Protecting software against piracy: Your suggestions here! - Page 2

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I know my post was kind of overly long, but I think you missed the point. I'm not saying all games need to become MMOs or that all games need to be on Steam or another digital distribution platform. My point is that we need to think outside the box and the afore mentioned have some good points to take from. Saying "oh no, MMOs are too different it could never work for a single player FPS" is not thinking outside the box, it's just reinforcing the box. My general idea is more centered around tying games to an account with internet access and a log in required to play. There's a lot of ways to implement and reinforce it, but I'm not going to put too much effort into devising a specific method until somebody pays me to. What's holding back the widespread use of such schemes is not feasibility due to cost or effectiveness but rather the reluctance on both sides to change the way things are done even if it would serve everybody better.

And yes you are right that you corrected me on Stardock before, except that I ended up finding out you were not entirely correct. Here's the info I received on installing a Stardock game through impulse:
"Currently installing from the Impulse archive does need a one time internet connection. They are working on a system to handle everything completely offline, but as they are hosting downloads for a number of other publishers, those other publishers also need to be satisfied with the arrangement, because not everyones' view exactly matches Stardock's."

The point being you still need an internet connection and an Impulse account to install these games.

Well here's the problem with online authentication in single player games, from a programmer's perspective.

Somewhere in the game's executable, or one of its other files, there needs to be a set of functions that handles authentication from an online server. So when the game starts, these functions get called to authenticate, then return a variable (like a 1 or a 0) that let the rest of the game know if you're allowed to play. If yes, the rest of the game loads and you start playing, if no the game throws an error message and exits.

Now a cracker comes along and knows all of this. He uses various tools to find out where those functions are and what memory addresses they use to store the return variable. Then he either removes these functions by editing the game files, adds a function that automatically stores a "yes" variable in the memory location the functions use, or changes some code so these functions just don't get called at all. Usually the last option, because it's the easiest.

Now the whole online authentication system is useless, because they game has been 'tricked' into not authenticating at all. That's the problem, code is not set in stone. It can always be altered, and it only needs to be altered once in a very small way to defeat an entire DRM scheme. This is complicated stuff we're talking about, involving disassemblers and writing in assembly code, but it only takes one person to do it.

Normally I'd agree with you, because I'm no fan of a black or white approach to anything. But you simply can't lock up software like you'd lock up a safe, doesn't matter if you do it by limiting the installs, authenticating online, encrypting everything or whatever else. It's just not possible from a technical standpoint.

I still think the only effective approach is to make the legitimate version better than the pirated version. If that means game studios have to compete with their own product then that's what it means, they're already doing this to some degree because they have to compete with the used games market. It's no accident that EA's installation limit has the side effect of destroying this market.

Nope you still missed it. That is installing a game THROUGH IMPULSE. That is as in getting it from the service.

I am talking about buying the game off the shelf. A friend of mine doesn't like to register software if he can avoid it and he played Sins of a Solar Empire out of the box without connecting to their service or registering or even using the CD key for months until he decided he wanted the patches that had become available.

In a thread where most people are very positive about Steam, let me put forward the following. I'm a Steam user myself with mostly positive experiences. However two things bother me:
#1 their pricing approach: indeed BioShock is mostly available in bargain bins now, not the €5 (let's use real money denomination ) but you should be able to get it below the 25 mark ($ or €). On steam it's still $54. I have not yet bought my copy of the game, because I am awaiting my new rig, but once that's here I want to play it and I would rather buy it through Steam. However a $30 delta is simply not realistic. Steam should really bring their pricing of older games in line with other suppliers. I would not mind paying a bit extra for the extra updating features through Steam but $30 is simply too much.

#2 I would expect a world pricing approach because of the online content and it should not matter where I am physically but instead Steam is region aware and Valve apparently has pricing agreements within regions and even some games are not available in certain regions. This is not primarily something to blame on ValvE, it is more likely that publishers entering in a Steam deal with Valve have applied those restrictions. Still, they bother me.

Now I know this is not really covering the thread topic so I'll come to that in a moment in a different post.

Ok, so I have now posted twice here without coming forward with my idea about solving piracy.

Actually what I'd really like to solve is the intellectual property issue of digital content (games, movies, books, whatever) that can be copied without cost to the copier and without quality degradation (in other words, someone that copies digital content can enjoy it with the same enjoyment as if (s)he would get the content directly from the publisher).

In the past, any form of content was coupled to a medium (tape, disk, whatever), and people were paying for the content by buying the medium. They could resell the medium once they'd consumed the content (and in fact, content creators and content providers do not get any revenues from that).

Now that publishers have lost the link to the medium, they try to protect their content in order to get revenues for it, and as we know there are no full proof protection schemes available yet, and the faulty schemes that are in place, bother legit customers that pay for the content more than that they prevent piracy.

