5 ms·

No, if the authenticity check is client side you can hack the asm to neuter it. This is security 101 people. Don't trust what the client says.

• jiggy2011 14y ago
  The issue with games however is that often all the actual content and game that you want to get access to actually lives on the client. For example Call of Duty singleplayer campaign. If you have most of your interesting stuff on the server (e.g WoW) then of course it makes sense to do checks server side. This is why DRM is fundamentally broken for singleplayer games (or music , or movies) in that you have to trust the client.
  • rmc 14y ago
    Yes for single player games. For mulitplayer games that require a server, you only allow them to connect and do the multiplayer bit if they have paid. Simples.
    • jiggy2011 14y ago
      Not quite so simples. Your choice is either to do as these guys did and run all the servers themselves in which case you need to factor the lifetime cost of running the servers into the purchase price or charge subscriptions. If you ever take the game servers offline the game then becomes unplayable and will preclude modded servers (which were fun in games like CS) and LAN play. There's till a risk that if your game is popular enough someone will reimplement the server. So the other way to do it is to allow third party servers or build the game to work on a type P2P system (I think a lot of xbox games still work this way). At that point you are basically back to the original problem.