
Gaming's most fiendish anti-piracy tricks - cssndrx
http://www.gamesradar.com/f/gamings-most-fiendish-anti-piracy-tricks/a-2010022516730628047
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cssndrx
Heard of one game manufacturer that willfully distributed a version of their
game on torrent. The torrented version of the game came bundled with a live
webcam virus. They then made a website to stream the pirates on webcam. Ouch.

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ivancho
So you didn't find a story of a legit game manifacturer commiting multiple
felonies just to embarass those darn pirates a little .. implausible?

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bryanlarsen
Neutering game play is a particularly bad way to punish pirates -- they're
likely to tell all their friends that the "game sucks" and leave bad reviews
on the web. Bad reviews don't deter the "try before you buy" pirate crowd near
as much as they deter legitimate purchasers.

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wccrawford
One thing you'd think they'd learn: DRM schemes like this punish legit
customers more often than pirates.

Most of these can be fixed with a JPG scan.

The ones that modify the game can be fixed with a drm crack... With the side
benefit that the cracked games are guaranteed to never mess up, where the real
game did mess up for legit players sometimes.

The 'secret code' ones can all be solved easier with a keygen/lookup than
actually doing the work... And of course, only pirates will even know there's
a keygen/lookup program out there. And if they lose it, they just re-download
it, unlike the physical media.

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raarky
I wonder if any game companies have secretly released their own pirate
version, complete with money making dodgy-ware, to try and get some money
back.

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loup-vaillant
_Back?_ That's assuming the pirate would have otherwise bough the game. This
is only partially true. Without piracy, most pirates would play fewer games.

And by the way, it appears some did:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738447>