I propose to eliminate the usefulness of piracy to the general public. In an ideal world anyone would automatically pay for what they download to their computer. The act of downloading would automatically trigger the financial transaction between buyer and publisher (would not matter where the content would be physically when the download is initiated). Obviously the price of the download must be available to the customer at all times. I do not foresee how this can be implemented in the short to midterm in a reliable way (robust against large scale piracy) but it would be a fair system.

As a intermediate solution (or one that is more efficient in terms of costs) a monthly fee will be included in your internet subscription fee. Subsequently all content will be freely available, once you've payed this fee, which should be proportional to the total amount of content (K/M/G/TBytes) that you download. These fees are collected and then distributed to the publishers (like royalty payments to publishers and/or artists when their music is broadcasted). The distribution scheme will be linked to how often their particular content has been downloaded. Every bit of content should contain some code that reports back to the publisher and the office that oversees the fee distribution (lets call them CMO in this post) that it has been downloaded. Is this system piracy proof? No, you can still hack the reporting code. However, the general public will have no benefit at all because they will be paying their fees regardlessly, so it will not save them any money. How can you protect legit customers from accidentally running hacked content? Well, you can alert the user that he is running content that is not reporting back to the CMO or anyone else, and you can simply show the recipient of the report in case someone tries to redirect funds. Checksums on the content will enable the CMO to determine if the content has been manipulated (providers have to submit their content to the CMO to be registered as the reimbursable party for this particular content, and a weighing factor is provided that relates in some way to the amount of effort of creating the content, as to get a fair share of the fee, and there could be a defined period after which there is no reimbursement anymore, basically freeing the information from copyright)

Sure there is some overhead/redtape involved but this scheme could be efficiently implemented worldwide, and it would allow for charging differently in different regions (for instance cheaper downloads for emerging economies).

Probably all kinds of details need to be figured out (and the devil may be in the details) but the principle looks sound to me. So... have I solved the piracy problem?

Your numbers don't really stack up. Remember that the end retailer (the shop) is not the publisher. The publisher is buying the game (you use a figure of $5 per copy, but I suspect in the real world it's a mixture of flat-rate with a per-copy rate on top), but then reselling to the retailer. A retailer will usually work on at least a 100% markup - i.e. the publisher is selling the game for less than $30 to the retailer.

This further increases the gap between digital sales and bricks and mortar sales - by removing one of the steps between producer and consumer (in this case, removing the retailer), you increase profits. It's called vertical integration.

It's no surprise, then, that many game publishers are trying to move towards online sales and away from standard bricks-and-mortar retail.

EA are different, because a lot of their biggest selling games (Sims, Spore etc) are not aimed at enthusiasts but "casual" gamers. My guess is that EA assume that casual gamers are more likely to buy instore than online, and so they need to keep that avenue open to them.

Depends on the improvement. Like I said before, online content is very difficult to crack. It's easy to crack online authentication, which is just a lock on the game, but cracking something like access to the Sporepedia is much harder.

I bought my copy of Orange Box in a store, and I can resell it if I want. EA can't just tell EB games not to sell its used console games because the law allows people to resell their games. It's called the First Sale Doctrine.

Because I don't believe this is the type of situation where you can just stop "some" pirates. It would be, if everyone had to crack the game themselves. But they don't. It takes 1 person to crack the game and upload it to bittorrent, and from there any Joe Sixpack can download it and play it hassle free. Either nobody can crack the game, or everyone can crack it. There's no middle ground in this problem.

All this DRM might stop casual piracy, but that's a shallow victory when the game still ends up on bittorrent for all to download. And judging by the number of people who download Britney Spears and Rihanna, there's a lot of 'average' people out there who can use bittorrent.

This is something I've thought about before, but there's some big problems to solve before it would be realistic. First, as you mentioned, there's the problem of knowing which content you downloaded. I can tell you with certainty that tagging content with some kind of reporting code will get cracked and removed in no time at all. Even worse it could simply be altered to point to whoever the cracker wants, even himself or some dummy corporation he's set up.

So once that's cracked we don't have a method of determining who gets what share of each user's monthly fee. And everyone is going to want a piece of it. Game studios, record labels, Hollywood, book publishers, software publishers etc.

There certainly are many ways in which publishers could stop or at least strongly discourage stores like EB from selling used games. In fact they pretty much have done that with used PC games in such stores. The reason being that without support from game companies like EA chain retailers like EB wouldn't survive. I've seen many independent game stores open up and try to survive mostly on used game sales and they all fail.

My whole point though is that the second hand market is not really a concern for game companies, and any concern they have is directly related to piracy anyways. That's why stores like EB do not sell used PC games. The idea that somebody might play a game through and sell it once they are done is not a problem. The idea that they might play it, make a copy which they can continue to use and then resell it is where the problem is.

That's why DRM and SecuRom exists (or part of why it exists). A pirated copy is almost better in this case as it includes a crack to play the game...well from a gamers' point of view.

