@Luke Maciak: and still there is the point that if your game is distributet via torrent and your users are going to download it anyways, there will be a way they can do this.
So what i believe is: the only thing you can do is reducing the people who copy it from your sold versions.

@Dr. Azrael Tod: Ok, here is the thing – downloading 8GB over a torrent is not a big thing these days. A lot of people have FIOS these days. :) I see torrents this big all the time now and no one seems to be complaining.

Most people don’t burn CD’s/DVD’s anymore. They mount the images with Demon Tools or Alcochol.

Also, I see a lot of games that are distributed as rips rather than disk images. In other words all you get is a huge .rar (or bunch of smaller ones) file and a batch script (that you run at your own peril). The script adds all the registry settings, while the rars contain the actual game files that the cracker collected after performing the installation on your system. Often such a package is trimmed down for size by removing foreign language audio files or unnecessary cinematics.

Some of these are actually made using pre-release beta or RC versions that were leaked by the testers. So the crackers can often circumvent the whole DVD9 thing.

But again, that’s only for big companies. When you are small, niche product then yes – something like this will definitely help.

@IceBrain: of course its like this.. but if noone ever starts the device it could not fail :D

The Problem with DVD9 is: if you want to seperate the Data over multiple DVDs, then you are back to either cracking the CD-Check, using virtual Drives and Images or even telling your friends how to merge those DVDs on your own.
Everything is perfectly possible, but imho it raises the bar to copy this piece of software a lot higher then the default-inclusion of SecurRom or something similar does.
The efford to download a Crack is imho not compareable to the effort of slicing the DVD9 into parts of the right size and telling your friends how they should use these.

On a lighter note, but precisely on topic, the studio CR Project RED decided to release a patch removing the DRM of their latest game: The Witcher. It will be online tomorrow on the server of the game studio. With some new content too, if I understood well (my Polish is non-existant and their English can be rusty).

i think nearly all software will eventually move online (into the ‘cloud’). partly because it has advantages and partly because it makes it much easier for software manufacturers to charge for access. it kind of annoys me because i see many products incrementally integrating online-features into their software so that eventually they can make these features “essential” and thus require all users to pay a yearly fee for access. this, to me, is one of the major annoyances of commercial software: the need to constantly grow and add new features. most software products (e.g. OS, Office software, tools, media players, etc) eventually achieve perfection — they acquire all of the features that one would expect from such an application. after that point, open-source software stays good for decades, and commercial software gets worse with every version because the manufacturers need to convince people to upgrade. this is yet another advantage (from the perspective of the software-makers) to put all software online so that there aren’t “old” versions of the software around, but everyone has to pay the same yearly fee to use your cloud-software.

Luke is right, though, that light-DRM is probably sufficient for everything outside the mainstream.

“At first: its not impossible to write the “perfect” DRM..”

That’s like saying it’s possible to build a perpetual motion device: just build one that noone wants to turn on.
DRM depends on giving the customer the encrypted contents AND the key to decrypt them and hoping they’ll never use them together :|

As for “pressing onto DVD9”, how does that protect anything? People will just use a couple of single layer DVDs instead of one.

PS: Why does WordPress requires Javascript to post comments? Bad wordpress!

As a Programmer i just have to congratulate for writing another great article… but still there are some small points where i must point out some things where you go wrong.

At first: its not impossible to write the “perfect” DRM.. not because there is one way how you could prevent every theorethicall possible crack… just because you _could_ get to a point where noone wants to bring the effort in cracking your DRM.
So from this point of view you allready archieved this on your own. Big Products can of course try to archieve this on multiple ways… one is beeing that crappy that noone wants the product anyway. ;-)

another thing i just feel the need to point out: I think there is another pretty good working copy-protection out there, keeping everyone from creating hundreds of copies and giving them to theyer friends for free.

Its called “pressing your Data onto DVD9” and is simply to expensive to create dozens of copies.
Still you can copy images and give them away via torrent or harddrive.. but you wont keep some hundred harddrives for lending them your friends and data-transfer over internet is still pretty expensive in time and money.

So i think this propably would be enough without cripling your product.

I agree with you, DRMs can work but on small enough projects that experienced crackers won’t notice or bother. What seems to work for now is the online account approach, but while this is easily justified for a MMO (along with server-side storage of your progress, to prevent piracy cheating), it’s much harder to do for single player games. EA somewhat tried it with Mass Effect and Spore, but thankfully turned back. I guess the next step would have been to store your savegames online and make them accessible only if you successfully log-in to your account…

I, like everyone, hate DRM-polluted software. If I buy a game, I won’t install it – I will download the cracked version and use that. So, in that way, I have supported the developers who created the game, but have given a virtual “up yours” to the DRMers. Though, I won’t touch an EA game (SIMS3, Spores) at all. Cracked or not.

You mean “the latter option” (re-write the copy protection mechanism), I think. What is your policy on pointing out mistakes ? Comments or email ?