A discussion of software piracy

[ShaggE]

Originally Posted by Certifiable

Awesome! I'd say there are supporters already dunking the cyanide in the well!
(Maybe further attacks could be with Britney Spears music videos, Nsync ones, Jessica Simpson's music or TV show, Paris - not THAT video - just some brain destroying episode of "The simple life"?)

There might be laws against that kind of brutality...

[Certifiable]

Originally Posted by Anon

<snip>
I have noticed that younger kids these days are showing an aversion to piracy, more so than when I was young(er). Maybe those anti-piracy ads are working?
<snip>

WORKING?

Hell, with movies, the F.A.C.T(ed up) campaign has piracy of movies equated to the same as stealing handbags, cars and the like, and beats us over the head with all-caps "PIRACY - IS - STEALING - STEALING - IS - AGAINST - THE - LAW" like we're all retarded children, and then proceeded to leave these adverts on copies of DVD we PAY for!



Hell, TV has finally broken the camel's back with adverts IN/ON a show! Screw that, I'm watching bittorrented shows. But I will buy the DVD/Box Set of either TV or Film entertainment that I enjoy.

Of course, if gaming is reasonable with both pricing and anti-piracy(preferably the lovely system of purchasing keys - it does nicely), I'll happily pay for it, like I already have for Sam and Max : Culture Shock.

[Certifiable]

Originally Posted by ShaggE

There might be laws against that kind of brutality...

How about using the brutally annoying, unskippable adverts on DVDs then?

[Jake]

I was very sad watching Lost last night and about every 10 minutes seeing a dancing couple go spinning across the bottom of the screen and fading into the ABC logo. I don't even know what show they were promoting (because I TiVo'd passed the commercials ¬ ¬), but it was extremely lame ... and occasionally confusing, because I kept thinking they were in the show and my eye kept trying to fit them into the shot even though they were tiny and in the foreground.

We will be doing this in the next Sam & Max episode.

[numble]

Originally Posted by Jake

I was very sad watching Lost last night and about every 10 minutes seeing a dancing couple go spinning across the bottom of the screen and fading into the ABC logo. I don't even know what show they were promoting (because I TiVo'd passed the commercials ¬ ¬), but it was extremely lame ... and occasionally confusing, because I kept thinking they were in the show and my eye kept trying to fit them into the shot even though they were tiny and in the foreground.

We will be doing this in the next Sam & Max episode.

I can seriously see this being integrated into a WARP broadcast with the Bones running across the screen being chased by those monster guys. And it would work. (Which is why networks do this sort of thing now...)

[ShaggE]

Originally Posted by Jake

I was very sad watching Lost last night and about every 10 minutes seeing a dancing couple go spinning across the bottom of the screen and fading into the ABC logo. I don't even know what show they were promoting (because I TiVo'd passed the commercials ¬ ¬), but it was extremely lame ... and occasionally confusing, because I kept thinking they were in the show and my eye kept trying to fit them into the shot even though they were tiny and in the foreground.

We will be doing this in the next Sam & Max episode.

TBS is infamous for that. They now have in-show ads that take up almost half of the screen... 4 or 5 times a show. Thank gods all I watch on TV regularly is Frasier and The Simpsons, or I'd start strangling TV execs.

(You really should do that in the next episode, that would be hilarious...)

[AdamG]

Originally Posted by Jake

We will be doing this in the next Sam & Max episode.

I think this is a joke?

[Maize]

I think that the most stylish copy protection was actually in an old (but excellent) game called Starflight II. The basic protection was pretty typical: It would show you some star charts and you had to identify something or other by referring to matching star charts in the manual. That part is kind of vague in my memory now.

The neat things were that first of all, it did this only when you tried to leave the starport. That meant you could spend a long time picking out crew and configuring your ship and so on before you ran into it. At a time when every other copy protection scheme happened as soon as you launched the game, that was pretty inventive. But the part that made it really fun was that no matter what you answered, it opened the starport doors and let you go. The problem was that there was a "police" ship. If you entered the wrong code, you'd leave and fly around thinking that you defeated the copy protection (or that it didn't work) but soon enough the police would track you down. You could try to fight them or run away and it gave you just enough leeway to think maybe it was possible but you could never really manage it. And they'd state something about not having the proper clearance codes and haul you back to starport.

In theory, you could lounge around starport as long as you wanted on a pirated copy, but there wasn't THAT much to do there, and every time you left you'd get hauled back again by the cops.

In some ways it served a dual purpose because it was not only a means of preventing pirates (who didn't also copy the manual) from playing, but it allowed pirated copies to double as a demo. You got enough of a sense of what the gameplay was like by just fiddling around starport and then flying around and communicating / fighting / running from the cops that you'd probably want to buy it once you realized what was going on.

[Hector]

@Mazie: Hehe, would be quite funny if THIS happened to our beloved Freelance Police in the pirated copies...

[Udvarnoky]

Maize, the Starflight II story reminds me very much of the copy protection in Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, where you would be sent to jail if you repeatedly failed to input the correct international visa code at the airport (which also enabled you to play a good bit of the game since you don't immediately need to travel overseas.) If all copy-protections were that fun and wacky, who could complain about intrusiveness?

