I firmly and
wholeheartedly believe that piracy protection in games are a scam,
that takes advantage of gullible publishers by prying on their fears.
No sales person wants to lose potential revenue, with some
exceptions. The idea is sound and sensible. If someone can make an
illegal copy of the game that other people can download for free, no
money is made, so in order to prevent this dastardly deed from
occurring a sinister software is added to authenticate the product
upon start up, or in the background while the software is running.
Lets use Monster hunter world as an example, Capcom, has implemented
a software from a company called Denuvo which uses precious system
resources to see if the game is legit. Since this occurs the only one
punished are legit owners like me playing it on Steam. Because the
software uses a lot of cpu, which causes some lag, long loading times
and general instability. A friend of mine has it even worse, Denuvo
causes too much stress on the processor and it causes the computer to
reboot. This happens despite his ability to run the game without any
problem. Due to the piracy protection causing problems for the
service it causes a general loss of revenue, due to people demanding
a refund because the game runs like crap and to add insult to injury,
buying the license from the company itself cost money, that could
have been earned through legit sales.
In fact, games are
cracked in less than a week after launch, be it an online or offline
game, this has been going on since digital entertainment has been
around. It never works and it is a pain in the buttocks to deal with.
One of the most vile and old examples I can recall is a nefarious
software known as Starforce. It came with a couple of games among
them was Worms Mayhem. Starforce is generally known to throttle and
destroy disc drives inside the computer. Install that worms game
along with the malicious software and suddenly out of the blue the
cdrom drive is not working anymore or just runs very slowly.
If I where to go
further back, the Amiga 500, a wonderful pc with many great games
that run on noisy and slow booting floppy drives also had pirate
protection. To prevent users from copying the content onto another
floppy and thereby ending up with an extra copy of the game.
Since space was
limited, developers usually added key words into the manual, such as
in Monkey Island, where I had to look up what grog was made of in the
manual to get past the first screen. Hackers cracked this the moment
they got a hold of a legit game copy. Pirate copies was apparetnly
very easy to aquire even back then and the service providers often
included a fancy animated logo with a custom sound track, proudly
proclaiming that they are the ones that hacked the game. Every now
and then they even added a trainer to make the game easier to
complete. In the end the only one punished was anyone without the
manual, that actually spent money on the game.
To summarize: A game developer uses money to buy piracy protection.
Hackers break the protection in a couple of days.
Legit owners get the shaft.
The developer and publisher loses sales.
Only the piracy protection software provider wins.
Zaceron signing out
And have a look see,
I’m writing a fantasy story
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