7 ms·

Keeping the Pirates at Bay

44 points by ssp 17y ago

swolchok 17y ago
Interesting despite its age, but the title needs (2001).
eli 17y ago
I'm sure making your game suck if it detects a crack is annoying for the pirates, but it also means that most of the people who play crack versions of your game will just assume it sucks. That can't be good for its word of mouth.
- Herring 17y ago
  You have to make it really obvious. >Some people even thought it was funny when the fairy character, who normally offers players helpful advice, instead told them they were playing a modified game. I found that hilarious.
micrypt 17y ago
Perhaps approaching gaming as a streamed service in the manner proposed by OnLIVE (http://www.onlive.com/ http://www.onlive.com/) could be a viable means of reducing piracy. It seems possible for a sizeable games publisher to move to a subscription based business model.
- javanix 17y ago
  Except games can't and will never be run off-site as a service - the technical capabilities for OnLIVE are not and will never be available in the US. More and more games will be moved to models that require a persistent internet connection though - the article does a good job of pointing out that winning the battle for just two months is nearly "good enough".
  - fnid2 17y ago
    It's difficult to look at the computer world, the rise of the internet, and onlive itself and not see that games are really no different than other aspects of computing, which have already migrated to the cloud... How many "nevers" have been obliterated by advancements in technology?
  - grinich 17y ago
    I saw Steve Perlman give a pretty impressive demo at MIT this fall. In the computer world, never say never.
  - jsz0 17y ago
    It's very do-able today. The key is just having the server located close enough for latency to not be a problem. ISP partnering would be their best bet. Run the service and let ISPs resell it -- locate the servers in their headends/datacenters. If you traceroute something and look at your first few hops it's easy to see how it would work. <10-20MS should be fine.
  - Luc 17y ago
    I don't think there are technical limitations holding this back. You can already get the necessary low-latency video encoding as open-source software, even: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=249 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=249 Gaikai seems to have pretty good business model to make it happen, too - better than OnLive anyway.
whughes 17y ago
Note: This is a PlayStation game! It's a key fact which you have to keep in mind when reading this article and considering it for use on PCs. Console copy protection is today important, but not critical as PC copy protection is. Chances are, this protection would have been instantly defeated on a reasonably high-profile PC game.
- ajg1977 17y ago
  That's quite an assertion - care to back it up with your reasons? FWIW I've written similar "time bomb" crack prevention techniques that were used in a couple of reasonably high-profile PC games (e.g. 500k to several million copies sold). Some of the strategies were inspired by this article when it was originally published in gdmag, others were based on certain benefits of being a PC title. What helped a lot was that we had a surprisingly sensible publisher who acknowledged that safe disc prevention was (at the time, I'm not sure about now) virtually worthless and allowed us to ship without it. This gave us the benefit of knowing ahead of time the hashes for various areas of our binary and being able to use and layer those into different checks. While non of these were crack-proof (or even close to it!) they did serve their purpose and prevent any zero-day or launch window warez releases - which as the author states in this article is about the best you can really hope for.
  - viraptor 17y ago
    I always wanted to ask this to someone who makes the games/protections: do you take into consideration the sales lost because of the protection? I know about games from friends mostly - if I can see it, I may be inclined to buy it. That's the only reason for me to buy the game really, as I don't follow the gaming news at all. Naturally they have illegal copies sometimes - that means if the protection is good, they cannot show me the game, or show me only something that suddenly breaks down (because of protection). That means I'm not going to be impressed by the game and will never want to have it myself. Example: I never bought Settlers (2? 3? - the one that exchanged production of pigs and gold when you were playing a copy) - I've seen it and thought it's just so buggy it's not worth getting. Learnt about the copy protection a lot later. I know many people who buy games this way - mostly grownups who want to have some fun once in a while but aren't interested in gaming every day. They also earn and spend their own money, so usually they're more ok with buying a good game than teens who need to request it from parents / buy for allowance / .... I've always seen advanced copy protection as games producers shooting themselves in the foot. But maybe I'm just not part of the market that makes a difference for producers. Do you remember if this was an issue at all?
zach 17y ago
More recently, the developers of the iPhone game BloodnGuns built an anti-piracy level that would only be seen by those playing a cracked version. It placed the player in an arena with a never-ending wave of killer chickens armed only with the weakest weapon and no way to advance. The forum posts went like: "Hi I can’t seem to get past the first level. I’m too slow. Only a pistol. Too many chickens. Any help with that? Suggestions?" It was great.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Well, a few people probably bothered with the forums. Everyone else just figured that the game sucked, and made a mental note to never buy (or pirate) your games again. And they told their friends.
