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Copy Protection (view source)

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{{trope}}
[[File:copyprotection-stratego_3297stratego 3297.png|link=Stratego|frame|Code wheel? F***, I downloaded the game!]]
 
 
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So from a fairly early time, gamemakers employed a variety of mechanisms to prevent unlicensed copying. Many of these were poorly implemented, and tended to either be prone to locking a player out of playing a legal copy, being trivial to circumvent, or being so annoying that players chose to play something else.
 
One early method, called "key disc" protection, required that the game access its original disc during loading -- metadataloading—metadata not normally preserved when a disk was duplicated was required to play the game. This was prone to failure, made games unplayable on newer machines (as this out-of-band data could not always be found by new hardware), and prevented the player from using a (perfectly legal) personal "backup" copy. Given that floppy disks had a typically short operational lifespan, this also had bad effects for long-term survival. Even a few CD-ROM based games used this method, intentionally introducing errors to the disk, then refusing to run if the error-correction mechanism did less work than expected.
 
The most expensive early system was to require that a piece of specialized ''hardware'' be attached to the machine, but this was hardly ever used outside of server-grade software. Some modern productivity software (in the $500+ range) uses a USB dongle key with decoding information built-in.
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The internet was probably the final nail in the coffin for most of these schemes, with all the secret codes now being accessible with just a few mouse clicks. Even in times when DOS (or Win 95 exclusive DOS mode, for that matter) didn't allow the player to switch and look at a solution in a plain text file, it still could be printed, or easily bypassed via DOS multitask extensions and programs like Game Wizard.
 
But now, things have come full circle again. Much software now uses internet-based copy protection, which players without a permanent connection might <s>find annoying</s> be [[Driven to Suicide]] over. For starters, you shouldn't even bother to buy such games if you don't already own a cable modem. Which then creates entirely new problems - you can only hook four computers up to most cable modems,<ref> There are ways to get around the four-computer limit, terms and conditions with your cable modem provider and/or willingness to spend on better/extra hardware permitting</ref>, so unless you live alone, you're taking up half the slots with just your computer and your console. Then there's also the issue of access providers capping upload/download speeds at levels counter-productive to gaming.
 
On the other hand, companies love this option to pieces. Games with an on-line component can implement such a mechanism "for free" within their own authentication structure. Of course, in the event that the company goes under, no one will ever be able to play their games ever again. Or, even if they're still in business, there's the question of exactly how many people need to keep playing an older game before the economics of appeasing fans of old titles comes into play. But the companies don't care so much about that. In fact, some probably like the idea of simply turning off the activation server for ''Mega Quest'' and thereby forcing all their users to buy ''Mega Quest 2''.
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Modern games simply fail to run if not authenticated. Earlier games tended to let you play a small part of the game, or play at a massive disadvantage, even if copy protection failed. In ''[[Sim City]]'', failing the copy protection would cause a non-stop stream of disasters to strike your city, making the game all but unplayable. (This sort of thing may have been intended, though, as another protection against people breaking the copy protection, since there was a chance someone idly examining the game before distributing it illegally might not have realized it had copy protection at all.)
 
In theory, the only way to have fine-grained control over what end-users can or cannot do with software is to physically separate it from them via a client/server arrangement. In this setup, the client only serves as a front-end -- sendingend—sending player input to the server and outputting streaming audio and video from the server. With a competent IT staff, infringement all but ceases to exist, yet each player is at the mercy of the server's uptime and bandwidth requirements for streaming audio and video. [http://onlive.com OnLive], a retail PC game streaming platform, inherently has this kind of copy-protection. With servers being overloaded and game companies bombing on a regular basis, this ends up being one of the least reliable systems in terms of gameplay and game longevity.
 
The only thing that cannot be defeated is charging a monthly fee, and that really only works for massively multiplayer online games and other stuff that runs off of a central server. And sometimes even that isn't immune, especially when a popular game has private player-run servers start popping up.
