Its certainly no secret that the R4DS and its copycat brethren are a bane on the existence of many DS developers, so how are you supposed to kill it off effectively? Gamasutra has an interview with Andrew Mclennan, CEO of U.K.-based Metaforic, who has been looking into ways to kill off this method of piracy.
Quote:
Metaforic's technology at its most basic level detects the form of patching that the R4 cards use to play ROMS, and then proceeds to "kill" the ROM. Understandably, Mclennan didn't want to get too specific about the methods behind Metaforic's technology. But he outlined a more general explanation: "We take any DS game and inject a security scheme into the game itself. It turns each game into its own security system. Every time we apply it to a different game, it's a different security system."
Mclennan didn't claim that Metaforic's anti-piracy tech is 100 percent hack-proof, and acknowledged that eventually, hackers with enough brains, time and motivation eventually hack many forms of software security. But he hopes to make the hacking process as long and annoying as possible.
“What we’re really trying to do is make hackers take on a long, slow, manual job,” he said. By denying the hacker a way to automate the hacking process, this extends the amount of time that software products can sell legitimately, free of piracy.
"We add so much security to it that it will take a very long time to hack," he claimed.
A good friend of mine with a DS likes to brag about how many hundreds of pirated games he has on a flash card. He always uses the excuse that he doesn't have any money to buy games as justification... Drives me freakin crazy cuz he makes about $15k more than I do... and yet somehow I pay for them. That doesn't mean he's not my friend...or that I'm better than him. I just can't see using bad money management as an excuse for stealing on a large scale.
Frankly, the only reason I might squint at the R4 was because you could carry multiple titles on a single card with you - great for travel. I think the new DSi is a great step forward in that you can now do the same (although admittedly not for all titles).
This is also one of the reasons the new PSP is dropping the UMD. That, plus advantages of digital distribution, online license verification, etc.
I'm sure all this means is it'll take 4 days for the pirates to break instead of 2.
When Chrono Trigger and a few other games tried new copy protection schemes that broke the game at certain points, all it took was about 24 hours for someone to share the action replay code that fixes it. You dont even have to enter the code. You simply update your card's cheat list file, and enable the code just once and it holds.
Copy protection does no good at all. They need to stop wasting time, money, and effort on it. The more complicated it is, the higher the chance of legit customers getting fucked by it. Pirates will always get around it.
When are they going to realise that DRM on games only hurt the legit customers? Now they are bringing their stupid DRM to infect handheld gaming? Stupid.
When are they going to realise that DRM on games only hurt the legit customers? Now they are bringing their stupid DRM to infect handheld gaming? Stupid.
When pirates stop making them lose money. The only problem with DRM is that there were people who made it so it had to be created.
They also have to realize that people who pirate, well the vast majority, were NEVER going to pay for their games. That's why you see people with tons of games and play maybe 5 in total.
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DS Game... DRM issues? It's not like you're only allowed to use the games protected by this on three different consoles, it's invisible to the normal user. This is a nice idea, but as has been said, it's not going to change piracy. If it takes a few more days, people who aren't willing to buy the games will just wait. They do for PC games where the DRM does actually get in the way of legitimate users and they will happily do it for other platforms too.
Also, as for the AR codes, there are some code files where they'll even already be turned on. It's either that or instead of clean dumps you'll only find pre-patched games.