  - chrischen 17y ago
    They probably aren't very inclined to buy games in the first place, though I do think they should be made aware they are using a crippled or demo version.
  - DenisM 17y ago
    And that's great - the less demand there is from the illegitimate users the less compelled the cracker are to crack.
- fragmede 17y ago
  They should have made it a pirate level where pirates with eyepatches steal your points.
jrockway 17y ago
It is ironic that so much development time went into features designed for people that didn't pay for it. If they used the time (and skill) to make their game better, maybe more people would have bought it? (The computing landscape has also changed significantly since 2001. With hardware support for virtualization, techniques like debugger detection just don't work. The attacker can make his computer behave however he wants, at a level far beyond your control.) It's probably best to just ignore piracy, because your game is going to be pirated no matter how advanced you think your protection is. Remember, people take their xboxes into expensive microprocessor fabs and use electron microscopes to figure out how to bypass the piracy detection. And, there is only one of you, but millions of people with plenty of time to spare that want to break your copy protection just to spite you. You are going to lose, so why even waste your time? The only people hurt by piracy protection are you and your users -- and that's a pretty silly demographic to try and hurt. If your game is good, plenty of people will pay for it. Don't worry about the pirates; they wouldn't have bought your game anyway.
- chrischen 17y ago
  He said their goal was to slow them down, not stop them. Also their piracy protection didn't really hurt paying customers, while it massively decreased value to pirates (2 month delay). There will be times if you go out of your way to screw pirates and it will be worth it, and other times it won't.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    Also their piracy protection didn't really hurt paying customers Except for the CPU and programmer resources that could be used for something else.
    - chrischen 17y ago
      That doesn't hurt customers. If anything that just doesn't give customers as much as they could have. But if you read my (short) post you'd know about the cost/benefit aspect too.
- 17y ago
Tichy 17y ago
"If YOTD follows the same trend, as it almost certainly will, those two to three months when pirated versions were unavailable must have reduced the overall level and impact of piracy" Don't they know for sure? What a wasted opportunity.
- Estragon 17y ago
  How would you do the experiment?
  - Tichy 17y ago
    I guess it's impossible to create a real test, but at least they should have some numbers? I don't know enough about the gaming industry. Maybe if it sells well, it could either be because it is one of the rare hit items, or because of the reduced piracy. Or maybe they could see some obvious deviation from the sales of "normal" games.
wedesoft 17y ago
Looks like the computer game of the future will be played by both gamers and developers: DRM.
grumpyfart 17y ago
So how long did it take for crack to come out? He mentions 2-3 months but he never says the actual time, or have I missed it? Because he says they bypassed in a different way maybe it was only 2 weeks.
Apreche 17y ago
The thing that struck me was that there was not a word about sales figures in this article. Yes, it seems they gave the pirates a hard time with their DRM. However, I think it is fairly obvious that those pirates had little to no interest in actually playing the game. They just like breaking DRM, that part is the fun for them. I think it is also obvious that people who got the game from these DRM-crackers, and actually did want to play it, would not have ever paid for it. Even if the DRM was perfect, would sales have gone up? In all that time people were waiting for a successful crack, how many people gave up on pirating and bought the game? I'm betting the numbers were ludicrously small. The developers would have been better off not spending any money whatsoever developing this copy protection. Unless they can provide evidence of a large increase in sales, I call BS. All they did was spend money developing a free game of "crack the DRM" to a bunch of nerds.
- teamonkey 17y ago
  Sales figures are a closely guarded secret. Today, rough (monthly) console sales figures in the US are published, but not PC games, digital downloads etc. I don't think that there should be any obligation for the publisher to release sales figures. However, without some hard figures it's really difficult to make any sort of judgement about whether DRM (and a crack) actually affects sales or not.
- rick888 17y ago
  "I think it is also obvious that people who got the game from these DRM-crackers, and actually did want to play it, would not have ever paid for it." You expect sales figures yet you say it's "obvious" that people that got the game from DRM crackers would never pay for it? Where are your facts to back this up? Do you really have any proof beyond a blanket statement? "The developers would have been better off not spending any money whatsoever developing this copy protection. Unless they can provide evidence of a large increase in sales, I call BS. All they did was spend money developing a free game of "crack the DRM" to a bunch of nerds." Right. We see how well that works. You seem to forget that DRM was created only recently, in response to mass piracy. You would think that people would take the hint and stop pirating games. If this happened, schemes like DRM would start to disappear because companies would not want to waste the effort or the money. The next step for game developers is software as a service, which has already started to happen.
