Suppose I made a simple little game that I think is worth charging a few bucks for.

I want to add some kind of anti-piracy protection, even if its just something very simple that a half-knowledgeable person could circumvent. I just want to be able to prevent most people from stealing it for free.

I definitely dont want to pay for any 3rd party stuff, I have zero budget for that. I'm just looking for a simple technique or two that I can implement myself to make it not worth it for the average person to try to hack.

Problem is, this is new territory for me. I have many years of programming experience, but Ive never done any anti-piracy stuff so I need some help thinking this through.

My first (and pretty naive) idea was to compile a separate version of the program for each customer, with a unique key hardcoded directly into the program. This had the benefit of being simple, but also had the drawback of being stupid Nothing stops one person from buying the game and then giving it away along with the key to everyone in the world.

I'm aware that Google has oodles of awesome information on this topic, but its a hell of a lot to wade through and I get kind of lost. I was hoping someone with a little experience could point me in a specific direction or to a specific technique, given my scenerio. That is:
-Its a fairly simple game so I dont want some crazy DRM that is more complicated than the game itself
-It will be a fairly cheap game so I guess that means I dont need to do too much in order to make it not worth hacking(?)
-I will be selling the game online via paypal or similar
-I have zero budget for buying 3rd party stuff

Quote: I want to add some kind of anti-piracy protection, even if its just something very simple that a half-knowledgeable person could circumvent. I just want to be able to prevent most people from stealing it for free.

I don't think that will work. One smart person cracks it. Then Average Joe can download it from bittorrent.

As an alternative, take a look at the Humble Indy Bundles. They tout "No DRM" as a feature. A unique selling point.

Exactly where the sweet spot is varies depending on who you ask, realistically the only type of piracy you can prevent using DRM is the casual kind (I.E , people giving a copy to a friend), the large scale piracy via torrent sites or similar channels will at best be delayed until a crack/keygen is ready and unless you are making a AAA game with a huge marketing budget those pirates are highly unlikely to buy your game on release day just because the cracked version isn't out yet.

If your game is the next big thing and all the pirates law abiding friends are having fun with the game then delaying the pirates by a week or two can have a significant effect, but even most of the really complicated and expensive DRM schemes fail to deliver in this area(Ubisoft succeeded in that area of their AC2/S7 DRM but the cost to their legitimate customers was high aswell and they did lose atleast one(mine) S7 sale by using it, if the number of pirates who bought the game was higher than the number of honest people who said "f that s***t" is impossible to say))

In your case its probably better to play the indie card (It is a very strong card), keep a reasonable price and try to build a community around the game. it won't stop piracy but it will improve your sales far more than any DRM scheme will and will cost you less.

I've always been of the opinion that Indie's make more and get more notoriety by releasing for free and asking for donations. Or releasing extra content for donations or a very small fee. Or asking for donations with a percentage going to charity.

Pirating can be a good thing for indies. Some people just will NOT pay for your game. For an indie, just getting exposure can be as important as your sales.


As for your question: unrestrictive, works well, easy to implement (cost/time), pick two. Simple key system is probably your best bet. Unless you want to go online only (which is viable these days but will definitely lose you some sales), there's not a lot of options, short of some draconian 3rd party stuff.

I think if your game is good enough to pirate, consider it a success.

I've thought about this recently and my 'current' thinking is perhaps to not bother with DRM, other than perhaps a keycode or similar. Instead to focus on providing cheap 'added value' items that could be purchased from within the game, extra game content if you like, models, maps, levels etc. The idea being you write-off the loses from people copying the game, but use the fact that people might share copies to get increased revenue from buying additional content.

Not sure if it would work, but worth trying sometime I think.

Obviously it doesn't really stop people from simply copying the extra content, but hopefuly the cheap prices and the fact that the user is clearly continuing the play the game, might give enough value to the game, that they buy extra content in order to support the developer.

use XBLIG or the App Store. They solve this problem very well.

This isn't exactly what you're asking, but IMO it's very well worth reading.

http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/jason-rohrer/freeDistribution.html