Every time a new game comes out, it is a flat $60 for the standard edition. Most of the time, games are good. but not good enough to constitute a $60 price tag. Take for instance Battlefield: Hardline. To a former "Call of Duty" player like me (Yes, I am going to slam them again), this was like discovering sliced bread or the fountain of life. To a person who plays Battlefield 4, it is super easy to dismiss this game as a $60 expansion pack (to be fair, Hardline changed little from the latter). Most people will be reasonable and wait for a game to go on sale, but several people will be too impatient or too irrational and make an illegal copy. Let me be blunt about the issue: Piracy is not a victimless crime. The developers have families to provide for, development costs to get back, publishers have prices for physical distribution.
There is also the issue of your internet speed. People who supply pirated materials often host downloads from their computers. They can't host it on servers, because a server will detect the content and immediately trace back the material and slap a costly fee. The wondrous thing about servers is that they have really good internet speed and great hardware that allows many people at once. Peer to Peer sites facilitates downloads from personal computers, having nowhere near the capabilities of a server straining the computers and internet service providers to the extent that they burn out the uploader's and downloader's computers.
However, this post is mostly about the uncanny ways game developers have protected their games from piracy. Like most things on this site, this intended to be humorous. These methods leave pirates in absolute frustration and having absolutely no fun with their ill-gotten games (pun intended). Before we start off with the jokes, let's take a look at how a phony game was detected
First of all, there were physical items. One obscure item was the "Lenslok" (that's how it's spelled), which was a prism that you had to hold up to your monitor to decode a short key to start a game. The problem with this was there had to be a certain screen configuration (I should mention this was 1980s), which was unreasonable to ask of consumers at the time. A better attempt at physical items were the "Decoder Wheels". This would consist of two or more layers on a paper/cardboard cipher disc and would end up revealing a little message to put on screen and proceed onwards. This was generally not a bad method, but there were better methods. For cartridge-based systems, checksums were used. (I am sorry if I got the explanation wrong, but I will try). In the circuit board of each cartridge, there would be little pieces of tape that the game would check for. If not present, the game would immediately halt to a screen about genuine copies. This was useful for stopping the type of cartridges that the user loads a ROM (or a digitized version of the cartridge) onto, as the positions of the tape often varied and would be to bothersome to work around.
As for discs, there were far different methods. For the first 2 Playstations and all nintendo consoles, there were unique marks (disguised as little scratches) which could only be made by a disc manufacturer. I am not sure how they were produced exactly, my best guess is that they would be drilled by a miniscule laser or needle to create the marks. The Xbox 360 method involved needing specially angled lasers for faster data relay, which would lead to discs being misinterpreted by a consumer burner. The Playstation 3 uses Blu-Ray discs (the same type of discs used for blu-ray movies) for more storage and for higher definition. Unfortunately, acquiring a Blu-Ray disc burner is relatively costly, making this method completely inefficient. This was later incorporated into the Xbox One and Playstation 4 systems, but their method is just copying the disc to the hard drive and only using the disc to ensure the copy was purchased legitimately. For systems like the Playstation Portable and the Gamecube, Sony and Nintendo used smaller discs, which like the blu ray were too inconvenient to copy.
DRM, or digital rights management is a scheme for digital games, which assigns each game download a key to play the game. Players must enter the key to start playing. The key is checked against the publisher's servers to ensure that the game is genuine and was not illegally obtained. Yes, this method is only as reliable as the publisher's servers (*COUGH Electronic Arts/Ubisoft COUGH*), but the key only has to be entered once, and I have personally experienced no problems with this. DRM is very reliable for me, and is the most easy to understand method, unlike others will argue.
So now you see how a phony game could be detected. Now let's take a look at some of the humorous ways pirated games behave:
In the game "Nevermind" (yes, that is the game's name, it was an old game), pirates could play through the first three levels, and then be greeted by a message stating: "there are 100 levels to complete on the original disc" and consequentially leading to frustrated pirates.
"Earthbound" punishes people by spiking up the difficulty, and if a person manages to make their way to the final boss, the game will freeze and the system will need to be reset. Upon resetting, players will see that their save file and hard work was deleted. Similarly, in "Spyro Year of the Dragon", a fairy would show up to warn players about paying for games, but not interfere with gameplay until the final boss. About 8 seconds into the final boss the game would automatically reset and delete the save file.
"Mirror's Edge" takes away the vital ability to make large jumps by progressively slowing down players as they approach a large jump ramp, allowing no progress beyond a certain point in the game. "Batman Arkham City" similarly removes the ability to glide, also rendering the game unplayable. Upon entering a match in "Red Alert 2", players are only given 30 seconds of normal play until their base explodes. "Sid Meier's Pirates" allows pirates to play, but the difficulty is spiked to the point of near unplayability. "Operation Flashpoint" gives players a normal experience at first, but shortly makes the game unplayable by reducing the player's power and overpowering the enemies over time.