vilda 17y ago
Methods used by Skype to protect its integrity is described in presentation by Philippe Biondi and Fabrice Desclaux: http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-biondi/bh-eu-06-biondi-up.pdf http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-... Definitely worth reading - actually the integrity tests consume more CPU than VoIP itself.
- binarray2000 17y ago
  This reminds me of Cubase 3 (software for music production). In 2005 the scene group H2O needed 1500 manhours for cracking it, from their NFO (iNFO notice from the scene group about the release) for Steinberg.Cubase.SX.v3.0.2.623: H2O does it again.........!!! Although everybody thought that Syncrosoft and Steinberg had found the ultimate protection, we prove otherwise. We admit that it's getting harder and harder to do and this one may possibly be the last one we do. Due to the complex nature of the protection we thought of approaching it from another direction. The Emulation is now done on driver-level, which means that the Emu essentially mimics a dongle, look in the License Control Center to view the applications the Emu supports. By writing the Emu at driver-level we probably went beyond cracking an application. The amount of effort invested in this project is staggering, estimated at over 1500 manhours during cracking, developing & testing, and probably will never be done again. (...) Note to protection coders: Unbelievable way you transform an application. We estimate that between 30% & 40% of the application are wrapped in the script protection. Protection is one thing but this surely effects an application performance. You probably could get a performance gain of 50% without the protection!! NFO for Steinberg.Cubase.SX.v3.1.1.944 has more details on the way the protection works and its impact on performance: Note to Steinberg/End-Users: It seems that our prior Release Note stirred something in the Audio Community (Yes, we can read). To get some of the facts straight we're going to reveal some secrets about the copy protection itself, and why we stated that it severely impacts performance. Info from Syncrosoft website: [QUOTE] "Syncrosoft's protection solution is different from mainstream software copy protection methods. It is based on a secure executer, the eLicenser, and the patented MCFACT technology" "At runtime, the transformed program code does not reveal its semantics. The eLicenser's crypto-services are called from time to time by the transformed program code." "The transformed program code is represented as tables in the computers memory. An adversary can not reverse- engineer or debug the tables, because a reverse transformation from the tables to original program code is not feasible. If the tables are manipulated, the transformed program code will crash or produce invalid results."[ENDQUOTE] So it's not crackable?... Now here is the explanation for what really goes on: Transformation is based on replacing ordinary machine code into tables representing results from calculations Example: Adding 2 numbers. Normal machine-code would look something like: Add eax, ebx This will take 1 CPU cycle to execute. Now comes MCFACT: 1) Transform the first number into a table 2) Transform the second number into a table 3) Do allot of manipulation of these tables 4) More manipulation 5) Transform the Tables back to the numbers 6) Add the 2 numbers This entire piece takes up hundreds of machine code lines and a lot of loops inside this code...estimated CPU-cycles <insert number greater than 1 here> No performance loss? We don't think so.......... And this code runs all the time!!......The dongle in fact is only called 1 out of 10 times inside these scripts......... A good example is the protection build in the midi- part. This is entirely wrapped in the script-crap. Try moving a note and swirl it around.....you should notice a sluggishness in the movement. In fact u will notice an improvement in version 3.1 prior to the 3.0 release. This is not due to improvements made by Steinberg (the midi-engine is still the same) but improvements made by Syncrosoft! (They optimized the script engine)!!!!!!! To give the end user some peace of mind: the scripts aren't built into the real-time audio-engine.....this is impossible because of the performance loss u would have from the MCFACT.
teamonkey 17y ago
For a more recent example of this technique, see Batman: Arkham Asylum http://www.neowin.net/news/deliberate-glitch-foils-batman-arkham-asylum-pirates http://www.neowin.net/news/deliberate-glitch-foils-batman-ar... "It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code."
scotty79 17y ago
Are there any research that indicates that presence or absence of copy protection has any effect on sales?
- teamonkey 17y ago
  All the major games publishers do it but they don't make the results public.
  - scotty79 17y ago
    How can you measure that? You can't make a grand premiere of the same game with and without protection.
bediger 17y ago
Is "keeping the pirates at bay" really really worth the effort, heartache, and whatever you didn't go (opportunity cost) because you were working on "protection" from something that will happen anyway? If so, does the rest of society agree with having this cost imposed on them? I personally never play these games anyway, so I don't care about the problems with the games that arise from you guys spending your best effort on copy-protection, but I do care if you want me to finance your idiocy via draconian copyright laws.

