if they don't want to send you the email address ... though I would be suspicious of their intentions if they didn't want me to know who and how many people were buying my games from them).

[cliffski]

screw the portals. who mentioned them? Plimus can do this.

Also, its totally wrong to say people who pirate wouldnt buy anyway, I've seen direct evidence of people asking around for a pirated copy of my games, then buying them when they found no copies available. Its just not true that people are pirates or normal customers, there is (unfortunately) a big grey area.

[luggage]

The original poster (and the point of this thread) mentioned portals.

They won't just give away their email addresses because a) it's probably against their privacy policy and b) they are their customers.

Of course if you're selling the game directly you can do what you want - but not all of us want to limit our distribution that way.

[FlySim]

The absolute most important thing to consider is this. Would the person who pirated the game have bought it anyway. The answer is virtually always "absolutely not".

How do you know? I don't know either, but have seen a couple of copies bought by folks who were asking for cracks/serials on forums. I believe that you may sell some extra copies if cracks/serials are not easy to get.

[papillon]

And some pirate and then buy anyway. Absolutes are rare. :)

[luggage]

What you need to work out is - will the amount of effort\time\cost required to put in an anti-pirate scheme and the inconvenience to your legitimate customers make it worthwhile to grab some of those extra sales?

[KNau]

Any protection scheme that locks the game to one particular computer or requires the user to connect to the internet every time they play or re-register everytime they do a system restore is just begging to be cracked - if only for karma's sake. Punishing honest customers because of paranoia over the hackers is not the way to go.

The opportunity cost of doing business with the portals is that your game will be cracked that much faster. But you are trading that certainty for the equal certainty of access to hundreds of thousands of potential customers. Cream still rises and a good game still makes money, regardless of piracy.

Piracy is a reality of the business, but not the reason if you aren't selling enough copies to earn a living.

[FlySim]

What you need to work out is - will the amount of effort\time\cost required to put in an anti-pirate scheme and the inconvenience to your legitimate customers make it worthwhile to grab some of those extra sales?

Agree - I also think the size of your potential market must play into this calculation. Niche games with high conversion rates but small markets are hurt more by piracy (casual or otherwise).

And some pirate and then buy anyway.
And some pirates chew up your support time. Had a "customer" email about problems with corrupt data files. After a couple emails I figured out that he had an older cracked exe but wanted to play the new content.

[DFG]

I think Big Fish uses Trymedia's DRM. Trymedia prides themselves on being the hardest to crack and most proactive against hacks since it is their bread and butter product. I would consider emailing them and letting them know where you see your product cracked - they do visit crack forums regularly to examine this type of behavior and to improve their product

re: arcadetown

Google has not filtered out crack/warez sites yet and I have always wondered why they haven't since it would be so easy to do. They may not want to ban legit sites that have those words for just the reason you are proposing. I think discussing the issue at Matt Cutt's website (Google's chief engineer for spam) and getting his take would be worthwhile or at WebmasterWorld.com where he frequents might be useful. I would follow your lead and add those pages to my site for every game also.

Related discussions:

Site Advisor Study - http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/siteadvisor-study/

[Jack Norton]

May seems a stupid question, but... are you SURE the crack works? I ask because I saw many times crack for my games, I never downloaded them in fear of having my pc totally broken, but I saw some comments (was a sort of forum) of users complaining that "crack wasn't working".

[Olivier]

May seems a stupid question, but... are you SURE the crack works?Yes the crack I was talking about works. The download actually contains BFG's installer + modified game EXE.
I think Big Fish uses Trymedia's DRM. Trymedia prides themselves on being the hardest to crack and most proactive against hacks since it is their bread and butter product. I would consider emailing them and letting them know where you see your product cracked - they do visit crack forums regularly to examine this type of behavior and to improve their product I think I will talk about that to BFG. Hopefully they will brief Trymedia.

[soniCron]

Google has not filtered out crack/warez sites yet and I have always wondered why they haven't since it would be so easy to do. And then they should remove extremist religious websites, pornography listings, and right-wing political blogs. Maybe burn a few books while they're at it. :rolleyes:

[LilGames]

Google cannot and will not filter out sites based solely on words like "crackz" and "warez" simply because they then run the risk of filtering out legitimate websites. Indiegamer.com would get filtered out because here we are discussing the subject matter! Can you imagine the chaos?

