I didn't read the entire thread so this might have been mentioned, but why not release an all-around patch and require each user to go through password validation like when logging into Battlenet or using the same email scheme the OP mentioned for all updates. Then, if the authentication succeeds, which it VERY likely won't for illegitimate copies, seed the legit user with a new hash and thereby invalidate all illegitimate copies without any hassle at all.

The effect is essentially that when the legit user updates the game, he or she will cause all copies made of his/her game to become duds and not run when they try to connect to the server. There's nothing you can do against offline hacks, though.

You can also send the original buyer an email when his hash is encountered N times, saying that there's a chance that his copy has been pirated, together with an update link that allows the user to install a small patch that updates his hash, causing all illegal copies to become invalidated.

Wolfenstein 3D is a 20 year old game, and if you have it legally, you can still play it in DosBox today.

If you buy a game from today, and go 20 years forward. Will you still be able to play it in an emulator that emulates today's hardware on the hardware of 2030?

If no, and this no is not due to technical reasons, then it has unacceptable DRM imho.

Wolfenstein 3D is a 20 year old game, and if you have it legally, you can still play it in DosBox today.

Well if you have it illegally can't you do the same thing?

There is a shifting paradigm from games as goods to games as services; this is fairly true of all entertainment media with digital distribution bursting onto the scene.

The minority is always the most vocal. It's generally also the most irrelevant. As I mentioned, it is important to make sure your detection system is very tolerant and robust. As long as this is the case, I don't see any problem with exposing pirates and making their lives harder. Yes, there may be false positives, but these can be kept to an absolutely minimum. It's a tradeoff.

Annoying paying customers is okay, and their views are "irrelevant"? And yes, they will be vocal (and rightly so), creating a bad name for the product. The absolute minimum here should be zero.

Also, you kill any chance of these people ever coming back to play/buy any of your games because they don't want to mess with a broken product.

People say this all the time, and it's generally nonsense. Boycott this, boycott that, and two weeks later everybody has forgotten about it.[/quote]He's not talking about a boycott. A boycott implies a mass organised attempt to never buy from a company, which is obviously harder. But on an individual level, it's commonplace for people to say, not visit a restaurant again when they had a bad experience. When you're just one person in a very large market, this is easy for customers to do.

Let's take an extreme example. Assassins Creed 2 had one of the worst, most intrusive and most controversial DRM systems to date, with bugs and flaws that massively affected legitimate players. And you know how that influenced sales ? Well, look:[/quote]Yes it's true, you can make money even if your software is full of bugs. Is gamedev.net a place that we should encourage that it's okay to write buggy software, because if you're a big enough company with enough marketing, you'll still get sales? I'm not sure that's a good idea in principle anyway - nor am I sure it works for small companies and indie producers (the only ones who are going to be asking about DRM schemes on a forum).

Lots of games companies used to (I don't know if they still do) require the CD in the machine. The fact that they could get away with this, and people still bought because they had no choice if they wanted to be ethical, doesn't change the fact that it turned out to be a bonkers idea, now that CD drives are rarely used, with many machines doing away with them altogether.

If you want to argue that you can still get away with making loads of money by annoying customers, sure, but don't pretend that it's a reasonable idea in any other sense. The question of whether you can get away with it, and the question of whether a particular DRM scheme will cause problems, are not the same. (A pirate can get often away with pirating your game, but does that make it okay?)

Note also the number one problem with DRM schemes: only one person needs to crack it, and then anyone pirating no longer has to live with the limitations that genuine customers have to live with.

So what do we learn from this ? Even the worst DRM will not majorly impact sales if the product and marketing is good. It will however severely impact piracy over the first weeks with the highest financial importance. [/quote]Where is your evidence that DRM increased the sales?

I do really like the idea of putting players with confirmed (or at least very highly likely to be) pirated copies into very difficult situations or otherwise erode the playing experience. Change all equipment the player can use from [item name] to Pirate [item name], with terrible stats, and the item description describes how because so many people obtained items without paying manufacturers started making crappy items instead. Or every NPC tells the player "Go blow yourself, pirate" at the end of every dialogue, and every time the player turns their back the NPC attacks and kills them, or robs them blind. Shopkeepers refuse to sell to the player, or only at insanely high prices. Lots of stuff to let the pirate run the game, but not really enjoy it.