44 points by ssp 17y ago

Interesting despite its age, but the title needs (2001).

eli 17y ago

I'm sure making your game suck if it detects a crack is annoying for the pirates, but it also means that most of the people who play crack versions of your game will just assume it sucks. That can't be good for its word of mouth.

Herring 17y ago
You have to make it really obvious. >Some people even thought it was funny when the fairy character, who normally offers players helpful advice, instead told them they were playing a modified game. I found that hilarious.

micrypt 17y ago

Perhaps approaching gaming as a streamed service in the manner proposed by OnLIVE (http://www.onlive.com/ http://www.onlive.com/) could be a viable means of reducing piracy. It seems possible for a sizeable games publisher to move to a subscription based business model.

javanix 17y ago
Except games can't and will never be run off-site as a service - the technical capabilities for OnLIVE are not and will never be available in the US. More and more games will be moved to models that require a persistent internet connection though - the article does a good job of pointing out that winning the battle for just two months is nearly "good enough".
- fnid2 17y ago
  It's difficult to look at the computer world, the rise of the internet, and onlive itself and not see that games are really no different than other aspects of computing, which have already migrated to the cloud... How many "nevers" have been obliterated by advancements in technology?
- grinich 17y ago
  I saw Steve Perlman give a pretty impressive demo at MIT this fall. In the computer world, never say never.
- jsz0 17y ago
  It's very do-able today. The key is just having the server located close enough for latency to not be a problem. ISP partnering would be their best bet. Run the service and let ISPs resell it -- locate the servers in their headends/datacenters. If you traceroute something and look at your first few hops it's easy to see how it would work. <10-20MS should be fine.
- Luc 17y ago
  I don't think there are technical limitations holding this back. You can already get the necessary low-latency video encoding as open-source software, even: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=249 http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=249 Gaikai seems to have pretty good business model to make it happen, too - better than OnLive anyway.

