Now for many people games on the PC and having a copy protection packed in with it, is a natural thing. I for one am guilty of buying a few PC games that have some copy protection on them. The downside of this is when the copy protection of the game causes issue with the computer. I myself have had several computers have massive messups from such copy protection schemes... These mainly dealing with the things they do to the computer. Some mess with programs that like to monitor processes (the task manager in windows and antivirus software) while others will watch for burning software and disable it (temporarily). here's a little history lesson.
In the earliest days, the copy protection was, look up a word in the manual that the game asked for before it would allow you to play. That's not so bad considering that the cost to make a copy of the manual would not have been worth it. Some games didn't bother to have protection, but would have a small line of code that if it wasn't on the original disk (floppy) that it would let you get to the end of the game but as soon as you go to the last area it would basically say, since you copied this game the final boss burns you to a crisp and eats you, buy a copy for yourself to stand a chance. nothing quite like a little 4th wall joke really. and the idea was that if you wanted to defeat the game completely you have to buy the game. Who knows maybe in the copy process it caused a certain item in game to disappear. But the early days were basically they made jokes at the pirates expense. Was that so bad?
Later on, when the CD came about with games on them, new forms of copy protection were created. These early ones were basically nothing more than a disc check which could be defeated by editing a text file. However some didn't need the disc check as they stored audio content on the disc and required the disc to play the in game music. This isn't the easiest form of thing to copy but it can be done. these simple copy protections didn't harm anything, just made you have to have the original disc in the drive to play. How it came to pass that they decided to make this simple concept destructive is a very good question indeed.
fast forward a few years and you will see safedisc, securom, starforce, cdcops, etc. many of these early versions were rather tame (safedisc for example was just a more complex disc check system with an encrypted disc) where some of them were absolutely dangerous to a PC's health due to the ways that it would check for a disc. For example, in some of them if a burner drive was used, it's speed would over time be diminished. I personally have not experienced this issue but then again I never had games that used starforce. SecuRom did some interesting things with scanning programming, even windows own task manager. There are even some bits from these that make disc burning software, antivirus software, and such... Why would they make these destructive bits of code? To protect their intellectual property? I doubt that highly as clever hackers have just as easily cracked these codes and make the game actually playable... What does this mean? it means that the copy protection only effects the average customer instead of stopping pirates. And to those hackers that do this, they see it as a challenge when a copy protection is made to be strong, so they make the game playable for themselves and sometimes will make the parts required to make the game more easily playable, available to the internet... After that the people with less morals start making copies of the games and include the hackers modified code to make the game playable without the legit disc. So who exactly are these companies punishing?
a little further down the road now and you will see the ones I hate the most... Online verification systems. These nasty bits of code require you to be online for you to be able to even start the game. Now to many this doesn't seem like a big deal, but for people like me that have a gaming rig set up offline, this can be quite the issue because we can't "verify" with the company server that our copy is legit... and what happens when the said server goes down? Sorry but it means you can't play a game that you have rightfully paid for. Enjoy your coaster if it is a cd/dvd installed game. The biggest culprit in this right now is Valve and their Steam. Though EA is getting just as bad, and in time I see them getting right up there with Valve. To me this seems completely unnecessary especially for offline gaming rigs (or internal network only gaming setups AKA LAN parties) and with games such as Duke Nukem Forever, which everyone has been waiting for since the late nineties, and some of these Fans remembers playing it's predecessor Duke Nukem 3D will be sorely disappointed to find out that the game that they have been waiting for so long, will requires online verification through steam. I know I am disappointed with this discovery and hope to see a change before it's launch.
But that's a tad off topic. I put this question out to all of you, including those that may be working for these companies that produce such malicious code... Why? Why bother with adding such pointless code? Pirates are going to pirate whether you like it or not. No matter how hard the protection is made to crack, it will be cracked, no exceptions. So why punish the average customer that would buy your games in the first place? Because that is exactly what you are doing with using any form of copy protection. Talk about aiming for the broad side of the barn and hitting the ground.
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