[Sharpfish]

Google cannot and will not filter out sites based solely on words like "crackz" and "warez" simply because they then run the risk of filtering out legitimate websites. Indiegamer.com would get filtered out because here we are discussing the subject matter! Can you imagine the chaos?

I wouldn't think they would of course, I would assume they had better algorithms than that. After all they virtually OWN the internet these days (we are all hooked in via analytics, sitemaps, page rank, adwords/sense and even gmail) ;)

I think they could easily look at keywords and titles of pages and that would stop a few sites right there, legit sites that use "warez" in their text content wouldn't be hit (if just discussing it).

A real world example, I just went to google and typed in "Warez and cracks" and the first site that popped up I viewed source and here are the results:

<title>TitleEditedOut: warez, cracks, serials, iso, full downloads</title>
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="The latest warez, serials, serialz, crackz, iso, full version games, keygenz, full downloads, only direct links">
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="application, clon, apps, appz, apps, file, ftp, ftpz, ftps, hacking, warez, crack, keygen, crackz, serial, 0day, ddl, full downloads, full games, direct warez links, edonkey, xp, sms, xxx, download, icq, free, 00day, 0-dayz, cd, driver, tweaker, systems, internet, web, brutforce, network, card, cc, cardnig, zip, advanced, mpg, avi">

<meta name="Classification" content="appz, apps, ftp, ftpz, ftps, warez, full games, hottest warez, keygen, crack, full version, full download, net warez">


That is a good starting place to ban these from SERPS and anyone stupid enough to do anything like the above would also be banned. It may not solve it but would cut down on it being so easy to find.

[Sharpfish]

And then they should remove extremist religious websites, pornography listings, and right-wing political blogs. Maybe burn a few books while they're at it. :rolleyes:

No, this is not removing the right for the urls to exist only to not be INDEXED. Now frankly if legit sites can get banned on google based on a few silly f-ups from an inexperienced webmaster or overzealous use of SEO tools then surely these guys deserve it also?

If it is *illegal* then it can be ommited from the results. This isn't saying the site must be closed down, I don't want any governing body deciding what is and isn't allowed on the internet but google isn't the internet (not quite yet, regardless of what I said in my last post ;) ) they are a company providing a tool and if it's against their policy to include illegal/infringing sites then they should ban them as easily as they ban legit sites who make minor mistakes (or get scraped).

Of course they can't because if they did, every other search engine would become instantly more popular, because those searching for these things (probably in large numbers) would shift to a competitor. Someone would provide a "search for whatever you want" search engine (if Yahoo, google, msn etc were locked down) and that unrestricted engine would become the top dog. Hence unless it became LAW (world law at that) Google probably won't do this anytime soon! :)

[Adrian Lopez]

Why filter anything at all? It's bad enough that Google filters results (http://sethf.com/anticensorware/general/google-censorship.php) according to the country where the search originates, so why should Google make things even worse? A search engine should be 100% neutral except in regard to the relevancy of search results.

[Sharpfish]

Why filter anything at all? It's bad enough that Google filters results (http://sethf.com/anticensorware/general/google-censorship.php) according to the country where the search originates, so why should Google make things even worse? A search engine should be 100% neutral except in regard to the relevancy of search results.

It's a hypothetical discussion based on fighting against the casual "warez" problem, not a recomendation and by no means a cure.

Personally, I don't think they should filter anything (in fact, as i've said above it would be virtually impossible to do it with enough effect and not harm your userbase who would go to another engine), it's simply not a cure because http: is not the only source anyway.

[LilGames]

Sharpfish:
So let's say Google filters out all those meta tag keywords, what do you think happens next? The pirates just use other keywords. Suddenly "krackz" is the new leet term for it. It's a pointless battle...

[Sharpfish]

Sharpfish:
So let's say Google filters out all those meta tag keywords, what do you think happens next? The pirates just use other keywords. Suddenly "krackz" is the new leet term for it. It's a pointless battle...

The same way this line of discussion is pointless. I'm pointing out the way around the "problem" of filtering out legit sites that you brought up in your last post and now you present a new question?

I will stress this point again: IT CAN'T WORK and I admit that, anything I have said in any post has already had it's flaws revealed by myself in the same post. Therefore I am not "proposing solutions", I am merely hypothesising all the alternatives and their flaws.

I'm going back to coding now... :)