whughes 17y ago

Note: This is a PlayStation game! It's a key fact which you have to keep in mind when reading this article and considering it for use on PCs. Console copy protection is today important, but not critical as PC copy protection is. Chances are, this protection would have been instantly defeated on a reasonably high-profile PC game.

ajg1977 17y ago
That's quite an assertion - care to back it up with your reasons? FWIW I've written similar "time bomb" crack prevention techniques that were used in a couple of reasonably high-profile PC games (e.g. 500k to several million copies sold). Some of the strategies were inspired by this article when it was originally published in gdmag, others were based on certain benefits of being a PC title. What helped a lot was that we had a surprisingly sensible publisher who acknowledged that safe disc prevention was (at the time, I'm not sure about now) virtually worthless and allowed us to ship without it. This gave us the benefit of knowing ahead of time the hashes for various areas of our binary and being able to use and layer those into different checks. While non of these were crack-proof (or even close to it!) they did serve their purpose and prevent any zero-day or launch window warez releases - which as the author states in this article is about the best you can really hope for.
- viraptor 17y ago
  I always wanted to ask this to someone who makes the games/protections: do you take into consideration the sales lost because of the protection? I know about games from friends mostly - if I can see it, I may be inclined to buy it. That's the only reason for me to buy the game really, as I don't follow the gaming news at all. Naturally they have illegal copies sometimes - that means if the protection is good, they cannot show me the game, or show me only something that suddenly breaks down (because of protection). That means I'm not going to be impressed by the game and will never want to have it myself. Example: I never bought Settlers (2? 3? - the one that exchanged production of pigs and gold when you were playing a copy) - I've seen it and thought it's just so buggy it's not worth getting. Learnt about the copy protection a lot later. I know many people who buy games this way - mostly grownups who want to have some fun once in a while but aren't interested in gaming every day. They also earn and spend their own money, so usually they're more ok with buying a good game than teens who need to request it from parents / buy for allowance / .... I've always seen advanced copy protection as games producers shooting themselves in the foot. But maybe I'm just not part of the market that makes a difference for producers. Do you remember if this was an issue at all?

zach 17y ago

More recently, the developers of the iPhone game BloodnGuns built an anti-piracy level that would only be seen by those playing a cracked version. It placed the player in an arena with a never-ending wave of killer chickens armed only with the weakest weapon and no way to advance. The forum posts went like: "Hi I can’t seem to get past the first level. I’m too slow. Only a pistol. Too many chickens. Any help with that? Suggestions?" It was great.

jrockway 17y ago
Well, a few people probably bothered with the forums. Everyone else just figured that the game sucked, and made a mental note to never buy (or pirate) your games again. And they told their friends.
- chrischen 17y ago
  They probably aren't very inclined to buy games in the first place, though I do think they should be made aware they are using a crippled or demo version.
- DenisM 17y ago
  And that's great - the less demand there is from the illegitimate users the less compelled the cracker are to crack.
fragmede 17y ago
They should have made it a pirate level where pirates with eyepatches steal your points.

jrockway 17y ago

It is ironic that so much development time went into features designed for people that didn't pay for it. If they used the time (and skill) to make their game better, maybe more people would have bought it? (The computing landscape has also changed significantly since 2001. With hardware support for virtualization, techniques like debugger detection just don't work. The attacker can make his computer behave however he wants, at a level far beyond your control.) It's probably best to just ignore piracy, because your game is going to be pirated no matter how advanced you think your protection is. Remember, people take their xboxes into expensive microprocessor fabs and use electron microscopes to figure out how to bypass the piracy detection. And, there is only one of you, but millions of people with plenty of time to spare that want to break your copy protection just to spite you. You are going to lose, so why even waste your time? The only people hurt by piracy protection are you and your users -- and that's a pretty silly demographic to try and hurt. If your game is good, plenty of people will pay for it. Don't worry about the pirates; they wouldn't have bought your game anyway.

