Copy protection is really a thing in which everyone seem to lose in some way...except the pirates.
The company implementing it really needs to because otherwise it'd be too easy to copy the game. They spend money and ressources to achieve this, I don't know, but I'm sure it can't be cheap.
The people buying the game has the risk of being one of the bad cases of copy protection problems, this can be especially aggravating if support is horrible (I've stopped buying Konami PC games because their support consists of "Tough luck")
The people cracking games will have a challenge. Some really do it for the fun challenge.
The people pirating the game need to find it online rather than finding a buddy to lend it from, and need to wait for the people cracking it to get done. They of course run the risk of malware.
Personally I'm halfway a pirate. Mainly out of laziness. I don't pirate games anymore. Got a shelf with 300+ games standing on it, still much of a casual gamer and hop from game to game rather a lot. So most of my installed games, I've gotten a crack for because I'm too lazy to turn around, and find the CD on my shelf, even if it's alphabetical it's still a bit of a chore, and then hope nothing could go wrong with the CD while using it (had a friend who's diablo expansion CD somehow got superspeed in the drive, then ejected while still spinning, sending it flying across the room and exploding against the wall after having made a 1 inch deep mark in the wall)
I would've bought Galactic civilization 2 if I played that kind of game for the sole reason that there was no copy protection, the incentive was your online account, which was the only way to download patches and upgrades...and that's only good as long as you trust the server to be there when you want the game.
Here's a fun fact. I recently had to resort to downloading a crack to make a game I own run on Windows XP. The company's support defaulted on "just buy the new gold edition!", and actually took down a patch they had up earlier that should've worked.
Here's another. In the old days when cd-roms were up-and-coming, you could choose between a partial install where some things would be left to read from the cd and a full install. The only reason to pick a full install was so that you wouldn't need to have the cd in the drive while playing. I miss those days. Seriously, the point of having hundreds of GBs of hard disk space seems a lot less when you have to dig up far less efficient mediums every time you want to play a different game.
I miss the days too when you could make a partial install and at least have a reason for keeping the disc in drive other than to validate. I have too many of my games installed because when the fancy for a particular game hits me I don't want to bother with installing and patching the game, especially if the patch becomes near impossible to find because it's old. And games like Marvel Ultimate alliance and Supreme Commander take 8+gb each. That's just over the top I think.
The whole needing the protection to play the game is a bit silly, a bother to the legitimate consumers. But without it, there really would be a lot more people who'd copy the game and not consider buying it because now they don't even need to venture on the weird intarwebs to find cracks. Most people are aware when they copy a game and patch it to fool the CD check that they're doing something wrong. But once the protection is completely gone they won't feel like it. Many would even argue "Well if you didn't want me to copy it, why didn't you bother to do anything to prevent me from doing it?"
17 pages... call me lazy but I would rather not read through all of them just to find out if I may install the game on my brother's laptop and use my serial number to unlock it so he can play it through himself as well. So... erm.. may I?
I remember Emily saying (maybe I'm wrong) somewhere that we can unlock the games on a maximum of two different computers. Is that still valid? Will I get a slap on the wrist if I do use my serial number on another's computer?
Edit: ooh, this is the wrong thread altogether Sorry.
I remember Emily saying (maybe I'm wrong) somewhere that we can unlock the games on a maximum of two different computers. Is that still valid? Will I get a slap on the wrist if I do use my serial number on another's computer?
When I bought this season, it said that one can activate it on multiple computers, but I don't remember where. Anyway, I was able to activate season two on both my windows 98 computer and my xp computer. I even had to activate it twice on windows 98, so I think the new activation system is more flexible towards multi-activation.
Edit: ooh, this is the wrong thread altogether Sorry.
That's fine. I don't even remember what this thread started with(and I'm too lazy to read it again Nah, I'll be heading off to play Grand Theft Auto 1 on my new fancy Voodoo3 3000 3dfx card instead.)
And yes, I agree with you guys. Back in the days, when two cd's where the size of a harddrive, the copy protections really made sense. But being prevented from running a game without a cd, when you got the whole cd installed on your PC already, feels a bit... wacky wheels... part duex.
17 pages... call me lazy but I would rather not read through all of them just to find out if I may install the game on my brother's laptop and use my serial number to unlock it so he can play it through himself as well. So... erm.. may I?
Back in the days, when two cd's where the size of a harddrive, the copy protections really made sense.
Back in those days there usually was no copy protection, since only a few people owned a cd-r drive and the media where still hellish expensive. Okay, after some time there where those ripped versions, but i always despised those. What sense does it make to play through a game when the ending video is missing?
Anyway, what bothers most customers about the cd-check stuff is, like marsan said, that you really need the disc for the copy protection only. On a console the game is loaded from the CD/DVD so it makes sense, but on a computer it doesn't. I guess copy protection is like mousetraps, everybody wants something working better, but there aren't really new ideas.
Back when I was on the Internet, we weren't surfing the web with graphical user interfaces and pretty pictures. NO! It was all text, and we liked it that way!
Think of how much faster your webpages would load if you didn't have images or markup. Just text. Lynx does it still though I believe, though of course it still needs to fetch the markup data.
