New Anti-Tamper Tech, Valeora, Debuts in City Patrol: Police

They most be counting all the games I buy on Steam sales, Green Man Gaming, and CDKeys as Pirated.

Derangel said:

Prove it. And I want empirical evidence not anecdotal or "well I heard it from this person" bullshit.

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It really doesn't matter what the percentages are (and they depend from game to game, software to software) *someone* is always going to deny them because it's convenient for them. The world of piracy is filled with self-serving excuses.

I'm not a games dev but I am a Windows utility software dev. Not going to give you the raw numbers, but I will tell you this: dormant for years in older versions of my software, there was a piece of code that would 'phone home' every week and try to download a file from the server, but only if the application thought it was registered. For years the file it attempted to download from the server was not there, so it would give up and try again a week later - because of this, (most?) crackers never knew what the function did, or at least never considered it important enough to disable.

Never-the-less, the number of 404's I got a month from the attempts to download a file that wasn't there, divided by 4, gave me a good estimate of how many presumed *registered* copies of my software were floating around in total.

One day I activated this function by actually providing a small executable it could download: the small executable simply validated the main application against tampering via CRC32 and if it found a mismatch (i.e.; a cracked copy) it would open the user's default browser showing a special 'don't-do-piracy' page on my website which I had prepared before hand.

The number of hits I get on this page vs. the number of downloads of my small tamper-checking applet in the same period of time thus allow me to calculate with enough accuracy how many copies are legit and how many are pirated.

62% of users out there are running pirated copies of my application.

Now, this is the CONFIRMED MINIMUM percentage. The REAL percentage is probably MUCH HIGHER for two reasons: first, I had removed this mechanism from the most recent versions of my software (so any user of the pirated versions who 'upgraded' to those, which I believe many did, will not be a part of the above stats) second, I don't know if some of the cracker groups actually DID disable the above feature. There may be a lot of cracked versions out there who aren't even able to 'phone home'.

BloodyIron said:

Of course Ubisoft is bitching about piracy. People pirate their games because they over charge and have bugs all the fucking time. Hey Ubisoft, stop releasing shit and your sales will go up.

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This is an example of self-serving excuses. If their games are riddled with bugs or cost too much (according to you), wait for the reviews and then vote with your wallet: DON'T BUY. But don't pirate either, because that simply makes an hypocrite out of you - among other things.

It is also NOT TRUE: people will pirate ANYTHING if they CAN, it has nothing to do with quality or cost. That 'Game Dev Tycoon' game, which hilariously made your in-game software company go bankrupt due to piracy if you were running a cracked version of their game, proves this without a shadow of a doubt: it only cost $8, yet after a single day on sale, 3104 of the 3318 copies being played were pirated. That's a 93.6% piracy rate.

velusip said:

This is the important part. That arbitrary "91.3%" stat can't be used as an indicator of revenue loss since there's no proof any percent of such a stat would have paid for the game in the first place, given no other option.

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This is another self-serving rationalization designed to minimize the damage you are causing by choosing to pirate a game or application.

Although it is certain that MANY would not buy if they didn't have access to pirated copies, it is also CERTAIN that this number is very far from ZERO.

Many users will first search for a crack of your application, but they will purchase a legit license if they can't find one.

If you want to get an extremely deep and interesting unbiased opinion on software piracy as a whole, you need to go no further than THIS ARTICLE. Be ready to have all your carefully constructed justifications and rationalizations demolished one by one, however. Either way, well worth the reading.

Fun said:

I'm just going to leave this here...

https://torrentfreak.com/new-valeroa-anti-piracy-system-cracked-by-pirate-in-20-minutes-181203/

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You know, I find this very odd. Everyone knows that the last thing you should do is challenge the warez community - but this is exactly what they did.

I would not be at all surprised if it turns out this was on purpose to figure out who the most prominent crackers are.

You see, going after the people who USE pirated/cracked copies of a game is stupid and futile (plus there are just too many of them), in much the same way going after drug users and putting them in prison for consuming is pretty much futile. No, what you should do instead is go after the much, much, smaller number of CRACKERS. In the world of software, they are the enablers, the equivalent of the Dealers and Pushers in the drugs world. If druggies can't get their 'fix' from anywhere, they have no choice but to stop consuming.

JcRabbit said:

It really doesn't matter what the percentages are (and they depend from game to game, software to software) *someone* is always going to deny them because it's convenient for them. The world of piracy is filled with self-serving excuses.

I'm not a games dev but I am a Windows utility software dev. Not going to give you the raw numbers, but I will tell you this: dormant for years in older versions of my software, there was a piece of code that would 'phone home' every week and try to download a file from the server, but only if the application thought it was registered. For years the file it attempted to download from the server was not there, so it would give up and try again a week later - because of this, (most?) crackers never knew what the function did, or at least never considered it important enough to disable.