chrischen 17y ago
He said their goal was to slow them down, not stop them. Also their piracy protection didn't really hurt paying customers, while it massively decreased value to pirates (2 month delay). There will be times if you go out of your way to screw pirates and it will be worth it, and other times it won't.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Also their piracy protection didn't really hurt paying customers Except for the CPU and programmer resources that could be used for something else.
  - chrischen 17y ago
    That doesn't hurt customers. If anything that just doesn't give customers as much as they could have. But if you read my (short) post you'd know about the cost/benefit aspect too.
17y ago

Tichy 17y ago

"If YOTD follows the same trend, as it almost certainly will, those two to three months when pirated versions were unavailable must have reduced the overall level and impact of piracy" Don't they know for sure? What a wasted opportunity.

Estragon 17y ago
How would you do the experiment?
- Tichy 17y ago
  I guess it's impossible to create a real test, but at least they should have some numbers? I don't know enough about the gaming industry. Maybe if it sells well, it could either be because it is one of the rare hit items, or because of the reduced piracy. Or maybe they could see some obvious deviation from the sales of "normal" games.

wedesoft 17y ago

Looks like the computer game of the future will be played by both gamers and developers: DRM.

grumpyfart 17y ago

So how long did it take for crack to come out? He mentions 2-3 months but he never says the actual time, or have I missed it? Because he says they bypassed in a different way maybe it was only 2 weeks.

Apreche 17y ago

The thing that struck me was that there was not a word about sales figures in this article. Yes, it seems they gave the pirates a hard time with their DRM. However, I think it is fairly obvious that those pirates had little to no interest in actually playing the game. They just like breaking DRM, that part is the fun for them. I think it is also obvious that people who got the game from these DRM-crackers, and actually did want to play it, would not have ever paid for it. Even if the DRM was perfect, would sales have gone up? In all that time people were waiting for a successful crack, how many people gave up on pirating and bought the game? I'm betting the numbers were ludicrously small. The developers would have been better off not spending any money whatsoever developing this copy protection. Unless they can provide evidence of a large increase in sales, I call BS. All they did was spend money developing a free game of "crack the DRM" to a bunch of nerds.

teamonkey 17y ago
Sales figures are a closely guarded secret. Today, rough (monthly) console sales figures in the US are published, but not PC games, digital downloads etc. I don't think that there should be any obligation for the publisher to release sales figures. However, without some hard figures it's really difficult to make any sort of judgement about whether DRM (and a crack) actually affects sales or not.
rick888 17y ago
"I think it is also obvious that people who got the game from these DRM-crackers, and actually did want to play it, would not have ever paid for it." You expect sales figures yet you say it's "obvious" that people that got the game from DRM crackers would never pay for it? Where are your facts to back this up? Do you really have any proof beyond a blanket statement? "The developers would have been better off not spending any money whatsoever developing this copy protection. Unless they can provide evidence of a large increase in sales, I call BS. All they did was spend money developing a free game of "crack the DRM" to a bunch of nerds." Right. We see how well that works. You seem to forget that DRM was created only recently, in response to mass piracy. You would think that people would take the hint and stop pirating games. If this happened, schemes like DRM would start to disappear because companies would not want to waste the effort or the money. The next step for game developers is software as a service, which has already started to happen.

vilda 17y ago

Methods used by Skype to protect its integrity is described in presentation by Philippe Biondi and Fabrice Desclaux: http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-biondi/bh-eu-06-biondi-up.pdf http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-... Definitely worth reading - actually the integrity tests consume more CPU than VoIP itself.

