The Final Answer For What To Do To Prevent Piracy [of Indie Games]

The other important point:<p>Every minute you waste on the specter of piracy is a minute you're not spending making something useful. Given the choice between spending time on people who are paying you versus the people who never will, the choice seems obvious.<p>No one is going to crow to their friends about your awesome anti-piracy mechanism. Make their life better? That would be something worth sharing.<p>Piracy is inevitable, loyal users aren't. Put effort into the fight you can win.

I have not heard of a single protection scheme that could not be broken. Not from the laziest homebrew 'protection' to the schemes used to protect 5- or 6-digit sale price engineering software, passign through every game in between.<p>If you plan on implementing a protection scheme, here's what I would want you to do. Think of the best and worst things it could do to these two classes of people: legitimate customers and pirates.<p>Pirates. Worst [for you] case: it inconveniences them for an hour. Best case: it inconveniences them up until two weeks after your release [two weeks is the usual goal for a game, Spyro was legendary in a way, and lasted two months <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirat...</a> ]<p>Customers. Best case: it inconveniences them for five seconds. Worst case: Depends on your scheme. Make it one where worst case is a one-day support e-mail away. Not where they lose all their files, are left cursing your name and treated like trash because they just wanted to move to a new computer.

Steve Jackson Games has a similar approach to protecting their ebooks:<p><a href="http://e23.sjgames.com/faq.html#protected" rel="nofollow">http://e23.sjgames.com/faq.html#protected</a><p>&#62; Q. Are the files in e23 copy protected?<p>&#62; A. No. That would interfere with your use of them.

Anyone knows Company of Heroes? It's not an indie game but a game from THQ. The developers decided that adding mechanism to it to prevent piracy is wasted money. And they were right because everybody I know bought it and the is/was a huge success.<p>Mechanism to prevent piracy are so expensive that it is not worth the money. Plus in the and the game will get cracked anyway and that means all the money you put into it was just useful for a short time.<p>Another thing about preventing piracy methods is that in most cases the paying customer are losing. I buy a game for 50 bucks from Capcom and can't play it cause they wanted to prevent piracy with a phone-home DRM. This is ridiculous.

Please tell this to big game developers that make you have a persistent internet connection to play, or only allow the key to be used 3 times etc.<p>Things like that only punish legitimate players, if it's pirated, those safeguards are removed and aren't a problem.

I disagree a bit:<p>"Whenever you find yourself starting a sentence with, "I don't want people to pirate my game, so I am going to ..." you are very close to making a big mistake."<p>There's one way to end that sentence that isn't a mistake:<p>I don't want people to pirate my game, so I am going to... Make it such a good game that they want to pay for it.<p>It actually works! Some pirates aren't convertible because they are complete jerks, or don't have money, or any number of other reasons that make conversion impossible. But quite a few are actually decent people who have needs that aren't being met. They -will- pay for a product that has value and meets their needs.<p>This article is a good example of failing to meet those needs. His piracy prevention tactics actually make it easier to pirate the game than buy it!<p>True story: I have a friend who bought some software and liked it. Then he reinstalled Windows and it wouldn't install. He contacted tech support and tried for 2 weeks to get them to fix the problem. He gave up, pirated it, and then emailed them telling him that he pirated it instead. Yes, a product he already owned. The next day they sent him a new registration code that fixed the problem. Ridiculous.

Valves approach is best- Try to make the multiplayer experience worth paying for.<p>Unfortunately, The market is being forced by execs to move to a platform that is "internet connection required" for playing single player games and the tools to do this without piracy being a issue are going to be here soon ( onlive ) - Yes, occasionally a source will leak to the public but for the most part this new system is going to be worse across the board for the consumers.<p>Sometimes 'progress' sucks.

I actually had a similar situation more recently (but with mobile apps, not games). Also asked a user to enter program-generated key when making a purchase. I don't think it's a huge problem if you explain where this key is shown inside the app. Speaking of distraction-free "buy now" webpage a reasonable solution I came up with the following solution: just ask for user e-mail (it's already provided by systems like PayPal anyway). Generate a random "user id" (better make it numeric) and send it to the user's e-mail along with activation instructions. Then user must go to another webpage on your site and enter 3 pieces of information: e-mail, id and the program key (the last one must be shown by the application). This page, if all goes well (the info is checked against the database records), generates an activation key to be entered to activate the program, which is also e-mailed (not just displayed on the webpage). This way you can control the piracy issue (because everything goes via e-mail, and also know/conrtol # of activations per user, since last step can be performed multiple times).

I kind of agree with this philosophy, to a point. However would you leave your house without locking the front door?

Why the [of Indie Games]?