[casual_games] Copy Protection

[Don Munsil]

>From my perspective, the best happy medium is simple speed-bump protection 
that uses simple documented interfaces and doesn't try to hide anything. 
Certainly there are successful companies out there using no copy protection 
at all (yes, even for downloadable games).

A fairly common design is to generate an unlock code by hashing the person's 
name, and stash a file (probably a text file) in the install directory with 
the name and unlock code in it. At startup the game opens the file, verifies 
that the name and the code go together by following the same hash algorithm 
used to generate the code from the name, and then either goes into "trial" 
mode or "unlocked" mode.

Obviously this is trivial to hack, but even the complex protection systems 
can be hacked. If someone is going out to the pirate sites to find a key 
generator or a patch to your game, they'll find it no matter how complex 
your system. If you go search those sites you can find generators and 
patches for some of the most complex copy protection out there, including 
$1000 software with dongles and keys generated with cryptographic hashes. 
You just want something simple to give the non-technical people an incentive 
to pay.

Also, most complex copy protection systems are vulnerable to app compat 
issues. I used to work for Microsoft application compatibility, and copy 
protection was always breaking every time we revved the OS, generally 
because they were poking around in undocumented structures that we needed to 
change.

Moreover, the simple methods make it easy to provide support. When some odd 
situation happens where someone has paid but didn't get their unlock code, 
or had to reinstall their OS and lost their code, it's trivial to shoot them 
a new one via email.

JMHO, of course.

Don

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Joe Pantuso
To: IGDA Casual Games SIG Mailing List
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2006 7:34 AM
Subject: [casual_games] Copy Protection



Hey all,

We've been kicking around the idea of featuring some single-player games in 
addition to the multi-player only approach.  This would allow us to increase 
the number of titles available quicker etc.  Before we get too far down that 
path I thought I'd ask for opinions on one of the areas that concerns me.

With the multi-player model all our games out for test and in the pipeline 
follow the protection of the game is pretty simple; without the server end 
the game is a door stop so it is impossible to pirate it.  If we accept 
existing single-player games though, these are essentially stand-alone. 
Some sort of imbedded or wrapping protection technology would have to be 
used to enforce trial/paid behavior switching and prevent casual copying.

So I ask;

1) What is 'typical' industry practice on this now? I know at least a couple 
companies out there have their own proprietary wrappers.  It seemed like at 
least a few people resent being forced into using them over stuff they 
wanted to do?

2) What wrapper or other system would you want to use ideally if you could 
use anything you want?  We can be pretty flexible since we're starting anew 
here.

3) My personal inclination is to offer a combination of an API that would 
allow the game to do things like check whether it should run as trial or 
paid, display score ladder info in-game, deliver score info at end of game, 
etc. and a wrapper that obfuscates the main exe and ensures it cannot run 
unless the TG client has authenticated the users rights to play.  Do you 
like that or do you see some hassle with that?

Thanks
-J

Joe Pantuso - CEO
TrayGames, LLC
www.traygames.com
Online multi-player casual games community






_______________________________________________
Casual_Games mailing list
Casual_Games at igda.org
http://seven.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/casual_games