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** The original Starflight had the code wheel. Starflight 2 had a fold out star map and a viewer to isolate 3 inch sections of the map. The game would then ask you the number of certain colored stars in the 3 in section once you placed the viewer at certain coordinates.
* Infogrames' original ''[[Alone in The Dark]]'' series had this, and notably ratcheted it up in the second game. The first required two objects from the game to be entered, which was already saying something given the large number of one-use clutter. The second, however, was a bit more complex. When you entered the first screen, it had a message something along the lines of "Protection Ace of Hearts over Three of Clubs First Hole". This could be disregarded, and if one tried to enter the hedge maze without inputting a code with the F keys, the game would say "YOU DIDN'T ANSWER THE QUESTION" and smite you. It turned out the manual told what the question is, and the game came with a number of hole-punched playing cards. Only by correctly laying the cards over each other and examining a hole could you figure out the required code to get on with it.
* In ''Vette!'', you are a given a question whose answer is in the manual. If you incorrectly answer three times, the game allows you to play, but with severely crippled gameplay(eg can't go above 80 &nbsp;mph), and after a certain time, it ends with the message "You are driving a stolen Vette".
* ''F/A-18 Hornet'' had you answer a question from its rather large flight manual before starting a mission.
* The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the first game of the series, requires you to answer questions about spells in the known Spellbook part of the manual before leaving the first dungeon. Recently, Bethesda allowed the game to be downloaded for free--andfree—and did not remove the [[Copy Protection]].
* Professor Layton and Pandora's Box (or the Diabolical Box in some countries) came with a train ticket needed to find the location of where the last half of the game takes place. It required a code to be deciphered and the answer had to be inputted into the game.
** More [[Feelies]] than this trope: the ticket was also shown in the game when it got to that puzzle. The puzzle required folding it, so it was a bit of a pain to envision how it folded from just the picture and without the physical ticket, but by no means impossible.
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*** Before the PS3s dropped backward compatibility altogether, this bit Sony on the ass - they had a hell of a time trying to read PS2 discs, to the point where most of the last-gen library was bugged out or failed entirely while playing on a [[PlayStation 3]].
*** And then Sony removed the OtherOS function from the PS3 back in April 2010, citing fears of ''security'' (or rather, ''piracy''. When the console is booted into Linux, it could now be used to run copied versions of discs). Generally, people weren't pleased and even brought on lawsuits.
* The Nintendo Gamecube uses a proprietary 8cm8&nbsp;cm DVD based on the miniDVD.
** Contrary to popular belief, discs for game consoles do not spin in reverse. But Gamecube and Wii discs do use a slight variant of the DVD sector-level encoding. Unfortunately for Nintendo, Wii pirates disregarded the physical aspects of the copy protection and instead decided to attack the console's firmware, which had quite a few holes.
* Sony has been fighting a long standing war against the Homebrew scene in the name of copy protection on the PSP. The Homebrew scene finds an exploit to allow un-official software, Sony releases yet another patch (that they usually make mandatory in order to play the newest games) to fix it, and the cycle continues. One particular patch that was designed solely to fix an exploit that would require a user to load a specific game in order to "unlock" their PSP, succeeded in introducing an exploit that allowed users to unlock their [[PSP|PSPs]]s without any game whatsoever.
** The 3.56 firmware update to the [[PlayStation 3]] marks the start of Sony's attempt to do the same thing (in addition to fixing the embarrassingly large security hole discovered not 2 months before the patch's release). How did it fare? Well, on the first release of the patch, it only succeeded in curbing (briefly) Call of Duty Modern Warfare hacks. It got cracked in under 24 hours, and that's NOT the worst news. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G40zYK-DbgY It would not work on Slim PS3s that had an upgraded hard drive], something that you are legally allowed to do. The second release of the patch only fixed the hard drive issue.
* ''[[Earthbound]]'' memorably has a vast array of copy protection mechanisms of surprising intricacy and thoroughness. For its first layer, it has a checksum that could detect whether the game was running from a copied cartridge or being booted from a cartridge-copying device ;<ref>Emulating the game does not set it off unless you're using a ''really'' shitty emulator.</ref>; if the mechanism did not check out, the game threw up an antipiracy warning screen at the beginning and did not play any further. If the protection was cracked, a checksum mechanism would detect the change, and the game spawned [[Zerg Rush|many more enemies than usual]] - some even in places they didn't belong! - in an attempt to discourage further playing. If the player persevered through this or cracked this second layer, however, an even nastier surprise awaited: the game would freeze and severely glitch after the first part of the [[Final Boss]] fight against Giygas... and when you reset, you would find ''all your saves deleted!''.
** These copy protection schemes sometimes trigger on legit cartridges, likely due to wear and tear over time. Although unrelated to copy protection, the same wear and tear can cause the game to run entirely in black and white as well.
** The English NES prototype of its predecessor ''[[MOTHER]]'', [[Fan Nickname|dubbed]] ''EarthBound Zero'' by the fans, also had similar copy protection, but it's more mundane and far less cruel in its implementation. Instead of making the game impossible and scrubbing your save games at the end, it runs a checksum at certain points to test whether the game is pirated; if it is determined it is, it stops the game and throws up a screen saying that the game is an unauthorized copy and will not continue, and bricks the ROM/cart. This measure was part of a major headache in getting the ROM to work properly when it was first discovered and dumped in 1998, and owners of the actual physical prototypes are understandably concerned that the condition of the prototypes may set it off anyway. This protection wasn't in the Japanese version, nor does it exist in ''[[Compilation Rerelease|MOTHER 1+2]]'' which is built upon the prototype data.
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** ''[[Mega Man Battle Network]]: Operate Shooting Star'', a remake of the first game, prevented you from editing your folder, and initiated a battle with three Mets, the weakest enemy in the game, with every single step you took while on the Internet.
** When the ROM boots up, ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles|The Manhattan Project]]'' checks to see if the copyright text and/or icon has been modified (a common practice among pirates) - if it returns positive, the damage the players give out is reduced, the damage they ''take'' is increased, and a boss around 3/4 of the way through the game is modified to have infinite health, making the game [[Unwinnable]] for anyone masochistic enough to keep playing after the first few levels.
** Similarly, back in the SNES era if you played a copy of the [[No Export for You]] ''[[Final Fantasy VI]]'' on a UK machine via an adapter, it would work fine, but wouldn't show the ending. It's not known if this was deliberate or not. The only way around it back then was to get a US/Japanese console, or have your UK machine chipped to run at 60Hz60&nbsp;Hz instead of 50Hz50&nbsp;Hz.
* ''[[The Journeyman Project]]'', at three points in the game, asks you to enter a code from the "Temporal Protectorate Handbook" (aka manual). Unfortunately, if you got this game bundled with a new computer, it most likely didn't come with the manual, and unless you were clever and looked up the codes on the Internet, you would have to brute-force the code to continue.
** Fortunately, if you remember what type of code it is (a numeric sequence), it's actually pretty easy to brute-force it, since the game automatically stops you the moment you input an incorrect character, meaning you only have to go through around 90 sequences (tops) before getting at the correct code, as opposed to over a million.
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== Software ==
* Valve Software's [[Steam]] is its online download and updating system, used to distribute Valve's games, first-party mods and <s>some select</s> quite a few other titles they have contracted in. It's usually cited as "DRM done right" by those who believe such a thing is possible. However, at the time of its original release, late 2004, DRM was nowhere near as common as it is now, and many players, who purchased the retail boxed copy, were understandably annoyed that they would have to install a separate program that runs in the background in order to prove that they weren't thieves. In addition, initially they had to connect to the Internet every time they wished to play the single-player game. Valve eventually removed this, and by now retail sales of their games have been dwarfed by digital sales, meaning most of their players already have Steam anyway. It is worth noting, however, that Steam is one of a handful of DRM systems to deliberately prevent players from reselling or giving away their used games.
** To be fair, Steam also avoids a common issue with copy protection software -- thesoftware—the inability to install a single copy of a game on multiple computers. On a growing number of games, it even works cross-platform now.
*** Although the fact that Steam only allows one computer logged in to an account at one given time means that you can't have a game downloading on one PC while playing another game on another PC. It's quite common for gaming enthusiasts (or computer enthusiasts in general) to own two (or sometimes more) gaming rigs. <ref>Why not just download the game on the same system in background and transfer it over later, since Steam has excellent backup/restore functions? Steam boneheadedly suspends all downloads automatically when launching a game, and will keep downloads suspended until the game is closed. You can force Steam to resume downloading after launching the game, but some drivers (i.e. NVidia version 250 or higher drivers in certain SLI configurations) freezes up the system for a few seconds when task switching in and out of some full-screen games, making this a major annoyance for people with said configuration. And no, there is no known way to tell Steam to ''not'' suspend downloads when a game is launched at the moment</ref>.
*** And oh, apparently the client would refuse to go into offline mode unless you're already logged in (the offline mode button that appears when you're unable to connect to the server is apparently broken). This will surely ruin the vacations of people who're uninformed of this limitation and forgot to put Steam into offline mode on their laptop before leaving home for a destination where getting an internet connection is very difficult.
** Steam's DRM also provides a useful service to online gamers: Since every game is tied to its owner, once a user is banned from a server, they are banned for good unless they are willing to buy another whole copy of the game. And since most of Valve's games are multiplayer...
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** Did we mention that, despite having a perfectly good copy protection system built in to Steam, most third party publishers keep their own, more intrusive systems in the version of their games that they sell on Steam anyway? At least the store warns you about this... ''most'' of the time.
*** However, there are now very easy ways to get a non-steam copy of all their games.
* Recently, copy protection has resulted in controversy because some gamers and journalists have complained that copy protection systems can make some games unplayable and can even make the computer unusable. For example, the copy protection software known as "StarForce" was boycotted by some gamers due to these issues. Some of StarForce's nastier side-effects included reduced system security due to the way the copy-protection driver was implemented, causing CD-ROM drives to step down into a form of data access that caused undue wear and tear on the drive, and BSODs (and not of the [[Heroic BSOD|heroic]] kind either). It should be noted, however, that many of these issues are unlikely to be experienced by average gamers. For example, some copy-protection software works by checking the serial number of the computer's hardware, so that changing the hardware can confuse the copy-protection system into thinking you have just copied it to a different computer. While gaming journalists routinely swap out their hardware so they can test games on different computer configurations, most gamers are unlikely to be changing hardware enough for this to be a problem. Of course, this doesn't make these problems any less serious -- itserious—it just illustrates why companies can afford not to care.
** About routinely swapping out hardware - hardcore gamers do that as well. [[Rich Bitch|There are people who swap out video cards as soon as a newer card hit the market]].
** ''[http://www.galciv2.com/ Galactic Civilizations 2]'' by Star''dock'' Systems features "No CD copy protection"; once you install the game, you never have to verify it again. They felt that ease of use was worth the increased risk. The trick is that Stardock provides lots of free patches and content updates; If they find out your copy is being pirated, you don't get those anymore. Star''Force'', mentioned above, was so impressed by this system that they posted a link to a webpage where one could download pirated versions of ''Galactic Civilizations 2''. The backlash from gamers was so intense that they quickly removed the link.
** Speaking of Starforce, they've updated their copy protection nowdays--sonowdays—so if you buy a game with the old Starforce, like ''[[Second Sight]]'', you need to download a patch off the company's web site in order to play the game.
** The launch of ''[[BioShock (series)]]'' was screwed up, plain and simple, when the single-player offline game shipped with SecuROM [[Copy Protection]] that allowed installation twice, ever, before the customer had to contact support. In its wake came crashing authentication servers, the customer support of the publisher and of its parent company each referring people to the other, said support demanding photos of the CD and the manual, people in smaller countries being asked to phone the same support - i.e., to make international calls in a foreign language, PR representatives assuaging the public by falsely stating that properly uninstalling the game would give the right to another installation, finding out that installing on another account or making what SecuROM deems to be a significant hardware change counts, the protection disrupting other programs if they look like the sort that might be used for cracking, the demo coming with SecuROM - without activation - when it acknowledgedly has no reason to do so, and [[Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking|halitosis]]. It would've been nice to tell about the limit beforehand, too. Others are cool with that and just dislike having unannounced, nonconsensual, unremovable data on their computers. Some parts of SecuROM don't like being told to leave.
*** All of this extra security didn't stop a pirated version of the game appearing three weeks after the game was released.
**** And ever better yet, ''[[Spore]]'', which also used SecuROM, was cracked a good 4-54–5 days '''before''' release.
** The Starforce copy protection on ''[[Cold Fear]]'' was so bad that it locked up a large percentage of legitimate copies, and Ubisoft ''had to distribute a scene no-cd crack'' for paying customers to be able to play the game. They released their own no-cd patch later, but it was essentially the same as the scene patch.
** Likewise, the Starforce copy protection on legitimate copies of ''[[Rogue Trooper]]'' is absurdly prone to false positives, but the publishers/developers never bothered to fix the problem because not enough people bought the game for them to care anyway.
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** There was also going to be a validation process that checked up on you every 10 days or the game would not run, but the immense backlash caused that to be abandoned and the developers will only implement the three-install limit. How thoughtful!
*** [[Mass Effect 2]] does not use this DRM at all, for those who want to buy this game. [http://meforums.bioware.com/viewtopic.html?topic=710074&forum=144 It uses a disc check and doesn't require online authentication.]
* Starship sim sequel ''Frontier: Elite II'' had an interesting version of this. Periodically, the player would be challenged by the in-game Space Police, and asked to find (for example) the fifth letter in the third word in line 17 on page 158 of ''his spaceship's'' manual. Three wrong responses in a row and you're arrested by [[Author Avatar|Chief Inspector Braben]],<ref>David Braben was the game's lead programmer</ref>, who would give you a lecture on how stolen starships are a major disincentive for starship manufacturers to make new starships; your ship is confiscated, you're sent to prison and [[Nonstandard Game Over|"with luck, you'll get a job cleaning the toilets when you get out"]].
* In the classic adventure game ''[[Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Graphic Adventure|Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade]]'' Marcus would ask Indy to translate some symbols for him, which would need to be looked up in the manual. Failing to do so would let the game continue as normal - until a crucial point where Indy, at Donovan's place, would fail to translate a tablet concerning the Holy Grail (Indy mistakenly translates it as "Holy Grain"), prompting Donovan to say "Seems you're just an illegitimate copy of the man I thought you were."
* ''[[Operation Flashpoint]]'' is notable for being the first game to use the FADE copyright system, which slowly degraded the quality of gameplay (for example, decreasing the accuracy of the player's weapons) if piracy was detected. The same applies for ''[[ARMA: Armed Assault|ARMA]] : Armed Assault'', its [[Spiritual Successor]]. The best copy protection for ''ARMA'' was of course the fact that [[They Just Didn't Care|it didn't run under Vista.]]
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** Also, thanks to the SecuROM situation, EA decided to scale back this games' copy protection to the traditional CD check and serial number that the earlier games used.
*** [[Ruined FOREVER|Unfortunately, the direct download version of the game still sports SecuROM copy protection, limiting users to 5 installations per copy.]]
* All these modern examples pale in comparison to a form of copy protection employed by several publishers during the Commodore 64 era. We'll spare you the boring and confusing details, but it involved placing a deliberate error on the disk, which, being that it was an error, could not be reproduced by the current copy software. However, this also caused the disk drive's head to knock repeatedly against a stopper every time it tried to load the program. Over time, this would cause the head to become misaligned and be unable to read ''anything'' anymore until the drive was repaired. That's right, a copy protection scheme that caused legitimate customers (and legitimate customers only, as this required pirates to hack the software and eliminate the need to read the error -- hardlyerror—hardly unlike today's cracks that remove pesky DRM) to experience actual ''hardware failure''. Yikes.