Also, console games have a different EULA (which is usually found in the booklet included with the game). Ironically, the end user doesn't have to agree with the EULA in order to purchase and play the game. Instead, they are being warned about current government legistlation (such as "you can't copy and resale the disk", etc).

The agreement between the publishers and the distributors are therefore different between consoles, PC, and other media products.

Alex, I understand your objection to not actually owning the game disc. That's why I focus more on changing how we think about playing games rather than specifics on how it's done. And it's not just players accepting that we are as you say basically renting games. Game companies have to accept that in order to get people to buy into such a model they have to make it worth it.
But to answer your question heres how such a service could work in the instance of a games like Oblivion. First off there can be a multiplayer aspect. Some RPGs have started to introduce multiplayer capabilities alongside single player gameplay. Two Worlds is one that comes to mind and now Fable 2 is supposed to have a multiplayer component. But an even more creative method would be to build a single player RPG with an ever changing living world based off remote server data. Currently major changes are made through expansion packs and mods. But why not integrate them directly into the game on a smaller scale but on a daily basis. Changes to scenary, NPCs (maybe they just change their damn clothes), new missions/objectives, updates to voice acting, etc. You could even control in game weather. I'm not trying to lay out a comprehensive plan for implementing such a thing but it's something to think about.

Regardless of ownership of games or simply renting I don't want a different service from every publisher. It's just stupid. Right now I have Windows Update, Steam, Impulse, EA Download Manager, Kaspersky, A few spyware apps, firefox, and I'm sure other stuff that I can't think of at the moment running in their own happy little space in ram self-updating. It's getting to be kind of ridiculous.

My machine has 4 cores and 8 gigs of ram, so I don't see a hit to performance. However, on my other box I have to turn almost all of this crap off to pull decent frames in a lot of games. Every company that goes out and makes this great new customer friendly distribrution/update method is just adding more freaking bloatware. I don't think that is the answer.

Steam/Impulse/EA Download Manager are not necessary for these systems. They just put them there to try and get you hooked into their product (that's why Steam tries to sell you something every time you sign in). You can have the same functionality without having the additional app running in the background. MMOs do it. When you run the game you get a little window similar to what Steam has for logging in but it only runs at the start of the game.

This string has gotten kinda long so if I repeat something someone has said I apologize.

OK... you need to go and review this... Since the release of Bioshock all EA titles sold on STEAM still carry the SecurRom DRM. So even though Valve is awesome and I like the way they do things, they still have to give their clients (EA) what they want.

Solutions:
1. Make all games for PC only available via a distributor like STEAM. But make sure they have policies against doubling up DRM such as STEAM + SecurRom. This is massive over kill. Also by using moving everything to download companies can save money on media (discs, boxes, artwork, anything else physical) and also save money on the shelf space they rent from the stores that sell them. They can then turn that money around and invest it in producing better titles that would produce more sales and thus adding to the great circle of life.

2. Instead of distribution online or on disc (CD, DVD, BlueRay you know it's coming) use some kind of encrypted flash drive. You buy the game on the flash drive. The security prevents it from being formatted or copied but allows read/write access to play and save your games. Kinda like a game cartridge on crack. Could someone find a way around this? Possibly, but it should make things more difficult.

3. Something like an ID card. Basically, you have a flash drive that is pre-coded and can not be altered. You take it with you when you go buy a game or plug into your USB slot if you buy online. Then the game you buy is registered to that key and that key only. If you are buying it as a gift then you pay for the game and they give you some kind of receipt that you give to the person and they go and get the game or download it after it has been coded to their ID card. In order to play the game your ID card has to be plugged into the PC. This is my least favorite option as it is very "Where are your papers?"-ish but it would work. You could register your card with whatever vendors you buy from in order to get games.

4. Google could buy EA and make things right with the world.

And as always... Shame on you EA

Bizarrely, that's already the case and has been for a long time. I actually bothered to read a few EULAs once, and that's exactly what it says. Microsoft can ask for your Windows CD back if they want!

I understand the point you were trying to make though - there is far more freedom to share the physical medium with consoles.
I guess the publishers recognise that - they tolerate it because unlike with PC games, sharing a console game doesn't duplicate the content (console owners don't borrow a game to copy it - they borrow to play it and maybe return). Of course, in theory this is still a lost sale (assuming the lendee would have bought if unable to borrow) - but maybe this is factored into the price? (Console games cost about 50% more in the UK than PC games).

call function is_game_legit

is_game_legit
If game is legitimate then return true
else return false;
end is_game_legit;

:::::::CRACK:::::::

is_game_legit
return true;
end is_game_legit;


SAME OLD PROBLEM. Any sort of checking/verification is susceptible to this. As I said in my post:

The problem is, most of these measures can circumvented, as long as the problem is kept in the digital domain.