The best part is in the case of a false positive, the player can make their case to you by presenting a receipt and the DRM is probably fixable without a huge amount of trouble. If done correctly, there wouldn't even be many of these to deal with.

But would they do this? Or would they just think that the game is a load of rubbish, and complain about the bugs? (Even if it did only affect people who had pirated it, there's still a risk they would do this.) Messing with game behaviour, rather than just a simple explicit message, is going to have this risk.

What if this is years later, and it isn't possible to contact the original person/company?

[quote name='Lode' timestamp='1316077459' post='4861972']
Wolfenstein 3D is a 20 year old game, and if you have it legally, you can still play it in DosBox today.

Well if you have it illegally can't you do the same thing?[/quote]Yes, and? People pirating it would likely still be able to play it even if there was DRM, since this can be removed.

There is a shifting paradigm from games as goods to games as services; this is fairly true of all entertainment media with digital distribution bursting onto the scene.[/quote]Which is not a good thing. And I'm not sure that's true with online media - last time I looked, buying non-DRM mp3s was easy. There have been tales of companies selling DRM audio, which often ends with situations where paying customers can no longer play their music when the company goes under. It seems to be specifically the games industry which is trying to insist on DRM online, not entertainment.

Yes, and? People pirating it would likely still be able to play it even if there was DRM, since this can be removed.

But then the problem remains unsolved. If the problem is piracy, ignoring piracy in favor of someone being able to play a game in 20 years doesn't feed your children.

Which is not a good thing. And I'm not sure that's true with online media - last time I looked, buying non-DRM mp3s was easy. There have been tales of companies selling DRM audio, which often ends with situations where paying customers can no longer play their music when the company goes under. It seems to be specifically the games industry which is trying to insist on DRM online, not entertainment.
[/quote]
It's not a good thing iyo. I'm fine with it. I used to be a subscriber to gamefly and loved it (moved out of the country, so it no longer applies ...) and still subscribe to netflix. I'd use hulu every day if it were available here; same with the bbc iplayer. Similar stories for pandora/grooveshark/whatever.

I'd much rather have the market adapt to it's new product than force a square peg into a round hole resulting in people who want the old product being unhappy with the product and people who want the new product having to pay more.

tldr: too bad for you. The market is going that way, and if you don't like it you're just going to have to settle for not consuming media legally.

Cracking a game would then amount to ... (the only realistic approach) illegally obtaining the master keys or unencrypted binaries from the publisher over an insider / hacker.

If we look at just a handful of events: the leaking of Half Life 2's source code, the pre-launch leak of the Spore gold master, Sony's recent multiple-week shutdown after they were hacked, and that's just off the top of my head... You get the general idea: publishers are not in the security business.

We aren't talking about stealing secrets from the Pentagon here - we are talking about corporate offices, staffed by 9-5 office workers. If their IT department has dedicated security experts, I would be impressed; their physical security is probably not a whole lot better, and I sincerely doubt that all their employees have been trained to identify/resist social engineering or coercion...

The absolute minimum here should be zero.

Come on - think realistically for a minute. Even Microsoft can't guarantee that with their verification tool, which is why they don't shut illegal copies down. They still get the odd false positive and have implemented a secondary voluntary procedure that you have to undertake to complete the verification for good. That is to say: you cannot have an absolute like that in an imperfect world. As a paying customer I am very aware of DRM and the potential issues with it, but I do not assume that any company will give up a ginormous share of their profits (or DRM) just to make sure the final 0.0001-0.001% of its customers (myself included) are safe from any and all possible misplacement of their €20-50. I'm happy to potentially become collateral damage (well, not really) if the odds of that happening are minuscule and the company's response is appropriate and swift. I sometimes make promises I can't keep to other people so I guess existentially me and game companies are even.

Come on - think realistically for a minute. Even Microsoft can't guarantee that with their verification tool, which is why they don't shut illegal copies down. They still get the odd false positive and have implemented a secondary voluntary procedure that you have to undertake to complete the verification for good.

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Had that computer just stopped working when it lost genuine status, I would probably be writing very angry emails about how awful Microsoft products are, instead...

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