Clever but useless

While we’re on the subject of copy protection, Ogged writes about a new game copy protection system called Fade. Fade introduces false errors onto the disc, which can’t be copied by conventional cd burners, because they get error-corrected away. The game then looks for those errors, and if it doesn’t find them, turns off most of the game content:

The idea is that people will be able to play the game long enough to get hooked, so they’ll buy a copy when their’s begins to degrade. I don’t know about that, I think that someone unwilling to pay for a game is unwilling to pay, period[.]

This is a clever and relatively user-friendly way of keeping kids from giving your game to their friends: turn the copies into shareware!

But it doesn’t address the real problem, which is industrial copying for money, not teenagers copying for free. If the folks using Fade think that their fake errors, which are stamped onto cds by industrial cd stamping machines, can’t be reproduced by other clever folks with industrial cd stamping machines—well. If your game is big enough to be an attractive target for industrial piracy, disc twiddles aren’t going to help you.

And: how much money did Macrovision spend to develop Fade? What’s the license fee per copy? How much extra time do game makers have to spend hooking into the system, deciding what content to degrade, and testing to make sure legitimate buyers don’t get Faded while copycats do? The chances are very good that, like all game copy protection schemes before it, Fade can’t compete in the marketplace against guilt and authenticated online play, the only things that have ever saved more in “lost” sales than they cost to implement.

Because Ogged is right. Casual copiers don’t pay for games. The only shareware games that have ever been successful are Doom (because it blew everyone’s mind) and Ambrosia’s better games for the Mac (because there are no other games for the Mac). Speaking as a wildly unsuccessful shareware game author, and former employee of what was the last of the true independent game companies, I can tell you that I made more money in one day at one job than I did in three or four years of the other—despite making games that were pretty good (for the time), well reviewed, and played by tens of thousands of people. Of whom roughly 100 bought the full version, of anything, ever. Shareware isn’t magic. Fade is a fancy, expensive shareware regime. Why spend millions to back yourself into a business model that doesn’t work?

Fade is up there with the Talking Moose. Clever but useless.

Filed under: copyright