Recent Topics: Your E-mail
Thanks for the thoughtful comments, as always.You guys have sent me some excellent e-mail, and here's a sampling.
First off, from a source who wishes to remain anonymous, a comment on Brad Wardell's contention that developers are more concerned about being "rock stars" than making games:
I think Brad's point about "rock star developers" is spot on. That was one of the main reasons I left the game development world - it was too immature and everyone at [studio name deleted] just wanted to make something "cool" and damn the torpedoes if it wasn't cost effective. We wasted untold amounts of time (literally months) while trying to get some of the more esoteric physics to work "just right", while I'm pulling my hair out in the background screaming that it just wasn't worth it. At [studio], it wasn't necessarily 'rock star popular' to the general populous, but rather to the interbred game developer world they were aiming at. A ridiculous waste of time which ended up sinking the studio in the end.
That's an interesting distinction, that developers aren't trying to be "rock stars" to the gaming magazines or the general public, but to each other.
Loyd Case e-mailed me with two thoughts:
First, content protetction software is a black box supplied to the developer -- and often decreed by the publisher, not the developer. You typically cannot customize the message when the copy protection check fails.
Second, if you were able to give the user a message that the copy protection kicked in, then the user will know where the content protection check resides in the code. It makes it easier for them to patch it out. It's a dance between the content creators and the people who crack the copy protection. Ideally, they just want to keep the game protected for a relatively short period of time, since early sales are often the biggest volume. Even so, day one cracks, as happened with Call of Duty 4 for the PC, occur.
That's an excellent point about copy-protection being a black box supplied to the developer. When publishers claim that such a high percentage of PC games are being stolen, though, it seems like it would make sense for them to be more creative in terms of working with the developer. What's being done now just isn't working.
His second point, about the message giving a clue to the hackers, is true, but I still wonder if a random time interval would throw them off. It's entirely true what he says about publishers just trying to protect a game from being cracked for as many days as possible--Ken Levine mentioned this after BioShock was released. In the end, they all get cracked.
Loyd also discusses this issue in an article over at Extreme Tech.
Brock Wager sent me a link to a story about what happened when Final Fantasy Chronicles: Ring of Fates (DS) was released and almost instantly cracked:
Mere hours after Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates hit store shelves today, pirated copies of the game appeared in the shady corners of the internet, posted for all the picaroons out there to download and transfer to their flashcarts.
Twenty minutes or so into the ARPG, however, many of those pirates found themselves greeted with this "Thank you for playing!!" screen and unable to progress. Players have the option of restarting the game from the last save point and playing on, but the screen reappears at random intervals.
It's not a PC game, but that's a clever approach to piracy. And the random time interval seems like it would make the security check more difficult for a hacker to find.
Finally, several of you e-mailed about the subject of convenient access. I think the moment when the music industry completely went off the rails was when it become much easier to share music among various devices you owned if you downloaded the music illegally instead of paying for it. At that point, what the music industry was doing with copy protection was guaranteed to fail.
Now, they seem to be figuring that out. What should have been an opportunity to have people listen to more music, though, instead became a horrifically expensive business lesson.
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