A CD key doesnt protect against piracy

Bengaboy

Bengaboy

Bengaboy

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This has recently been bugging me quite a bit.

The pc games industry has a major problem - piracy. Now I know this is common with the consoles to, but they need to be modded in some way, PCs dont - at all.

I gave a go at committing piracy "legally" (for least time spent "acquiring" a test sample, I went for "Tropico" - quite a low memory game) , legally meaning I have it, so I wouldnt be stealing this game - in a sense, if that makes sense...which it might not do lol

So I got my cd key off a certain place and bam - I have a free game.

I just think its pretty stupid that big companies like EA dont put in things to make it harder to get pirate games. Why dont they? The cd key does jack - getting a communal one only means you cant play it online - woopdee doo lol.

Also, if this kind of chat aint allowed, my bad, mod please dispose of it. I tried to be discrete as poss :D
 
I'm pretty sure this sort of chatter is allowed so long as you're not saying "ooh, 'game x' has been leaked" or "here's where to get cracks", at least that's what the dons said in the thread about Bioshock activation.

I agree with you though, serial numbers simply don't work, but to be fair neither does anything else. CD checks can be broken, CD image detection software can be broken, online activation can be broken. The only games that can't be pirated, or rather can be pirated but not be useful, are MMORPGs because you need to pay a monthly subscription for most of them. You can play them on private servers, but on your own.

The thing that worries me though is not pirates, it's the people who develop protection. Developers and publishers pay through the nose for crap like Starforce and Securom and not only does licensing these things get passed on to you, the customer, but they can actually affect your PC in a negative fashion and increase the time it takes for you to get into the game. These companies are going to continue developing more strict methods of protection and make bigger inconvenience for the legitimate buyers of games when the pirates will simply break it and not have to worry about it.

Copy protection only affects the consumer, since pirates just break it anyway. If developers didn't release crap game after crap game then maybe people would actually buy them.
 
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Making piracy harder to achieve is actually bad for the gaming industry as hard as it is to believe that.
A big percentage of hardcore gamers want to try the game and then buy it.

Make a great game with great multiplayer and cd authentication servers and people will buy it.
That is the only way forward unfortunately, where there's a will there's a way and no matter what they do someone will pirate it.

Just look at bioshock all it achieved was to anger legitimate owners of the game and stop pirates for about a week.
It can be stopped for online play there's loads of games that are not playable online without a valid key pro evolution soccer being a prime example.

I look at it this way, If you are making a single player only game then you are putting yourself out there to lose a lot of sales and if you do have a good multiplayer feature then for gods sake make sure it does a cd key check.

But then you could argue that the games developers just love games and want everyone to play their games and it's the corporate profit making capitalist
company's that are the only people being harmed.
A film director makes a film because he loves films and wants people to see his vision and would probably rather 100 million non paying people see his film than 10 million paying customers see it.

And i happen to think there's a touch of that about video games too, not everyone in this world is here to make money some people actually like pleasing people and bringing fun in to someones day.And i wouldn't be surprised if it was one of the main programmers for bioshock that released the crack.
 
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I disagree. CD Keys are a good way of protecting against piracy, in the sense that if there's a multiplayer game people like then often they will need to buy the game to play on all servers.
 
HangTime said:
I disagree. CD Keys are a good way of protecting against piracy, in the sense that if there's a multiplayer game people like then often they will need to buy the game to play on all servers.
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The vast majority dont play mp. Even Infinity Ward (COD4) said that only 10% of the people who buy the game will play mp.
 
Edinho said:
The vast majority dont play mp. Even Infinity Ward (COD4) said that only 10% of the people who buy the game will play mp.
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I'm not debating that.
I'm just saying that it does prevent piracy in regard to multiplayer games because I've seen stacks of people buy games like Quake 3 Arena, Battlefield 2 etc in order that they can play online.

It's better than most other methods I've seen (requiring disk in the drive, questions on the manual, starforce etc).

Although that said, titles which jumped on the Starforce bandwagon early (TOCA RD2) probably did quite well.
 
Cd keys are pretty useful in online play as when someone is caught cheating they can bann that particular cd key.
 
The whole piracy issue is a bit of a double edged sword. Ideally a games manufacturer or publisher can generally tell if they are doing something right by the amount of copies of a game that is sold. You are always going to get a certain amount of people who are not prepared to pay for a game either because they are simply not prepared to pay or theiving it is too easy.