Never-the-less, the number of 404's I got a month from the attempts to download a file that wasn't there, divided by 4, gave me a good estimate of how many presumed *registered* copies of my software were floating around in total.

One day I activated this function by actually providing a small executable it could download: the small executable simply validated the main application against tampering via CRC32 and if it found a mismatch (i.e.; a cracked copy) it would open the user's default browser showing a special 'don't-do-piracy' page on my website which I had prepared before hand.

The number of hits I get on this page vs. the number of downloads of my small tamper-checking applet in the same period of time thus allow me to calculate with enough accuracy how many copies are legit and how many are pirated.

62% of users out there are running pirated copies of my application.

Now, this is the CONFIRMED MINIMUM percentage. The REAL percentage is probably MUCH HIGHER for two reasons: first, I had removed this mechanism from the most recent versions of my software (so any user of the pirated versions who 'upgraded' to those, which I believe many did, will not be a part of the above stats) second, I don't know if some of the cracker groups actually DID disable the above feature. There may be a lot of cracked versions out there who aren't even able to 'phone home'.



This is an example of self-serving excuses. If their games are riddled with bugs or cost too much (according to you), wait for the reviews and then vote with your wallet: DON'T BUY. But don't pirate either, because that simply makes an hypocrite out of you - among other things.

It is also NOT TRUE: people will pirate ANYTHING if they CAN, it has nothing to do with quality or cost. That 'Game Dev Tycoon' game, which hilariously made your in-game software company go bankrupt due to piracy if you were running a cracked version of their game, proves this without a shadow of a doubt: it only cost $8, yet after a single day on sale, 3104 of the 3318 copies being played were pirated. That's a 93.6% piracy rate.



This is another self-serving rationalization designed to minimize the damage you are causing by choosing to pirate a game or application.

Although it is certain that MANY would not buy if they didn't have access to pirated copies, it is also CERTAIN that this number is very far from ZERO.

Many users will first search for a crack of your application, but they will purchase a legit license if they can't find one.

If you want to get an extremely deep and interesting unbiased opinion on software piracy as a whole, you need to go no further than THIS ARTICLE. Be ready to have all your carefully constructed justifications and rationalizations demolished one by one, however. Either way, well worth the reading.



You know, I find this very odd. Everyone knows that the last thing you should do is challenge the warez community - but this is exactly what they did.

I would not be at all surprised if it turns out this was on purpose to figure out who the most prominent crackers are.

You see, going after the people who USE pirated/cracked copies of a game is stupid and futile (plus there are just too many of them), in much the same way going after drug users and putting them in prison for consuming is pretty much futile. No, what you should do instead is go after the much, much, smaller number of CRACKERS. In the world of software, they are the enablers, the equivalent of the Dealers and Pushers in the drugs world. If druggies can't get their 'fix' from anywhere, they have no choice but to stop consuming.

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Wow, dude. I never said I choose to copy without licence. And just to make it clear, I won't use or copy software without paying for a licence. My "rationalization" is not so, but a thought experiment posing the conditions of two perfect scenarios and the difference of outcome. There is no data, so we can only imagine the scenario where either copy protection works flawlessly or everyone is perfectly ethical. In such an imagined scenario, the amount of "lost revenue" recouped is unknowable, and that is mine only point: it would be misguiding to use data on evidence of copyright infringement as directly proportional to shrink. It is not shrink, but merely uncaptured market (market analysis 101). To use this illogical and unknowable relation of data-points as "rationalization" for unethical copy-protection is the concern I am trying to bring up. We're not even talking about me, but since you choose to accuse me of illegal activity without evidence or recourse, how do you expect to be taken seriously?

I usually avoid software with DRM/copy protection out of ulterior principles having nothing to do with this discussion. Jumping to this conclusion demonstrates your lack of interest in the discussion, so I don't know why I even bother.

velusip said:

We're not even talking about me, but since you choose to accuse me of illegal activity without evidence or recourse, how do you expect to be taken seriously?

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I didn't mean to accuse YOU of anything, I quoted several people and was debating the arguments presented. The 'you' in that phrase was a generalization, sorry if I didn't make that clear - in retrospect I should have used 'people' instead of 'you', my apologies.

velusip said:

I usually avoid software with DRM/copy protection out of ulterior principles having nothing to do with this discussion. Jumping to this conclusion demonstrates your lack of interest in the discussion, so I don't know why I even bother.

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Read the article I linked to. Seriously, well worth the read and one of the most complete articles on the subject I have ever seen.