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Copy Protection: Difference between revisions
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See also [[Digital Piracy Is Evil]].
{{examples
== Feelies ==
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** ''[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--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 ''[[Bio Shock]]'' 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 4-5 days '''before''' release.
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* ''[[Mortal Kombat]]: Armageddon'' had copy protection which caused the game to boot up and then go into ''Cabela's Big Game Hunter''.
* Some games like ''[[Mechwarrior]]'', ''[[War Craft]]'' and ''[[Marathon (Video Game)|Marathon]]'' had special, network-client-only "spawn" installations that you could make many or an unlimited number of on other machines from just one copy and run without the disks (sometimes full versions and/or demos would automatically run in "spawn" mode when you don't pass the copy protection). These needed a full installation on another machine to act as a server, and would sometimes connect only to servers run by the full install from the same copy. Similarly, ''[[Diablo II]]'' allowed you to install a "multiplayer Version" with which you could play online, without the cd, but disabled the single-player segment of the game.
* Microsoft Reader's activation scheme lets you read the same book on five machines. The problem is that it doesn't realize when you have reformatted the drive or gotten rid of the machine. So when you run out your activations, you're screwed. Luckily, the encryption is [[Family
** Apple has something similar going on. You have to 'authorize' a new machine in order to use the iTunes Store, or play your downloaded tracks, or... something. Whatever it is, you only get five of them - and if you didn't hit 'deauthorize' before that old hard drive died, that's your own fault.
*** Authorization is required to play music/movies from the iTunes Store. If you run out of activations you can deactivate all machines via the iTunes Store. Still annoying, but if you forget one machine you aren't hosed.
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*** This game was allowed as a demo in many stores. The same message would play in the demos. The method of the Copy Protection was that the game would have around a 30-45% chance of a random check to see if the game was a proper game... each time you changed rooms in the dungeons. The demos were only given a certain amount of game memory and that did not include the key to stop the Copy Protection from activating. This truely was a great AP due to the way it confused so many Pirates.
** ''[[Chrono Trigger (Video Game)|Chrono Trigger]]'' allowed you to play until you first traveled back in time, which then stuck you in an eternal loop in the warp sequence. This was also present in the original SNES version.
** ''[[Love Plus|Love Plus+ ]]'' made it impossible to get past the first part of the game IN ADDITION to making it impossible to gain hearts in the main part of the game, effectively making the game unplayable on flashcarts. Apparently, [[Does This Remind You of Anything?|if you're too cheap to pay for your virtual girlfriends,]] they will dump you.
** ''[[Ghost Trick]]'' made all the text blank if you use a flashcart.
** If you play a purported copy of ''Michael Jackson: The Experience'', the notes don't appear (it's an ''[[Elite Beat Agents]]'' clone by the way), ''and'' it plays [[FIFA World Cup|vuvuzelas]] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZwFxAi76iI over the music].
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* Many old arcade games have "suicide batteries" that are believed to be used for this purpose. When the battery runs out, the game's graphics glitch, the sound goes away, or the game itself stops working.
** Of course, [[Lost Technology|once replacement batteries stopped being made]], it became a rush for emulation experts to ''save'' these games from oblivion.
** Many operators believe that the suicide batteries are actually used for another purpose: [[Self
** Some arcade games also required "Licensing modules", which are a separate ROM board that holds only the decryption key of the game. Many newer games, since they're run on machines based on PC hardware, requires a USB dongle to run. And of course the USB dongle could hold an expiry date instead of the game, adding to the planned obsolescence method mentioned above.
* The old [[Gold Box]] ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]'' computer games by SSI requires the use of the included a thick manual not only to log into the game ("In the manual section on page 45, paragraph 2, line 10 - what is word 6?"), but also to understand the plot (you have to refer to the journal part). In the [[Sarcasm Mode|brilliant move]] by the company for its Anniversary set, they included the spin wheels for some of the games' copy-protection, but forgot to put in the manuals for ''Gateway and Treasure of the Savage Frontieer'', rendering those two games unplayable.
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* ''[[Starcraft]] II'' has no have localized multiplayer, in a effort to create "[[Blatant Lies|a more social gaming experience]]", or somesuch.
** Must be noted that local multiplayer is still possible, just that two people in the same room have to play each other through the official network.
* The ''[[Dragonball]]'' 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 [[Game FAQs]] was invented.)
* Not strictly [[Copy Protection]], but more like ''incredibly'' failtastic programming: Capcom's ''[[Megaman 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.
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** All the above did not apply to the demo for the first game. So when [[Fan Translation]] group No Name Losers was working on an English localization of both games, they decided to do a combined stand-alone release that was run using a modified version of the demo's exe.
* 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.
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[[Category:Videogame Culture]]
[[Category:Copy Protection]]
[[Category:Trope]][[Category:Pages with comment tags]]
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