I have exactly 126 games in my Steam list, and that's approximately 2/3 of all the PC games I own.AceDiamond said:
I sure as hell want nothing to do with keeping track of separate USB devices for each specific game. It's way too much of a hassle.
In Another Castle: The Only DRM That Works
- Thread starter SavingPrincess
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I sure as hell want nothing to do with keeping track of separate USB devices for each specific game. It's way too much of a hassle.
The problem with that is that HDDs have moving parts (unless you want to pay $1300+ for 500 GB), and they are much more likely to fail, on average, than a CD drive. Plus, it's significantly more expensive to sell HDDs (which are ~$10 for a game-sized one) compared to DVD/Blu-Ray (which is <$1 per).RedMenace said:
Are you kidding? Cartridges are awesome. They've squashed N64 sized games onto a wafer thin cartridge. Imagine what could be done with the sizes we previously had.SavingPrincess said:
Also, I think the usb thing is a great idea. I'm not sure what some of these people are thinking, but nless you insure a game, if you lose/break it, you buy another if you really want.
No matter how significant a title that game is within the Korean market, that's still only one country. A game which is only significant in one country vs. games which are massive globally? I wonder which are going to get more attention from people trying to crack them...SavingPrincess said:
The other reason why this copy protection system would fall like all the rest if it were used for major titles, whereas a cloud computing based solution would not, is because when someone has the game and the USB key, they have all the components of the copy protection available to investigate and reverse engineer.
With a cloud based solution where actual computation is taking place off the user's machine, the source code of the remote section is not present for the user, so any potential cracker would have to recreate it from scratch, and would have no immediate way of telling whether they had done so successfully, because even if their patch worked the first time that code was called, it might not work the second time in different circumstances.
My god can you imagine the price hike that would come from that? We would never be able to afford the bloody things. That is why they moved away from cartridges in the first place. Although something like the "red ray" or the "blu lazer" would be a smart move on the anti piracy end of things. Can you imagine how long it would take for someone to D/L a 500 gb game? Now that is an effective DRM lol.RedMenace said:
Rawr, I cover this in the OP, read the OP.squid5580 said:
What do you do with Xbox games? What happens if you lose the disc? How do you store so many games? Read the OP please.
Thanks, I find that when people actually read the entire OP instead of skimming and forming an opinion, they actually see how this is a benefit and probably the least obtrusive DRM imaginable while still protecting publishers.Georgie_Leech said:
It annoys me when people talk about "Cracking" the DRM when in effect the USB piece is a physical piece that stores saves and profiles and such.. why the HELL would anyone want to have 23 "USB emulators" for every pirated game out there?
The professional (FAA certified) version of X-Plane 9 uses a software dongle to authenticate the software as well as add the necessary features for professional pilot training.
Dongles are great, but they do have some drawbacks... Losing them being the most obvious.
Dongles are great, but they do have some drawbacks... Losing them being the most obvious.
I like the idea, I don't like the price hikes(why do we have to pay more for what other peopl do?), but I have another question- If I've spent 110$ on the 360 version of Fallout 3 and all the DLC, do you guys consider it legally OK to pirate it for PC? I mean, I bought the 360 version and legally own the intellectual property, why is is stealing to simply transfer the intellectual property to another platform?
Why would anyone need 23 usb emulators when all they really need is the one unless they plan on pirating and playing multiple games at once. You still have yet to make a convincing arguement that copying the usb drive before the consumer makes a profile is all that would be needed to crack it. Sure it may not be as easy as I make it sound but if pirates can devise a crack to trick games to run that require authentification from the devs servers within a day I don't see how something like this will slow them down let alone stop them. Except for the extra hardware now required which is great for the USB drive makers but they are the only ones who would win.SavingPrincess said:
Now as for the dongle vs disc and potential loss. I have a 9 month old daughter. She gets into everything that isn't nailed down. Now if I were to leave a disc or a disc and case within her reach and she got to them (and it has happened shinies are shinies) well it is my fault if something gets broke but at the same time I would have to be blind not to see she has a disc in her grimy little paws. The dongle is a different story. The dongle is small, easily hidden. I also have a dog who would think the dongle is a chew toy. It is a disaster waiting to happen in my house.
Also you guys are wrong about cartridges being unpirateable. Way back in the day I had a Colecovision. I was at a friends house one day and he had a huge box of Atari games and a nifty little black box. The black box plugged into the front of the Coleco and let it play any Atari game.
This is something I speak to multiple times in the OP. I even provide context and a storage solution (having them in DVD/Blu-Ray style cases along with the install disc so they can be shelved easily). PC users have just been spoiled in this regard. What happens when you lose a DS game?tsb247 said:
I'm guessing you don't own a Nintendo DS... heh.squid5580 said:
Seriously though, I don't think this would be a problem if given the proper storage solution (like I speak to in the OP). If you could snap these babies into a DVD/Blu-Ray case along with the disc and keep them up on the shelf right next to your PS3/360 games, would it really be that troublesome to keep track of them? Where's the personal responsibility? I realize you're not for ANY form of DRM, but using this in the retail sector would likely have an impact on piracy. It just has to be done "right" and with the player in mind. There needs to be some incentive, like you say, for the gamer to WANT the USB "Cartridge" with the game and not go out of his/her way to use some elaborate "emulation"-based piracy system.
