Take On Helicopters' anti-piracy tech defended by devs
Unsuspecting pirates playing Take On Helicopters have found their vision turned watery, and not with tears of shame. Bohemia has explained its anti-piracy scheme, saying developers have a responsibility to "try to protect their company's future."
One pirate's problem in Take On Helicopters
One of the aspects of developing any game in this modern age is how to protect it, it's widely known that as soon as any game is released there are those who are looking to download it for free, who for whatever reason feel that their right is to not pay for something despite all the thousands of hours that have gone into its development. Obviously game developers have a responsibility to themselves to try to protect their company's future, but also a responsibility to the community that supports them by buying their titles, no gamer who has spent their hard earned money to buy a game wants to be playing MP against others who didn't buy their game, no addon maker wants to have things they created over countless hours downloaded and used by people who didn't buy the game it's intended for. That is why we try to come up with unique and irrefutable ways to stop people from playing our games without paying for them, that's why Take On Helicopters shipped with our unique antipiracy countermeasures.Bohemia has tinkered with cunningly degrading copied copies since 2001's Operation Flashpoint, powered by the FADE copy protection scheme, where weapons would become less accurate and powerful, and performance would decrease. Batman: Arkham Asylum famously had similar ideas, rendering the Dark Knight unable to glide across a room filled with poison gas if the game was pirated. "It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code," community manager Keir Edmonds quipped. However, Bohemia does quietly acknowledge some pirates' justification that they want "to test it before buying," saying that a Take On Helicopters demo is "in the development pipeline." As ever, the dance between developers and crackers goes on, with some claiming to have already bypassed the FADE in Take On Helicopters.
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Shacknews
replyAlice O'Connor posted a new article, Take On Helicopters' anti-piracy tech defended by devs.
Unsuspecting pirates playing Take On Helicopters have found their vision turned watery, and not with tears of shame. Bohemia has explained its anti-piracy scheme, saying developers have a responsibility to "try to protect their company's future."-
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Yeah that shit cracks me up.
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I love reading the threads about this, so I'd love to see more developers take this approach.
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I think a big problem is that a lot of people for some reason find nothing wrong with pirating. Even at work people lollygag about what they bittorrented, and its greatly annoying to me. Its part of the reason why PC is getting less love as a gaming platform these days, fuck pirates.
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So your morals should apply to everyone huh? God forbid we deviate from you as the de facto model of perfection!
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How do they react when you try to delicately tell them, you don't get support with a fucking pirated game?
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You know what would be an interesting DRM scheme? A one time use code on the box or whatever that lets you get to technical support and patch downloads.
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Somewhat relevant...
The comments on Demonoid/TPB torrents often have much more helpful tech support than the official channels. Regardless of your opinions of piracy, they often expose a lot of the shortcomings of developers in this regard.
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Developers should try this approach, only more extreme. Release several (5-10) "full versions" of the game to different torrent sites, each with unique problems that start to manifest after 30-60 minutes, and quickly erode to being unplayable. If they can initially flood torrent sites with "broken" copies, and those copies that seem to work at first glance, then leechers will seed them, thus continuing the cycle and making functional copies a hassle to obtain. It might get cleaned up after a few weeks, but if this a normal occurence, then piracy may become inconvenient to quite a few people.
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This backfired with Titan Quest, pirated copies of the game would crash at certain points. Their forums were flooded with complaints and it killed their sales.
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Jesus fuck, my retail copy of the game crashed the fuck out too. I had to e-mail Securom to send me an un-Securom'd version of the EXE every time there was a new patch.
Eventually, they stopped answering my e-mails.
Thankfully, the no-CD cracks actually worked, and eventually I re-bought the game on Steam and that seemed to have solved the issues too. -
Assassin's Creed 1 on the PC had that issue also. It got horrible feed back as being buggy because of its anti-piracy protection.
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How about instead of this retarded bullshit, focus on making a working game that people will actually want to pay for, price it intelligently, etc. etc.
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Refer to Steam to get some kind of an idea of how lowering price points drive up sales.
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I believe you could argue that they already do that. And people pirate it anyway. Because they want to.
Now the real debate would be whether or not this is worthwhile or worth the risk. It could be that some of the pirates might buy the game to get it unbroken. It could be that some of the pirates just forget the game which only accomplishes the goal of pissing them off since you were never going to see money from them anyway. And it runs a significant risk of having an issue or a bug which could cause it to show up for people with legitimate copies - look at how no one can know if you're having issues with Titan Quest because it has a bug or because you pirated it.
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I have pirated some games, i admit this. But the only reason i do it, is because i'm stuck on shitty government welfare payments that are getting shittier by the day. I can barely survive with rent and food letalone buy games. If i were getting enough money to actually buy these games, i would happily go back and buy every single game i have ever pirated, but i just can't and that is the sad truth of it.
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People not reading shacknews articles, shocker.
Bohemia has tinkered with cunningly degrading copied copies since 2001's Operation Flashpoint, powered by the FADE copy protection scheme, where weapons would become less accurate and powerful, and performance would decrease.-
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I like bohemia's take on this, a little humour. It seems far more human.
Another interesting idea would be to just enforce the lowest graphics settings.
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640 x 480 only
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The people going on Internet forums saying that the game is buggy and crashy are not disclosing that they're playing a pirated version. To the general forum-going public, it just looks like they're legitimately complaining about a shitty game.
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The way to solve this is to do somethign that breaks the game but explicitly in a way so you know the game is breaking cause you didn't pay as opposed to looking like a malfunction.
Big Mortal Kombat babality letters in the middle of the screen that read "YOU ARE A PIRATE :D" and a sample of the LazyTown song on loop ought to do it.-
the hard part is that pirates want offline play so the game can't call home. then of course they come raging out of the woodworks demanding patches and explanations why their torrented hacked cracked shit doesn't work.
so we don't have good metrics on the piracy stuff, and that bothers me. the pirates' computers are connected constantly, but demand offline play to pirate shit and evade detection.
so we are stuck shipping the game WITH the localized crap that penalizes everyone when it misfires. if everything required more persistent online authentication we're all going in the right direction.
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of course not. that's the trick though, the devs know it. like with mass effect, all those posts should have been purged.
they hold no value and are not based on the shipped game code whatsoever.
those comments need to be reserved for the torrent sites where the code came from, not on dev or pub forums and then regurgitated on gamer forums.
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a crash is not a good method, but spawning an invincible titan that promptly rapes you repeatedly is excellent.
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I like this idea, pretty hilarious. I've heard of capcom getting tech support calls from pirates too.
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Pretty ingenious. I think more devs should do this, create "dummy" versions of games that are purposely broken and then let them proliferate on torrent sites. They would go viral pretty quickly, and would easily discourage would-be piraters.
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Spyro: Year of the Dragon did this pretty well:
- http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php -
Didn't Earthbound crash and delete the save at the final boss? :)
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Guide to preventing piracy:
Step 1. Make game not suck.
Step 2. Use Steamworks. People like it, respect it, and its known to increase length and girth by at least 5%.
Step 3. Accept piracy will always happen. You wont stop it, your crazy schemes are not going to increase sales enough to offset the bad vibes it will generate towards your company.
Step 4. Stop letting the Securom salesmen into your publishers office. If you see him coming, kill him. At least knock him down hard. He is like the vaccuum cleaner salesman coming to visit the 1950's housewife door to door. Dont let him in, or your gonna lose a weeks pay to a giant sucking machine thats no better than the one you already had. -
Piracy = Testing before buying
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