I must say the way TTG has done copy protection on Season 1 is good. I get the download versions which I can play while I have a net connection, and while the activation server exists. And when it does go down, or I go away to a place without internet, I've got the disc which also handily contains extra material. So basically got the best of both worlds, and haven't had trouble with any of the protection methods.
Only better method I can think of at the moment would be Unreal Tournament 2004 which had disc based copy protection until a couple of months after release, whereafter copy protection was removed in an official patch.
And rumors of Trackmania United Forever seems to indicate they might remove copy protection as well, which means I don't need to fear the day I need to contact Metaboli to get 3 new activations and hope they reply.
Idea being that while the game is new there's copy protection, but once it's a bit older and the majority of sales of the "new game" has died down, they remove the purchaser annoyment features. Of course this works well because both games use an online key.
Nice one Tabacco. At one point had what was released of season 1 on my laptop while visiting my mother who's without wireless. I had made sure to activate it on the lappy before leaving, but alas I could only play the demo when I got there.
Really wasn't bothered by it since after I got the disc I could do it anyway. Just a bit surprised
I get the download versions which I can play while I have a net connection, and while the activation server exists. And when it does go down, or I go away to a place without internet, I've got the disc (...)
There are always those who bought one or two episodes and don't own the disc. If the DRM funtions weren't online anymore in 2010, they wouldn't be able to play their episodes on a new computer. That's what bothers most people when it comes to DRM.
Valve's Steam takes it to a whole new level. After Steam runs an update, every game on your list must be played at least once while you're online so that the game information can be updated. If you go offline without running the game at least once, you won't be able to play it, even if you could before, and there's no information on screen that this is how it has to be done. That's not cool at all.
As for other protections, I've recently bought two games. Another World: 15th Anniversary Edition and Simon The Sorcerer 4. They both want the CD present in my drive. Another World uses SecuROM 4.X and that's fine. Simon however uses StarForce, which is not fine. StarForce is just one of those protections that annoy because it affects so many aspects of the game, including the performance. Heavily encrypted files [the encryption is not limited to executables] are being decoded while various defensive routines are running. Nice.
The Bioshock protection that so many found to be a problem was cracked in eleven days. So was it worth the bother in the first place? Those who bought the game got pissed off [I got the 360 version, so I'm cool] and pirates got their game anyways.
I guess the golden rule would be: Don't overdo it. No DRM, no heavy stuff. Protect it so that it won't be possible to burn a copy onto another disc and that's enough. "The scene" will crack it anyway.
I'm a strong supporter of "no protection" patches for the titles after a year or two from the release date. Those who got it will be able to play it without any problems in the future and those who didn't buy it, well, after a year or two there probably is a cracked release anyway.
I am new to the Sam & Max series and have not played the game that was released in 1993 unfortunately, but since I buyed and tried Sam & Max Season 1 DVD package
I love these game-episodes and the charaters a lot. If I can get a hold of the very first adventure game with Sam & Max I would gladly invest that to my collection also.
Lookin forward to support the Telltale Game Company in their hard work with new adventure games like Sam & Max.
Unfortunately I live in Sweden and can there for not buy any of the Season 2 episodes but when the Season 2 DVD package get's released in Sweden I am the one who reserve my copy on my local website. TellTale deserves my money for believeing in the future for the adventure genre.
Comments
The company implementing it really needs to because otherwise it'd be too easy to copy the game. They spend money and ressources to achieve this, I don't know, but I'm sure it can't be cheap.
The people buying the game has the risk of being one of the bad cases of copy protection problems, this can be especially aggravating if support is horrible (I've stopped buying Konami PC games because their support consists of "Tough luck")
The people cracking games will have a challenge. Some really do it for the fun challenge.
The people pirating the game need to find it online rather than finding a buddy to lend it from, and need to wait for the people cracking it to get done. They of course run the risk of malware.
Personally I'm halfway a pirate. Mainly out of laziness. I don't pirate games anymore. Got a shelf with 300+ games standing on it, still much of a casual gamer and hop from game to game rather a lot. So most of my installed games, I've gotten a crack for because I'm too lazy to turn around, and find the CD on my shelf, even if it's alphabetical it's still a bit of a chore, and then hope nothing could go wrong with the CD while using it (had a friend who's diablo expansion CD somehow got superspeed in the drive, then ejected while still spinning, sending it flying across the room and exploding against the wall after having made a 1 inch deep mark in the wall)
I would've bought Galactic civilization 2 if I played that kind of game for the sole reason that there was no copy protection, the incentive was your online account, which was the only way to download patches and upgrades...and that's only good as long as you trust the server to be there when you want the game.
Here's another. In the old days when cd-roms were up-and-coming, you could choose between a partial install where some things would be left to read from the cd and a full install. The only reason to pick a full install was so that you wouldn't need to have the cd in the drive while playing. I miss those days. Seriously, the point of having hundreds of GBs of hard disk space seems a lot less when you have to dig up far less efficient mediums every time you want to play a different game.
