241–250 of 297 posts
You may want to consider Software Protection and Licensing from a vendor and not roll it yourself.
The high end versions of these solutions accomplish binary protection and encryption quite well and can require things like a token or hardware dongle to utilize the software.
Additionally given you've been pirated already, from a business perspective a freemium model might be helpful for converting pirate customers to real customers.
Hope it works out for your business!
One trick I’ve learned from the mobile game world is to make sure your localization files are separate resources — don’t compile them in. They way, when your game is first cracked, you’ll get a pretty decent Russian translation immediately that you can, with no moral concerns, “steal” back for your next update — and within only a few weeks you’ll have a pretty rich set of languages floating around for your distributi…
I remember that a video game editor once released a collector edition of one of their titles, where the bundled OST was copied from a torrent (which had presumably been ripped from the standard edition); apparently the file names or metadata made the origin clear.
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‘But above all, make sure not to confuse a "pirated copy" with a "lost sale". In 99% of cases, the Venn diagram of those has very little overlapping area.’ The non-overlapping are is likely non-trivial. There are surprising many shops that use professional software for client projects, could afford the license, but that prefer pirated copy to paying actual license fee. Ofc persecuting non-professional users is pointl…
Lol everytime I read this argument I think of the software VirtualDJ. It was notorious for being the DJ software to use about a decade and a half ago as pirate copies were everywhere! Fast forward to today and you can read post after post from ex pirate user that's now a paid user. VirtualDJ have one of the more expensive software licenses on the market in that sector too. I wonder if many other software companies ha…
I feel like easiest way to monetize apps like that would be free noncommercial license. Want to DJ your school party ? Go ahead, as long as nobody pays you it's fine, and if someone does, well, now you have money for license.
You're also building potential user base, when everyone can play with your software without limits many will pick it when they will do something commercial
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> Whenever people report that bug I feel a little joy I hope you are super duper 100% sure the bug can’t happen otherwise. I would hate to be your paying costumer and ignored because your drm system is buggy.
Yes. 100% super duper sure. It's something along the lines of: Pi+=2 in one place of the code. And Pi += 1.1415 somewhere else. And both are guaranteed to run at the start of the program so that Pi=3.1415 However one of those lines is hidden in a part of the code that the most obvious crack is going to remove.
I cracked an expensive FPGA simulation program (for which I had the license, but the FlexLM scheme based on the MAC address of the adapter was just too annoying to get working on Linux).
What they would do is have a sort of unit test of their license verification function at runtime. There was a check hidden somewhere that I never found, and if the license verification was changed to always return true, the unit test would fail. The simulator would continue working within a single module, but as soon as you tried simulating a larger project, it would return undefined values between all the modules, rendering the simulation unusable for any real project =)
(I solved the unit test by having the license check return true only for my hardcoded serial number, which is definitely easier than hunting for the different places where a check might be hidden)
Here's the standard playbook for dealing with this: - Let hobbyists and tiny companies pirate your software. You don't have to encourage it, but you can still turn a blind eye. They weren't going to pay you anyways, and this is a good way to get people familiar with your products. - Ruthlessly go after mid-large sized companies if you find their employees pirating your software. They have money to pay, and will be ha…
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Almost like Gabe Newell is right, piracy is first and foremost a service problem. There's some irony in things like Denuvo making games worse for legitimate users and creating new incentives to crack it, or players deferring purchases until it's either inevitably removed long after the launch window (where publishers are expecting the majority of purchases to happen).
To some extent. With modern AAA games costing ~$100AUD these days, there is still a strong incentive to pirate even if it’s far more convenient to buy.
For instance, current Netflix pricing I am okay with, with the content they have. If the price triples, you bet your ass I am going back to torrents unless they really step up the quality and quantity of content.
Congratulations! Having cracked versions out there indicates that your software is both useful and notable, which is a point where many developers would love to arrive at, maybe, one day. As to what to do about it, there are two basic tracks, neither of which is incompatible with the other: 1. The legal route: notifying distribution sites that they're hosting content in violation of copyright law, requesting takedown…
If your app isn't a game and/or you think that DRM isn't worth the platform tax, remove the DRM and focus on building relationships with your customers.
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Not sure how your example of Netflix refutes the point being made? It’s exactly the point? Regardless this just goes to show that the problem can be mitigated by making the legitimate route less painful than the illegitimate one. I used to pirate most of my music collection but now I use Apple Music because the friction of maintaining the library across multiple devices is so much lower. Imposing restrictions and hoo…
Oh yeah okay I see what you're saying. DarrenDev says there are no lost sales. However, I pay for Disney plus because I don't have access to invite-only torrent sites where the latest movies can be found, but I'd still like to watch them. If I had access to those torrent sites or someone's Plex, I could cancel Disney plus.
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These days the companies won and modern game DRM often doesn’t get cracked for the first year if at all.
That heavily depends on game in question. Some use "top of the line" DRM still get cracked within a week.
There is just very little incentive anymore. The skill level for hacking game DRM is extremely high now and those people would rather spend their time working on one of the many bug bounties where they can get huge payouts and public recognition for hacking ios vs having to hide behind tor and risk arrest to provide kids with free games.