Well . . . hrmm. I must admit, I'd think that an all-Online gaming company would actually have far
FEWER problems with piracy. . . if they used proper security.
A typical example would be the Pixels 3D software company. I've bought several revisions of their incredibly powerful(and relatively cheap) 3D animation software, and they have effectively locked every install by using the following method: they have a key generator that creates a unique key string tied to the serial number of the BIOS. Whenever I install the software, I'm unable to use it at all until I've gone Online and registered the software. . . whereupon a matching string is sent to me.
This works
much better than either:
A. Trusting your customers not to make copies with their burners and simple cracking tools.
B. Sending out a serial/registration code on the jewelbox and locking the CD to the game. Again, it's too darn easy to break the code if you have both strings and can watch the registers. . . you don't need to be very good, either
Anyhow, Pixels' copy protection
sounds like a royal pain in the rear for end-Users, right? Well. . . no! Since Pixels sells all of its software Online, and distributes through one supplier(sound familiar, Richard?) . . . all of the Users already have the
expectation of having to deal with the software publisher's website, so having to take the extra step of registering to recieve their serial number(which can be generated from the seed provided by the machine's BIOS or any number of other unique identifiers) would provide fairly complete protection from warez hackers for a very reasonable price in terms of time and effort. Just a thought