The whole needing the protection to play the game is a bit silly, a bother to the legitimate consumers. But without it, there really would be a lot more people who'd copy the game and not consider buying it because now they don't even need to venture on the weird intarwebs to find cracks. Most people are aware when they copy a game and patch it to fool the CD check that they're doing something wrong. But once the protection is completely gone they won't feel like it. Many would even argue "Well if you didn't want me to copy it, why didn't you bother to do anything to prevent me from doing it?"
Sad but true.
I remember Emily saying (maybe I'm wrong) somewhere that we can unlock the games on a maximum of two different computers. Is that still valid? Will I get a slap on the wrist if I do use my serial number on another's computer?
Edit: ooh, this is the wrong thread altogether
When I bought this season, it said that one can activate it on multiple computers, but I don't remember where. Anyway, I was able to activate season two on both my windows 98 computer and my xp computer. I even had to activate it twice on windows 98, so I think the new activation system is more flexible towards multi-activation.
That's fine. I don't even remember what this thread started with
And yes, I agree with you guys. Back in the days, when two cd's where the size of a harddrive, the copy protections really made sense. But being prevented from running a game without a cd, when you got the whole cd installed on your PC already, feels a bit... wacky wheels... part duex.
You can do that just fine.
Back in those days there usually was no copy protection, since only a few people owned a cd-r drive and the media where still hellish expensive. Okay, after some time there where those ripped versions, but i always despised those. What sense does it make to play through a game when the ending video is missing?
Anyway, what bothers most customers about the cd-check stuff is, like marsan said, that you really need the disc for the copy protection only. On a console the game is loaded from the CD/DVD so it makes sense, but on a computer it doesn't. I guess copy protection is like mousetraps, everybody wants something working better, but there aren't really new ideas.
I must say the way TTG has done copy protection on Season 1 is good. I get the download versions which I can play while I have a net connection, and while the activation server exists. And when it does go down, or I go away to a place without internet, I've got the disc which also handily contains extra material. So basically got the best of both worlds, and haven't had trouble with any of the protection methods.
Only better method I can think of at the moment would be Unreal Tournament 2004 which had disc based copy protection until a couple of months after release, whereafter copy protection was removed in an official patch.
And rumors of Trackmania United Forever seems to indicate they might remove copy protection as well, which means I don't need to fear the day I need to contact Metaboli to get 3 new activations and hope they reply.
Idea being that while the game is new there's copy protection, but once it's a bit older and the majority of sales of the "new game" has died down, they remove the purchaser annoyment features. Of course this works well because both games use an online key.
In your face, DRM zealots!
Really wasn't bothered by it since after I got the disc I could do it anyway. Just a bit surprised
There are always those who bought one or two episodes and don't own the disc. If the DRM funtions weren't online anymore in 2010, they wouldn't be able to play their episodes on a new computer. That's what bothers most people when it comes to DRM.
Valve's Steam takes it to a whole new level. After Steam runs an update, every game on your list must be played at least once while you're online so that the game information can be updated. If you go offline without running the game at least once, you won't be able to play it, even if you could before, and there's no information on screen that this is how it has to be done. That's not cool at all.
As for other protections, I've recently bought two games. Another World: 15th Anniversary Edition and Simon The Sorcerer 4. They both want the CD present in my drive. Another World uses SecuROM 4.X and that's fine. Simon however uses StarForce, which is not fine. StarForce is just one of those protections that annoy because it affects so many aspects of the game, including the performance. Heavily encrypted files [the encryption is not limited to executables] are being decoded while various defensive routines are running. Nice.
The Bioshock protection that so many found to be a problem was cracked in eleven days. So was it worth the bother in the first place? Those who bought the game got pissed off [I got the 360 version, so I'm cool] and pirates got their game anyways.
I guess the golden rule would be: Don't overdo it. No DRM, no heavy stuff. Protect it so that it won't be possible to burn a copy onto another disc and that's enough. "The scene" will crack it anyway.
I'm a strong supporter of "no protection" patches for the titles after a year or two from the release date. Those who got it will be able to play it without any problems in the future and those who didn't buy it, well, after a year or two there probably is a cracked release anyway.
I am new to the Sam & Max series and have not played the game that was released in 1993 unfortunately, but since I buyed and tried Sam & Max Season 1 DVD package
I love these game-episodes and the charaters a lot. If I can get a hold of the very first adventure game with Sam & Max I would gladly invest that to my collection also.
Lookin forward to support the Telltale Game Company in their hard work with new adventure games like Sam & Max.
Unfortunately I live in Sweden and can there for not buy any of the Season 2 episodes but when the Season 2 DVD package get's released in Sweden I am the one who reserve my copy on my local website. TellTale deserves my money for believeing in the future for the adventure genre.
Thank you TellTale Games!
/Chris
Well the problem for me is that I don't have a credit card....:(
But if I could pay in another way that would be great. So I have
to wait for the release to store of Season 2.
Okey...well I prefer a invoice..but hey I can wait for the release of Season 2 here in Sweden.
To bad I can't pay via SMS but I guess it couldn't be done that way...
I enjoy Telltale Games adventure episodes of Sam & Max.
Keep e'm coming Telltale Games!