What "recovered profit' are you talking about? You think that the average pirate would actually buy stuff because he now has to double click a .bat file that runs both the 2kb emulator and the game instead of the .exe file? Especially if the game is even more expensive and clumsy due to the extra hardware? No, it will actually drive MORE potential customers to piracy because buying games would be even more of a hassle.SavingPrincess said:
We are not "spoiled", we are progression. There is NOTHING good about your idea of going 25 years. Disk based games were invited because cartridges were inefficient. Steam, Battle.net, XBL/PSN marketplaces etc are all invented because disk based media is becoming outdated. You are failing to factor in that having 2 objects to keep track of is even more annoying then one, which is the very reason for the recent move away from physical objects. And because other products have the same drawback, it means that those products are flawed, not that it's a good idea to make something where the problem is even bigger because it already exists. We still find unexploded WWII bombs here every time we dig foundations for a new building but I'm pretty sure that you won't like it if I were to bury a landmine on your doorstep.
tl:dr version: Hardware dongles are regularly cracked, and DRM is really only meant to protect long enough to make the sales figures desired.
The hardware USB dongles are crackable, and have been defeated frequently (Like the 3D modeling suite Maya). While having a hardware dongle with some sort of encrypted key on it is a higher barrier to piracy, it's still possible for two reasons:
1. Uncontrolled access to the dongle which contains the encryption key somewhere, and has some way of getting it.
2. Uncontrolled access to the software which may or may not implement the security features properly to take full advantage of the dongle protections. Even if it does, transfer of the encrypted key still happens during execution and can be worked around or found.
There's also another problem. Using hardware dongles for the consumer market drastically increases the attack surface of the protection, especially if a game maker is lazy and uses the same type of key and code within several games. If a pirate breaks one they can break all of them. Since reimplementing the security code for each new game isn't at all feasible, and since paying for or finding different hardware types every time is expensive, the industry isn't very likely to move there unless software DRM just isn't working well enough to keep piracy down.
This isn't to say anything about DJMax:Trilogy, however. They might have found something that works. The point of DRM, like any access control (locks, keycards, scanners, etc) is really just to prevent access for a certain amount of time. For door locks, that's long enough for security to respond. For DRM, that's long enough for retail sales to go through the normal cycle until the game is eventually pulled from the shelves, without suffering a pirate crack and the noticeable sudden drop in sales.
The hardware USB dongles are crackable, and have been defeated frequently (Like the 3D modeling suite Maya). While having a hardware dongle with some sort of encrypted key on it is a higher barrier to piracy, it's still possible for two reasons:
1. Uncontrolled access to the dongle which contains the encryption key somewhere, and has some way of getting it.
2. Uncontrolled access to the software which may or may not implement the security features properly to take full advantage of the dongle protections. Even if it does, transfer of the encrypted key still happens during execution and can be worked around or found.
There's also another problem. Using hardware dongles for the consumer market drastically increases the attack surface of the protection, especially if a game maker is lazy and uses the same type of key and code within several games. If a pirate breaks one they can break all of them. Since reimplementing the security code for each new game isn't at all feasible, and since paying for or finding different hardware types every time is expensive, the industry isn't very likely to move there unless software DRM just isn't working well enough to keep piracy down.
This isn't to say anything about DJMax:Trilogy, however. They might have found something that works. The point of DRM, like any access control (locks, keycards, scanners, etc) is really just to prevent access for a certain amount of time. For door locks, that's long enough for security to respond. For DRM, that's long enough for retail sales to go through the normal cycle until the game is eventually pulled from the shelves, without suffering a pirate crack and the noticeable sudden drop in sales.
If the core of the games code will only pull "Save/Profile" information from a specific piece of external hardware, how "effective" can a crack really be? It reminds me of a glitch in the "Vista Compatible" version of Myst that pre-patch would cause the game to search for a file on the "A:\" drive for a save file and prevent you from saving a game. Plus with so much DLC these days, the game itself can be patched with incentive at regular intervals to counteract any sort of "emulation" of the drive itself. If you can work into each function of the code, separate ways of accessing said drive and varied differentiating "checks" into the functions of having a external source of save/profile information, a "hacker" would literally have to go line by line of decompiled code and alter it in order for the game to function properly. It's not as simple as the USB dongles included in "software" that they have now, it's a "game-centric" tool that developers can use for various game functions.Ossum said:
It's doable, and would be much less annoying than the "always connected to the internets" version of DRM they're trying now.
Yes, it's doable. But no hacker actually has to go line-by-line; they simply need to figure out how the checks are being made (and such methods are far more robust than scanning code by hand) and patch all the calls to look at some other device, like a generic USB drive, with automated tools. It really comes down to the code eventually doing a "look for x device" check, and changing x.SavingPrincess said:
Besides, unless you ship only half a game you can't really give an incentive for pirates to download patches that'll break the cracks. They'll play the base game as shipped and forego the rest, or just wait until the next wave of cracks are out.
The larger point I'd hoped to make is that DRM, like all other security devices, can only hope to achieve a minimum time to break, given uncontrolled access. All DRM is doing is trying to slow down the cracks long enough to not harm first wave retail sales.
Of course they'll say they're trying to stop piracy, but really they're just trying to slow down pirates long enough to make initial sales figures, until the game stops being shipped as new.
You say its the only one that doesn't work, but believe it or not, Assassins Creed 2 still hasn't been cracked by pirates. Ubisoft may have hit upon a solution, unfortunately.
Nor has it been cracked by Ubisoft apparently? As in the servers don't really work that well... as in the go down a lot... as in the only people who can't play the game are people that paid for it... as in it doesn't work.Sneaklemming said:
