UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

Copy protection for computer games is as old as computer games themselves.  Software companies have long believed that if they don’t come up with ways to stop games from being copied, consumers would wildly copy games between themselves for free and the software company would lose sales and not make any money.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, game companies came up with increasingly outrageous copy protection schemes.  VintageComputing.com has a great run-down of some of these methods:

Many games — X-Com: UFO Defense included — would ask the player to type in a code that appeared on a given page. Other games took it a step further and would ask for a specific word from a given line in a given paragraph on a given page: “Type in the fourth word of the first line of the last paragraph on page 254 to continue.”

While the copy protection methods have changed, the idea remains the same.  Instead of looking up words in a manual, computer games these days will require online activation or use specially-modified cds that must be inserted in order to play.

While piracy is rampant in the computer gaming world, the very idea of copy protection is completely broken.  At first, it might seem like a reasonable idea to force game players to prove that they bought the software, but it is actually counter-productive due to the nature of software.

Think about it: Once a single person figures out how to bypass copy protection, every other pirate in the world can get a copy from the first person who copied it.  At that point, the software pirates have a modified version of the game that doesn’t include the hassles of copy protection.  In fact, the only people who have to deal with annoying copy protection are the very people who actually paid for the game.  With today’s high speed internet connections and bittorrent download sites, is actually easier in many cases to pirate a game than it is to go to the store to buy it.

But while there hasn’t been a single* moderately popular computer game ever released that wasn’t successfully pirated despite copy protection, game publishers still think that they can stop pirates.  Spore, one of the most highly anticipated releases of the year, is the latest victim.

The publishers of Spore went to great lengths to prevent the game from being copied - possibly greater lengths than any game before it.  The publishers instituted a system where the game had to be activated online every 10 days in order to be played.  That means that even if you don’t play on the internet, you still had to log in once every 10 days to keep playing.  In addition, the game counted the number of times it was installed.  After the third install, the player was forced to call the publisher and prove that they didn’t pirate it in order to install it again.  Even worse, the copy protection would occasionally malfuction and cause problems for players who didn’t violate any of the numerous rules.
This resulted in widespread outrage from gamers.  Amazon was flooded with poor reviews decring the copy protection (the game current has 1.5 out of 5 stars), forums were swamped with protests from players, and gaming blogs were full of stories from dissatisfied players.

So clearly copy protection managed to destory the reputation of the game.  But did it at least keep people from copying the game illegally?

In the first two weeks after release, Spore had already been pirated over 500,000 times, more than any other game ever tracked.  And it gets worse!  According to TorrentFreak, here are the most pirated games of 2008:

1. Spore - 1.7M downloads
2. The Sims 2 - 1.15M downloads
3. Assassin’s Creed - 1M downloads
4. Crysis - 0.94M downloads
5. Command and Conquer 3 - 0.86M downloads

So if you are keeping track at home:

1. Spore’s copy protection outraged players, which resulted in wide-spread consumer outrage and one of the worst Amazon review scores ever recorded for a major game
2. Spore was still pirated more than any other game ever
3. The only users who were harmed by the copy protection were players who purchased the game legally.

So clearly the publishers of Spore and the rest of the industry will learn from their experience and not make the same mistake again, right?  Don’t count on it.  In fact, they should have learned over 20 years ago, when Game Guru was released:

It shipped on a 3.5″ floppy, but the program was restricted to only three installs. In order to install it, the write-protect tab on the floppy had to be disabled, and the software would supposedly write a marker to a file on the disk every time it was installed. Once that count reached three, poof! No more installs for you. Hmmm…I wonder why that technique never became popular.

So it shuts down after three installs just like Spore.

Here’s a little more history/trivia:  Game Guru was published in 1996 by 3DO Software.  3DO Software was a spin-out of EA Software started by the founder of EA Software, Trip Hawkins.  After 3DO Software went out of business, many of it’s assets were bought by UbiSoft.  Since 2004, UbiSoft was been partially owned by EA Software.  EA Software of course publishes Spore.  Small world, huh?

* No, really.  Not even one.  Try to find a counter-example.