Game Disk copy protection

[Solver]

To all those looking for warez - nothing to see here .

As known, games are protected by applying some 3rd-party defense mechanism, such as SafeDisk, which is, I think, the most often used protection. My question is, how much it costs for a game creation company to obtain rights to use SafeDisk on their game?

Does anyone here have any information, or maybe has used the protection devices himself?

[DaShi]

Re: Game Disk copy protection

Originally posted by Solver
To all those looking for warez - nothing to see here .

This is probably why this thread has generated so little response.



Anyway, given how easy it is for people to get around the copy protections out there, I suggest that companies just save their money.

[Urban Ranger]

Death to copy protections and people who use them!

[Atahualpa]

I once stated in a forum of a publisher that I feel treated bad because of their copy protection.
The protection used to take quite a while to check the CD and launched the game with quite a delay. Anyone that cracks the game is taken to the game screen immediately.

My post was deleted of course and I got a warning.

[LDiCesare]

You should check www.galciv.com or Brad Wardell's joeuser.com web site. He doesn't like copy protection and doesn't use it, but if you're interested in the subject, it may be worth checking over there.

[Urban Ranger]

Brad

[Adagio]

Re: Game Disk copy protection

Originally posted by Solver
My question is, how much it costs for a game creation company to obtain rights to use SafeDisk on their game?

I really hope they don't pay more than $ .25 to get the license to use it... it's not worth more than this...

[Solver]

I really hope they don't pay more than $ .25 to get the license to use it... it's not worth more than this...

I bet several hundred bucks.

Though the philosophy behind using those is interesting.

[Urban Ranger]

I can tell you, people who use them did not learn from history.

Once upon a time, during the bad old days of DOS, a number of companies were also worried by piracy. They did exactly the same thing, namely, introduced copy protection schemes. These shemes too screwed around with recording formats and the surface of floppy diskettes.

The end result? Pirates were not bothered at all. Tools were developed to defeat these harebrained schemes, while legit users got all shafted since these schemes introduced artificial weaknesses to the medium. So, they would get errors all the time and the diskettes went bad easily.

Then, a backlash against copy protection started, with Jerry Pournelle as one of the main proponents. Soon afterwards, all the copy protection schemes disappeared.

This is going to happen with both game and music copy protection.