binarray2000 17y ago
This reminds me of Cubase 3 (software for music production). In 2005 the scene group H2O needed 1500 manhours for cracking it, from their NFO (iNFO notice from the scene group about the release) for Steinberg.Cubase.SX.v3.0.2.623: H2O does it again.........!!! Although everybody thought that Syncrosoft and Steinberg had found the ultimate protection, we prove otherwise. We admit that it's getting harder and harder to do and this one may possibly be the last one we do. Due to the complex nature of the protection we thought of approaching it from another direction. The Emulation is now done on driver-level, which means that the Emu essentially mimics a dongle, look in the License Control Center to view the applications the Emu supports. By writing the Emu at driver-level we probably went beyond cracking an application. The amount of effort invested in this project is staggering, estimated at over 1500 manhours during cracking, developing & testing, and probably will never be done again. (...) Note to protection coders: Unbelievable way you transform an application. We estimate that between 30% & 40% of the application are wrapped in the script protection. Protection is one thing but this surely effects an application performance. You probably could get a performance gain of 50% without the protection!! NFO for Steinberg.Cubase.SX.v3.1.1.944 has more details on the way the protection works and its impact on performance: Note to Steinberg/End-Users: It seems that our prior Release Note stirred something in the Audio Community (Yes, we can read). To get some of the facts straight we're going to reveal some secrets about the copy protection itself, and why we stated that it severely impacts performance. Info from Syncrosoft website: [QUOTE] "Syncrosoft's protection solution is different from mainstream software copy protection methods. It is based on a secure executer, the eLicenser, and the patented MCFACT technology" "At runtime, the transformed program code does not reveal its semantics. The eLicenser's crypto-services are called from time to time by the transformed program code." "The transformed program code is represented as tables in the computers memory. An adversary can not reverse- engineer or debug the tables, because a reverse transformation from the tables to original program code is not feasible. If the tables are manipulated, the transformed program code will crash or produce invalid results."[ENDQUOTE] So it's not crackable?... Now here is the explanation for what really goes on: Transformation is based on replacing ordinary machine code into tables representing results from calculations Example: Adding 2 numbers. Normal machine-code would look something like: Add eax, ebx This will take 1 CPU cycle to execute. Now comes MCFACT: 1) Transform the first number into a table 2) Transform the second number into a table 3) Do allot of manipulation of these tables 4) More manipulation 5) Transform the Tables back to the numbers 6) Add the 2 numbers This entire piece takes up hundreds of machine code lines and a lot of loops inside this code...estimated CPU-cycles <insert number greater than 1 here> No performance loss? We don't think so.......... And this code runs all the time!!......The dongle in fact is only called 1 out of 10 times inside these scripts......... A good example is the protection build in the midi- part. This is entirely wrapped in the script-crap. Try moving a note and swirl it around.....you should notice a sluggishness in the movement. In fact u will notice an improvement in version 3.1 prior to the 3.0 release. This is not due to improvements made by Steinberg (the midi-engine is still the same) but improvements made by Syncrosoft! (They optimized the script engine)!!!!!!! To give the end user some peace of mind: the scripts aren't built into the real-time audio-engine.....this is impossible because of the performance loss u would have from the MCFACT.

teamonkey 17y ago

For a more recent example of this technique, see Batman: Arkham Asylum http://www.neowin.net/news/deliberate-glitch-foils-batman-arkham-asylum-pirates http://www.neowin.net/news/deliberate-glitch-foils-batman-ar... "It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code."

scotty79 17y ago

Are there any research that indicates that presence or absence of copy protection has any effect on sales?

teamonkey 17y ago
All the major games publishers do it but they don't make the results public.
- scotty79 17y ago
  How can you measure that? You can't make a grand premiere of the same game with and without protection.

bediger 17y ago

Is "keeping the pirates at bay" really really worth the effort, heartache, and whatever you didn't go (opportunity cost) because you were working on "protection" from something that will happen anyway? If so, does the rest of society agree with having this cost imposed on them? I personally never play these games anyway, so I don't care about the problems with the games that arise from you guys spending your best effort on copy-protection, but I do care if you want me to finance your idiocy via draconian copyright laws.