Uh, they addressed that in the article, they didn't use much development time on this. One guy for three weeks to develop it, and extra testing time (unspecifie

Uh, they addressed that in the article, they didn't use much development time on this. One guy for three weeks to develop it, and extra testing time (unspecified) for making sure it worked, and some extra debugging time for everyone until they learned how to work with it. To me, that sounds perfectly reasonable. They didn't cripple the game for legitimate customers, and they managed to slow down the cracking of the game by two months, and it only cost a tiny fraction of the total budget. If they used the time (and skill) to make their game better, maybe more people would have bought it? I doubt it. First off, the work used for their protection wouldn't have added much to the game, because it was so little work compared to the whole. Second, the type of people that sometimes pirate games and sometimes buy games wouldn't be swayed by the quality of the game. If you already pirated the game, well, you have it. Even if you thought it was excellent, going out and buying it after you completed it to reward the developers is too much trouble. But, if everyone says the game is great, and it's not easily available in a pirated version, then those same people might go buy it instead. And I think the group of people that would buy it if they couldn't pirate it is larger than the group of people who would buy it if it was good even though they pirated it. But all of this is speculation anyway, it's so hard to actually know how well copy protection works, because there are a million factors that influence the sales of a particular game.