My personal favorite method goes to "Game Dev Tycoon", where players are in charge of running a game development studio, and if a player uses a pirated copy the game will eventually bankrupt the player's studio. The ironic part? The virtual consumers in game decided to steal your game and you could no longer turn a profit, so players efficiently learned the hard truth about piracy and hopefully would stop their evil ways.
Here is an informing video entitled "Don't Copy that Floppy", an old psa schools probably showed in the 1990s to discourage piracy. It also ends out being one of those types of 1990s tapes where there was a rap in it, making it all more amusing to watch! There are several other informing videos, with this one being blunt and straightforward (Yes it is about movie piracy but the same concept applies here).
If you want to learn more about how games would punish pirates, click here, here, and here too. If you want more information on how games are protected click here. If even that does not fulfill your quest of knowledge, you can also click here and learn how arcade cabinets were protected from being copied. Please remember to buy genuine games, because piracy and torrenting (illegal media hosting/downloading) is against the law and is not a victimless crime. Please be supportive of game developers and they will keep making games for us to enjoy.
-Game on
Jacob Bacci
As for discs, there were far different methods. For the first 2 Playstations and all nintendo consoles, there were unique marks (disguised as little scratches) which could only be made by a disc manufacturer. I am not sure how they were produced exactly, my best guess is that they would be drilled by a miniscule laser or needle to create the marks. The Xbox 360 method involved needing specially angled lasers for faster data relay, which would lead to discs being misinterpreted by a consumer burner. The Playstation 3 uses Blu-Ray discs (the same type of discs used for blu-ray movies) for more storage and for higher definition. Unfortunately, acquiring a Blu-Ray disc burner is relatively costly, making this method completely inefficient. This was later incorporated into the Xbox One and Playstation 4 systems, but their method is just copying the disc to the hard drive and only using the disc to ensure the copy was purchased legitimately. For systems like the Playstation Portable and the Gamecube, Sony and Nintendo used smaller discs, which like the blu ray were too inconvenient to copy.
DRM, or digital rights management is a scheme for digital games, which assigns each game download a key to play the game. Players must enter the key to start playing. The key is checked against the publisher's servers to ensure that the game is genuine and was not illegally obtained. Yes, this method is only as reliable as the publisher's servers (*COUGH Electronic Arts/Ubisoft COUGH*), but the key only has to be entered once, and I have personally experienced no problems with this. DRM is very reliable for me, and is the most easy to understand method, unlike others will argue.
 |
| Please take your DRM rants somewhere else like Youtube. |
So now you see how a phony game could be detected. Now let's take a look at some of the humorous ways pirated games behave:
In the game "Nevermind" (yes, that is the game's name, it was an old game), pirates could play through the first three levels, and then be greeted by a message stating: "there are 100 levels to complete on the original disc" and consequentially leading to frustrated pirates.
"Earthbound" punishes people by spiking up the difficulty, and if a person manages to make their way to the final boss, the game will freeze and the system will need to be reset. Upon resetting, players will see that their save file and hard work was deleted. Similarly, in "Spyro Year of the Dragon", a fairy would show up to warn players about paying for games, but not interfere with gameplay until the final boss. About 8 seconds into the final boss the game would automatically reset and delete the save file.
"Mirror's Edge" takes away the vital ability to make large jumps by progressively slowing down players as they approach a large jump ramp, allowing no progress beyond a certain point in the game. "Batman Arkham City" similarly removes the ability to glide, also rendering the game unplayable. Upon entering a match in "Red Alert 2", players are only given 30 seconds of normal play until their base explodes. "Sid Meier's Pirates" allows pirates to play, but the difficulty is spiked to the point of near unplayability. "Operation Flashpoint" gives players a normal experience at first, but shortly makes the game unplayable by reducing the player's power and overpowering the enemies over time.
My personal favorite method goes to "Game Dev Tycoon", where players are in charge of running a game development studio, and if a player uses a pirated copy the game will eventually bankrupt the player's studio. The ironic part? The virtual consumers in game decided to steal your game and you could no longer turn a profit, so players efficiently learned the hard truth about piracy and hopefully would stop their evil ways.
Here is an informing video entitled "Don't Copy that Floppy", an old psa schools probably showed in the 1990s to discourage piracy. It also ends out being one of those types of 1990s tapes where there was a rap in it, making it all more amusing to watch! There are several other informing videos, with this one being blunt and straightforward (Yes it is about movie piracy but the same concept applies here).
If you want to learn more about how games would punish pirates, click here, here, and here too. If you want more information on how games are protected click here. If even that does not fulfill your quest of knowledge, you can also click here and learn how arcade cabinets were protected from being copied. Please remember to buy genuine games, because piracy and torrenting (illegal media hosting/downloading) is against the law and is not a victimless crime. Please be supportive of game developers and they will keep making games for us to enjoy.
-Game on
Jacob Bacci
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