* ''The Island of Dr. Brain'' forced you to consult the manual, called the Encyclo-Almanac-Tionary-Ography, to input the coordinates necessary for finding his island. This counted as the first puzzle in the game, and you receive a gold plaque just for completing it.
* ''[[Spyro the Dragon|Spyro: Year of the Dragon]]'', if you are playing a cracked copy, has Zoe the Fairy appearing at the latter part of Sunrise Spring telling you that your copy is hacked and may be an illegal copy, which will lead you to experience "problems" you would not experience on a legal copy. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZinR10DC3-Q\]
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* ''[[DJMAX]] Trilogy'' comes with a USB dongle that must be plugged into your computer to run the game. It also contains your profile, which has your usernames, unlocks, etc., so a fortunate side effect is that you can carry your unlocks across multiple machines. On the downside, lose the dongle and you're screwed.
** Inverted unintentionally in ''DJ MAX Portable Black Square'', in which songs will skip when played via UMD due to memory management issues, but won't when played via an ISO on a memory stick.
* ''[[Titan Quest]]'' has "mysterious" crashes on bootleg copies due to ''properly working'' sneaky [[Copy Protection]], which of course caused a lot of bad press and consequently dropped sales more surely than "pirates" could do on their own.
** The conclusion: any [[Copy Protection]] not working explicitly is self-defeating. Most people won't bother to investigate on their own why this or that software happened to be buggy or crappy, ever. So unless users can openly admit what they tried and compare, this buries the reputation of an original, not a bootleg copy -- theycopy—they haven't any separate reputations if no one mentions them.
* On the Amiga, there was a game ''[[The Killing Game Show]]''. This game was broken and copied early in its life, but the original protected disk would alter the system timing during bootup. The broken copy did not alter the timing, resulting in a game that became [[Unwinnable]] without removing the "timer". (It is not known if any cracked version ever fixed this.)
* The German game ''[[Drakensang]]'' (Das Schwarze Auge/ Black Eye) had at least three instances of copy protection and you were punished for then buying the original because you had to start anew, as the problems were saved in the savegames (there was supposed to be a patch for that, but it's unknown if it ever got made). First you have to go to a NPC that doesn't spawn. This can be corrected by using an SQL editor. Then there is a vital door, that's just not clickable. And last but not least there is supposed to be a door that usually leads to another vital part of the game, but in case of a pirates version leads into a cell with no exit. And no, nobody ever said anything about this beforehand, leading to a mass of "buy the game already" and almost as much "I already OWN it" :=)
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* [[Origin]]'s ''[[Strike Commander]]'' came with instructions to copy the disks and put them in the cupboard in case something happened to your originals.
** Another Origin property, the [[Wing Commander (video game)|Wing Commander]] series, required for the first few games information included in the [[Feelies]] or manual to start playing the game. When they were reworked for the ''Kilrathi Saga'' collection, the check was eliminated.
* The Dreamcast game ''[[Ooga Booga]]'' had an interesting [[Copy Protection]] mechanism: If it detected that you were playing a burned copy, instead of starting the game it would show an in-game pirate character that would dance when you pressed any button on the controller. The group who released the pirated ISO left this in, but made it continue to the actual game when the player pressed Start.
* The PC version of ''[[Batman: Arkham Asylum]]'' has one of these in the form of a deliberate glitch which disables Batman's cape glide ability, rendering the game [[Unwinnable]]. The developers say this.
{{quote|"It's not a bug in the game's code, it's a bug in your moral code."}}
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* The ''[[Dragon Ball]]'' video game trilogy known as "Legacy of Goku" (And the spiritual sequel, ''GT: Transformation'') had its form of copy protection wherein a message popped up at a certain point saying "this game cannot be played on this hardware" and wouldn't go away, should it detect that it isn't a legit copy (Although there are rumours of some retail copies having this problem as well). Perhaps stupid is the fact that [[What an Idiot!|later versions of the emulator Visual Boy Advance decided to emulate this form of copy protection]], making playing the games on that emulator ''extremely'' difficult.
