DM copy protection
Posted: Wed Jul 09, 2008 12:39 pm
Posted by Doug Bell, on 06/09/2008 at 16:55 on
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?optio ... =1&start=8
Of course it is a difficult question to say how much more or less revenue a product would have earned with or without copy protection. The answer to the question is dependant on a number of factors including the effectiveness of the copy protection and availability of similar products at different price points with and without effective copy protection.
There are at least four different interest groups, with the lines between them blurred at times:
1) Software developers and publishers seeking to maximize the return on their efforts;
2) Paying customers interested in receiving value in exchange for their money;
3) Pirates interested in using the software while illegally minimizing or eliminating costs; and
4) Crackers interested in the technical challenge, notoriety and/or financial gain from circumventing the technical barriers to copying or pirating the software.
Each interest group offers up their own reasons and rationales to justify their actions. Crackers argue the copy protection is pointless because it can always be circumvented as if this somehow bestows their activities with some form of populist nobility. Pirates argue that they wouldn’t have paid for the product anyway, so their actions somehow don’t really amount to stealing from the developer. Paying customers are frustrated by paying for a product that is less functional or more cumbersome to use than the stolen version used by the pirate. Finally, the resources available to software developers to invest in creating software are limited by the revenue they earn and reduced by the resources invested in copy protection. All in all, this creates a tough situation to analyze.
However, as the developer of a must-have computer game (albeit from a couple of decades ago) that you had to actually buy, I may have the rare perspective to take a stab at the question. Back in 1988, cartridge games were rarely pirated while computer games were rampantly pirated. Most games were cracked within a week of being released, with probably significantly less than 1% of software remaining uncracked after two weeks. One notable exception during this period was the game Dungeon Master, which was the best selling game on several different personal computer platforms over a two-year period. Dungeon Master was first released on the Atari ST, and for the better part of a year the only way to play Dungeon Master was to own an Atari ST and to buy the game.
Dungeon Master exposed the fallacy in the claims of both the pirates and the crackers. The pirates who would never have paid for the game if they could steal it did pay for it. Despite a steadily growing bounty of fame and notoriety for cracking the game, the protection lasted more than a year. And the paying customer was rewarded with not just a minimally invasive copy protection scheme, but just as importantly, with the satisfaction of not feeling like a schmuck for paying for something that most people were stealing.
As the developer of both Dungeon Master and the software portion of its copy protection, I knew that eventually the copy protection would be broken, but that the longer it held out the less damage we would suffer when it was broken. We had the advantage of owning the patent on a floppy-disk copy protection scheme that required a $40,000 specialized hardware device to write the disks. It was impossible to create a disk image without this hardware, and the hardware itself was out of production. That meant that as long as there were enough layers on the copy protection, and these layers took long enough to crack, the only way to own the game was to buy it. The copy protection scheme took a couple of weeks to create, and while this added cost to the production without adding value for the customer, it was time well spent. The copy protection was based on many redundant, overlapping and isolated checks and cross checks. The copy protection was developed with the assumption that the cracker would be armed with a hardware emulator and developed with an awareness of the capabilities and limitations of the commonly available emulators of the time.
Dungeon Master had a greater than 50% market penetration on the Atari ST—that is, more than one copy of Dungeon Master was sold for each two Atari ST computers sold. That’s easily 10 times the penetration of any other game of the time on any other platform.
So what’s the lesson? That piracy does take significant money out the pocket of the developer and that secure anti-piracy schemes are viable.
http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?optio ... =1&start=8
Of course it is a difficult question to say how much more or less revenue a product would have earned with or without copy protection. The answer to the question is dependant on a number of factors including the effectiveness of the copy protection and availability of similar products at different price points with and without effective copy protection.
There are at least four different interest groups, with the lines between them blurred at times:
1) Software developers and publishers seeking to maximize the return on their efforts;
2) Paying customers interested in receiving value in exchange for their money;
3) Pirates interested in using the software while illegally minimizing or eliminating costs; and
4) Crackers interested in the technical challenge, notoriety and/or financial gain from circumventing the technical barriers to copying or pirating the software.
Each interest group offers up their own reasons and rationales to justify their actions. Crackers argue the copy protection is pointless because it can always be circumvented as if this somehow bestows their activities with some form of populist nobility. Pirates argue that they wouldn’t have paid for the product anyway, so their actions somehow don’t really amount to stealing from the developer. Paying customers are frustrated by paying for a product that is less functional or more cumbersome to use than the stolen version used by the pirate. Finally, the resources available to software developers to invest in creating software are limited by the revenue they earn and reduced by the resources invested in copy protection. All in all, this creates a tough situation to analyze.
However, as the developer of a must-have computer game (albeit from a couple of decades ago) that you had to actually buy, I may have the rare perspective to take a stab at the question. Back in 1988, cartridge games were rarely pirated while computer games were rampantly pirated. Most games were cracked within a week of being released, with probably significantly less than 1% of software remaining uncracked after two weeks. One notable exception during this period was the game Dungeon Master, which was the best selling game on several different personal computer platforms over a two-year period. Dungeon Master was first released on the Atari ST, and for the better part of a year the only way to play Dungeon Master was to own an Atari ST and to buy the game.
Dungeon Master exposed the fallacy in the claims of both the pirates and the crackers. The pirates who would never have paid for the game if they could steal it did pay for it. Despite a steadily growing bounty of fame and notoriety for cracking the game, the protection lasted more than a year. And the paying customer was rewarded with not just a minimally invasive copy protection scheme, but just as importantly, with the satisfaction of not feeling like a schmuck for paying for something that most people were stealing.
As the developer of both Dungeon Master and the software portion of its copy protection, I knew that eventually the copy protection would be broken, but that the longer it held out the less damage we would suffer when it was broken. We had the advantage of owning the patent on a floppy-disk copy protection scheme that required a $40,000 specialized hardware device to write the disks. It was impossible to create a disk image without this hardware, and the hardware itself was out of production. That meant that as long as there were enough layers on the copy protection, and these layers took long enough to crack, the only way to own the game was to buy it. The copy protection scheme took a couple of weeks to create, and while this added cost to the production without adding value for the customer, it was time well spent. The copy protection was based on many redundant, overlapping and isolated checks and cross checks. The copy protection was developed with the assumption that the cracker would be armed with a hardware emulator and developed with an awareness of the capabilities and limitations of the commonly available emulators of the time.
Dungeon Master had a greater than 50% market penetration on the Atari ST—that is, more than one copy of Dungeon Master was sold for each two Atari ST computers sold. That’s easily 10 times the penetration of any other game of the time on any other platform.
So what’s the lesson? That piracy does take significant money out the pocket of the developer and that secure anti-piracy schemes are viable.