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Until someone breaks it that is. Then there will be two independent markets appearing: legitimate and cracked.
by meaty 14y ago
Until someone breaks it that is. Then there will be two independent markets appearing: legitimate and cracked.
- jerf 14y agoOnline DRM can't always be "cracked", because the "DRM" may in fact be that significant chunks of the game actually live in the cloud. For instance, if the levels can be randomized, that's easy code to put in the cloud. You can't "crack" that; you may be able to re-implement it, but that's a whole new level of effort and skill.
- meaty 14y agoEverything is cached on the device. It's only a matter of time.
- jerf 14y agoUh, no it's not. Code that lives in the cloud, lives in the cloud. Can you "crack" an MMORPG to work without a server? No. You might be able to reimplement a server, and people have for various MMORPGs, but it's not a "crack", it's a full, real software project, with all that implies. I suspect you're just chanting the Standard DRM Cant. It does not apply here. The Standard DRM Cant has a prerequisite, which is that all the content is local. DRM on movies doesn't work, because the act of consuming a movie requires that it be in front of you, in its totality. That is not true of a program; arbitrary amounts of it may live in the cloud. It is true that they can't stop you from recording your playthrough of the game, or recording the results of whatever algorithms they left in the cloud, but they darned well can stop you from having a full, real copy of the code in the cloud, and by the nature of it being in the cloud, they will control access to it. You may briefly fool their auth systems, but the balance of power is actually on their side, not yours. Just as DRM doesn't work on movies because the content in question must somehow be in your hands, your "crack" isn't going to work because the content is still in their hands.