* The Amiga game ''[[Elvira Games|Elvira: Mistress of the Dark]]'' had you hunting for six keys hidden in the castle, and one was hidden in a dark passage, requiring you to have Elvira cook up "Glowing Pride" to find it. However, you couldn't find any recipes inside the game; all of them were in the manual. In other words, you could play most of the game on a pirate version, but to complete it you needed the original version. (At least, until [[GameFAQs]] was invented.)
* Not strictly [[Copy Protection]], but more like ''incredibly'' failtastic programming: Capcom's ''[[Mega Man Battle Network]] 4: [[One Game for the Price of Two|Blue Moon]]'' has issues the Red Sun version doesn't exhibit which make the game virtually unplayable on anything except the original Gameboy Advance hardware. One unavoidable section of the game causes the entire game to slow to a near halt (the music remains normal, however) if you open the menu or encounter enemies. The game will eventually bring itself back to normal speed, but this glitch turns what should easily be a 15 minute at most scenario into something that can take up to an entire day to complete.
** There was a Super NES game that ''accidentally'' implemented copy protection: the game program had a bug which, by sheer dumb luck, caused it to depend on extremely precise timing of the SNES cartridge - play it on a copier or emulator, and the slight timing change would crash the game.
*** Would that be a [[Good Bad Bug]]?
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** It should be noted that several companies, including Ubisoft, have previously tried to convince Microsoft and Sony to let them release console games that would require the player to be connected to Xbox Live or the Playstation Network at all times, irrespective of whether the game has any online elements. And despite the fact that such a mechanism would probably be far easier to implement on a console than on Windows, both Microsoft and Sony have smacked down such requests each and every time, on the grounds that they don't want to be responsible for the fallout that would inevitably happen. Let's reiterate: Sony, who ''love'' locking up everything harder than Fort Knox, using proprietary solutions wherever they can, and who have in the years attracted a lot of hatred due to their [[wikipedia:Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal|boneheaded antipiracy measures]], [[Everyone Has Standards|have rejected Ubisoft's project]]. You'd think this would be an eye opener in and of itself for Ubisoft...
*** That certainly didn't stop [[Capcom]] of all things [http://www.capcom-unity.com/ask_capcom/go/thread/view/7371/23158177/Why_does_Final_Fight_Double_Impact_require_me_to_be_in_PSN pulling off that dirty trick on the consoles]. At least the [http://www.giantbomb.com/news/bionic-commando-rearmed-2-psn-requires-an-internet-connection/2895/ Second time] they did it, they said it required a PSN login right on the description. (And it still only affects the [[PlayStation 3]])
**** [http://wii.ign.com/articles/117/1172319p2.html That type of copy protection actually is allowed by Microsoft and Sony], but only on download titles -- eventitles—even then, however, the game has to go through a more rigorous validation process than usual, which is why most game developers don't do it. However, Ubisoft (among others) have repeatedly demanded to be allowed to implement this type of protection on ''disc-based'' games, which is silly when you consider that a significant amount of people still go without internet connections on their consoles. Fortunately, both Microsoft and Sony both have more sense than the developers in question, and still refuse to allow them to do so.
** Ubisoft tried to guard against the first ''[[Assassin's Creed (video game)|Assassin's Creed I]]'' being leaked by deliberately introducing a performance-degrading bug into the code, to be removed only when the game was sent to be mass-produced. Unfortunately, they didn't actually tell anyone, so when the bugged version was inevitably leaked, it considerably hurt their sales because the pirates spread through word of mouth to potential legitimate buyers that the game had [[Porting Disaster|terrible performance even on high-end computers.]]