[marsan]

@Maize

A pretty similar protection, but still different, was the one they used on Sam & Max : Hit the road and on some of the Larry games. Like, it will ask you to "What is the color of this or that on this or that page?" and you got this manual with all these pictures. A lot to scan just to copy the game. Combining this with what you mentioned from that other game would be pretty good. Because if it is the same code everybody shall input(not random), people can just write down the code when they publish it on the net. Also, using colors or shapes people must select between, can also be more efficient than numbers.

In Hit the road it asked for the cloths of sam & max on different pages in the code book or manual or whatever...

[S3BR4]

Originally Posted by bigtopfrank

did anyone ever read about the copy protection for the game XIII? at a certain point in the game, it prevented the player from obtaining an object and had a message saying 'if you want the object buy the game'. i thought that was the most inventive (and guilt creating) piracy preventive i'd heard of.

Actually VERY BAD example. XIII had insane amounts of problems with the stupid copy protection because it also prevented huge amounts of legal customers from playing the game. It ended with them removing the entire copy protection in the last patch, to help people run the game without any problems. Of course this lead to abyssimal sales because a lot of people returned their copies and word of mouth did the rest, with the result being the cancelation of the sequel of this great game. Very sad indeed, as the game was really good (own it myself) and the ending of the game had a bad cliffhanger.

All I can suggest to telltale is keep going like now and you will see quality and good customer support will prevail in the end. Yes it sucks seeing people pirating your game, but what people forget is that piracy can also benefit developers. I know sounds crazy but just think about it. Someone might actually have downloaded a previous Sam&Max episode that he really liked, and then decided to buy the whole season. It's not as unlikely as it may sound.

Anyway, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for telltale, because the episodes keep getting better and I can't wait for the rest of the season and for the start of season 2

[AdamG]

If they're going to go through the hassle of pirating software, there's a high probably they never would've payed for it anyway. You might lose potential sales if said pirate gives copies to friends, but you do gain marketing, which means they may possibly buy future products. Sometimes you lose some with pirating, and sometimes you gain.

[Armakuni]

I have around four hundred cracked games.

These are all original games I have that I have downloaded cracks for (or made images of) so I can keep the CDs/DVDs in their boxes at all times. I hate having to be a discjockey just to play games.

So I don't pirate games but I do crack the ones I buy.

[Yandros]

Well good luck to anyone trying to crack sam and max episode 4. (Which I bought) I was curious so I, shall we say, had a poke around. The game is protected by 'SoftwarePassport - a greatly enhanced version of the Armadillo Software Protection'.

Basically it goes something like this. You open the original, it unpacks the real exe into memory and runs it as a separate thread, then shares memory across the thread (I think) using some fruity variety of API calls. You can’t get an unpacker for the armadillo packer, I didn’t bother trying any generic ones.

Anyway once you have the application running it generates a fingerprint of your hardware and sends it off to the activation server at drh.digitalriver.com with your account information. If the registration is successful the server will reply with a valid serial key and also tell you how many registrations you have left, you start with 10. I believe that means you can install your copy of the game on 10 separate computers, or 10 times on the same computer after 10 sets of hardware changes.

If the key is valid then something magical happens. I haven’t managed to work this part out. I’m not sure if the game writes into the registry, or into a file, or into itself or maybe even into some hidden file in some hidden folder deep in the recesses of the windows directory structure. But once its written there’s no getting rid of it.

And then you can launch and play the game. Which I enjoyed, very much , and was glad that it was a good deal harder than the first three.

Anyway I was curious to know why no cracks had appeared for the new game, and now I do, because it has *really* good anti-crack protection. The unfortunate part of having really good anti-crack protection is that crackers only crack for the challenge of cracking. So naturally they look for the most challenging and naturally they will hit armadillo’s system eventually.

For the meantime at least it looks as though the telltale engineers have found a sufficiently good means of protecting their games. Which means future piracy will be nil.

A cautionary note however: Remove the phone activation. This is a major weak spot. I’m no professional cracker, I only play around for fun and education, but a professional cracker could probably extract the generation algorithm which turns a fingerprint into a serial key for comparison using a low level debugger like softice. Once the algorithm is known they could simply write a generator which generates keys given fingerprints. (I know you think no one would bother for such a cheap game, but I’m betting you want to use this system on more expensive games in the future.)

[tabacco]

We definitely can't get rid of the manual activation system, since that's how we unlock people who can't unlock automatically or who aren't connected to the internet. For what it's worth, though, it's really really hard to write a key generator, although obviously I'm not going to go into detail

[ShaggE]

I completely agree with removing phone activation. That would at least eliminate potential keygens. The only problem is, that would alienate those who activate by phone.

EDIT: Damn your faster posting! :P

[tabacco]

Originally Posted by ShaggE

I completely agree with removing phone activation. That would at least eliminate potential keygens. The only problem is, that would alienate those who activate by phone.

EDIT: Damn your faster posting! :P

Faster like a fox

[Yandros]

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If they downloaded their copy of the game they must have an internet connection.

Perhaps ship the hardcopies with phone activation and don't put it on the downloadable copies?

[numble]

Yandros: Since you seem to be knowledgeable about this stuff, how often are these protection systems upgraded? Is it basically an arms race between crackers/protectors? (Just curious)