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.
[quote name='Khaiy' timestamp='1315973267' post='4861378']
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.
What if this is years later, and it isn't possible to contact the original person/company?
[/quote]
Those are kind of flimsy criticisms. If someone buys a game, and there's an issue (one that is very obviously an anti-piracy scheme of some sort), do you think that they would go on the internet and complain about bugs to anyone who would listen instead of emailing a receipt to the company? Digital sales make this sort of thing a breeze. If they would go to the trouble of complaining, I'd think that they'd take the easy step to have the company verify their purchase and then, you know, let them play the game the normal way. If your game isn't as fun as complaining on the internet, even after purchase, then you're not going to be seeing good sales in any event.
I haven't seen heavy criticism of game's bugs (even actual bugs) ruin games when the company works to resolve them unless the game is fundamentally broken, which is decidedly not the circumstance being described here. Other internet people help frustrated players through solutions (sometimes very complicated ones), nearly all of which are more convoluted and time consuming than an easily identifiable problem with an extremely simple solution. I think that you are taking a concern that is technically possible, though not especially likely, and then very very dramatically overestimating the likelihood of it happening. It's the same kind of hyperbole as when people said that online video game piracy would bankrupt the industry.
Years later, if the game is no longer available, then the verification scheme can just be disabled in a publicly released patch.
There will always be people who complain about game issues, whether it's a false positive piracy status or their graphics card not being good enough to run the game or a thousand other things. Some of these people will never be satisfied. And while developers should work to minimize those cases as much as possible so that they're limited to truly irrational customers, it's a fantasy to think that you won't have marginal cases. I remember seeing a review of StarCraft on Amazon that gave it one out of five stars because they thought it would be like Diablo and were disappointed that it wasn't-- I know it's hard to believe, an unreasonable complaint on the internet, but it happened.
If your solution is a popup only, it's an admission that you aren't going to bother to do anything about piracy. For a lot of developers, especially smaller time developers, this is probably the right approach. They don't have the money or time to invest in DRM schemes, and getting word out about the game (even via piracy) would probably help sales or the developer's reputation a lot more than however much they might otherwise earn in legal copies distributed. Anti-piracy efforts are crucial for big releases, to reap sales in the first weeks after release, but that will not be the typical developer's experience.
However, if a developer wants some kind of DRM, I would infinitely prefer something a little tongue in cheek and easy to resolve as a paying customer to paying a premium for the developer to buy into something like StarForce or an always-online verification system.