Saying that, it always amazes me the way retailers mark up their products to the extent they overcharge their customers. I mean in the shop-Crysis is £34.99 and on the net £24.99. They might claim the price is a reflection of their overheads when in effect if they can't offer value for money then perhaps they shouldn't be in this line of business.

I mean it is absurd, though good for the customer when you can simply pop down to one of your supermarkets and get Bioshock for £22.99 and World in conflict for £24.99 whilst a retail Game shop sells them both for up to £34.99. The point is the retail practice of some game shops do nothing but make the situation of game piracy worse. Personally more people would be inclined to buy a game if they though they were getting a good deal. I admit though that this is only part of the problem but it is a part of the problem retailers could do something about by trying to be more competitive.
 
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look at bioshock, now some of the things it does for protection generally screw over legitimate buyers.

Pirates they have none of this 2 installs malarkey to bother with.


And the quickest cracks that come out aren't a cd key, someone just edits the .exe so it never asks for a cd key.(still need cracked servers or a better crack to play on-line but they usually come shortly after)

I personally like the galactic civ way of doing things, they put a cd key in, but it wasn't mandatory to enter it so you could install off a disk of a mates then use it etc, however if you wanted updates help tech suport etc, you needed the key.

iirc it sold quite well and didn't suffer from crippling piracy from having pretty much no drm.
 
C64 said:
Make a great game with great multiplayer and cd authentication servers and people will buy it.
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But what about single player games? It would suck if every developer effectively could only make multiplayer games, and it's not like you could even just tack a basic multiplayer onto a SP game because it would probably suck and people wouldn't want to play it online.
 
Trouble when protection goes over the top like with the witcher half the time it says insert the dvd when it in the drive and i need to reboot to play it and a lot of people cannot even play it with the dvd in the drive.
 
Not sure why my second post in this thread was deleted, because I didn't hint at where to get pirated games and/or cracks for them. I just said that I've done it when a demo wasn't available, is that against the rules?

I apologise if it is, and a passing mod can feel free to delete the above paragraph if it's also in violation.

In that post I also said, and this was my main point, that sales would increase if developers and publishers simply didn't churn out crap game after crap game as less people will pirate a game if it's good. Not only that but I am shocked when I see a game released with no demo because in this day and age it's such an easy thing to distribute and people like to know what they're buying.
 
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I actually think piracy on console's is getting worse and becoming easier as time goes by. The biggest difference I see is that while piracy is often fairly simplistic on the PC, albeit some games require messing about with different software to work like daemon tools etc, a majority of console games will work regards, providing your machine is chipped/modded. Which generally just involves nipping down to your local "dodgy" game store and getting it for less than the price of a single game.

Console piracy also has a bigger impact on the markey as we all know console games far out sell PC games, look at Bioshock for example, 360 sold over 300,000 copies in its launch week, pc managed about 60k. If by those numbers would could assume that for every 5 legit copies sold, 1 was pirated then the console market is loosing a lot more money and its piracy protection is very limited.
 
MadMossy said:
Console piracy also has a bigger impact on the markey as we all know console games far out sell PC games.
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I agree, and it has an even bigger impact on console manufacturers because, apart from Nintendo, they all sell at a loss and make up for it in game sales.

MadMossy said:
If by those numbers would could assume that for every 5 legit copies sold, 1 was pirated then the console market is loosing a lot more money and its piracy protection is very limited.
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I prefer not to make assumptions like that, it could easily be 1 in 5 or it could be 1 in 1000. Nobody knows.
 
The problem is what ever the game industry does to protect their games the pirates will always find a way around it just like in Bioshock and that was pretty tough online activation.
 
tron said:
The problem is what ever the game industry does to protect their games the pirates will always find a way around it just like in Bioshock and that was pretty tough online activation.
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which was cracked on the day of release.

i like the Bethesda Approach. no copy portection at all. guess which game i have sitting on my games shelf. you won't find Bioshock there.
 
Aod said:
i like the Bethesda Approach. no copy portection at all. guess which game i have sitting on my games shelf. you won't find Bioshock there.
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Bingo! Oblivion and Company Of Heroes had zero copy protection and Company Of Heroes didn't even need the CD in. Guess which two games sold massively that year?

The reason is because good games don't need copy protection to keep sales up.
 
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