* ''SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3'' forces you to pay 20$ to play online on pirated '''or''' second hand copies. And it didn't take long to crack it, which makes this PSP copy protection irritating as it was preceded a month before by...
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* Pro Tools, an audio-editing suite currently used by the majority of the music industry, has gone back to the "piece of hardware" method. You can pirate the software all you like... But unless you have an "MBox" plugged into your computer, the program will start to load, put up an error window that says something on the order of "ha ha ha", and close again. Used versions of the MBox 1 go for something like $200 on the secondary market; MBox ''3''s are worse. Oh, and, let's not even ''start'' on the "iLok" dongle.
** Though, if someone in the music industry is committing piracy, well, [[Hypocrite|they have alot to answer for.]]
*** What does [[Hyperbole and a Half|the poor alot]] have to answer for?? But no, most people ''in'' the music industry are probably good to go. It's the people trying to ''get into'' the music industry--Indieindustry—Indie labels, home-studio owners, [[Jonathan Coulton]]--who—who would be running into this problem.
* ''[[Worms]]'' came with a code sheet printed in glossy black ink on matte black paper.
* The ''[[Ef: A Fairy Tale of the Two.|Ef: a fairy tale of the two]]'' duology from minori is one of the few visual novels with any sort of copy protection. Strangely, the objective wasn't to stop pirates. Explanation below.
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* Fictional example: In ''[[User Unfriendly]]'' by Vivian Vande Velde, the protagonists are playing a pirated copy of Virtual Reality RPG ''Rasmussem''. Unfortunately for them, [[Talking Is a Free Action|discussing the game]] in front of an NPC initiates an infinite loop in the relevant AI which can only be terminated by a customer service representative.
* The DOS game ''Al-Qadim: The Genie's Curse'' featured copy-protection in the form of a question whose answer you needed to look up on a page in the manual in order to start playing. Not only does it give you the page of the manual and what number word it is, it also gives you the heading of that section of the manual and the first letter of the word. Unfortunately, one of the copy-protection questions used an answer that was directly related to the heading and extremely easy to guess: "On page 19, under the heading Sound, enter the ninth word: (first letter is m)" [[What an Idiot!|(unsurprisingly, the answer is "music")]]. If you answered the question wrong it would simply let you try again with a different question as many times as you wanted, so even if you lost the manual it was easy to just cycle through the questions until you got one you knew or could figure out the answer to (not to mention having the first letter of the words made brute force guesswork much easier).
* ''X3: Reunion'' shipped with StarForce, [[Obvious Beta|along with a lot of bugs]]. The players and developers both hated it, and it was removed in a later patch (along with, if memory serves, instructions on how to completely eradicate StarForce from one's system. The standalone expansion ''X3: Terran Conflict'' shipped with a different DRM package, but it was also ditched in a patch. Egosoft's position is they hate [[Copy Protection]] but publishing contracts require them to use it.
* Similarly, both ''Supreme Commander'' and its expansion came with a disk-check but it was removed after a couple of patches.
** The copy protection was required by their publisher, THQ, during the short period in between the European and North American launches. Neither the developers nor the community liked the mere presence of the DRM, and it was promptly patched out; in the first patch for the expansion in fact.
* ''[[Oregon Trail]] II'' normally has to load the oregon.dat file from the CD drive, but this can be easily circumvented by copying the file to the hard drive and instructing the INI to load it from there.
** This is actually true for most if not all [[Edutainment Game|Edutainment Games]]s. Their reasoning being 1: the customer base (mostly schools and libraries, as well as parents, who're buying the game for students) needs a way to make a backup of the game, seeing that the media will be mostly handled by kids, and 2: their software are rarely attractive to pirates anyway.
* Most modern CD/DVD-ROM games require the original disc, not a copy, to be present in the drive for the game to run. Such as the aformentioned Safedisc system. Not surprisingly, most of these games have illegal no-CD cracks, although they can be flaky at times.
* ''Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III: The Manhattan Project'' would make enemies tougher and the bosses invincible if the copyright code was modified.
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