Software Piracy -Protecting your game

[pjvdg]

How can I prevent my game/app to be cracked?

I once saw a protection method where you needed a special floppy disk that had a enable-code written in the boot-sector.

Anyhow, does somebody now any good protection methods/ideas?

[Zaei]

Online Serial registration, so that a person can only play
your gaem while A) they are online, and B) only one
owner of the software can play at once. You could
modify this sceme, so that a CD would have its CD Key,
and have online registration once, with a password, or
some such thing, and if someone tried to re-register the
CD key deal, it would void the Key, and the owner of it.
If a computer was reformated, they could send an email
with their CD Key, and the password, and you could
manually update the database. This would allow
people who arent online to play, and ensures that
anyone who gives out thier CD Key wont be playing
your game anymore.

Just some ideas =).

Z.

[Sastraxi]

But maybe allow more than 1 person on if they are networked together, so that LAN games are possible with the same CD. (most games don't support this, it gets darn annoying.)

[HarryW]

Unless the game is by its very nature online only, requiring anything to do with the internet is pretty unreasonable in my opinion. Yes, it will help you stop piracy, but it will be a complete pain in the arse for your users and they will all hate you. The floppy disk stuff is easily cracked, probably on of the easiest protections to crack. Notice nobody uses it any more. You can require the presence of a 'dongle', which is basically a bit of hardware that must be plugged into the parallel port (or some other port) for the software to function. Apps like AutoCAD use dongles. Apparently they're pretty easy to integrate into your app. I don't know for sure though.

Nothing is uncrackable though, so don't expect to be 100% secure.

[SteveCRM]

Wow...I'd be proud if someone cracked my game!

But seriously, all files that contain data, such as saved game files and pictures should be encrypted in some way.

[Vuen]

Proud? Ah, you mean that the fact that they took the time to crack it shows that its such a good app/game? I see. I suppose...

[Megatron]

One method is to create a unique serial number for each user (based on their computer specs) and hide it somewhere in the Registry.

[parksie]

Two words (and a smiley): Registry Tracer

Harry -- Dongles are dead easy to use, but a complete bastard for the users. Although the newer ones which come as a tiny box that plugs into a USB port. They're a lot lighter and less likely to damage the socket (trust me, I've ripped enough out ). Have you seen the new Rainbow X.509 certificate pods? Nice bit of kit -- you keep it on a keyring, and plug it into the USB port before you turn the computer on and it authenticates you