Keeping the Pirates at Bay (2001)

At one point crackers came up with loaders and virtualisation, which basically meant that they traced whatever the code was doing on a legitimate install and replayed it to a 'cracked' copy (including challenge/replies to auth servers etc) It really dumbed down hte whoel cracking process as understind how the DRM code works was no longer a necessity. Unterstandably there was quite a bit of discussion about loader vs crack. The advantage of PROPER cracks is that they still work, even when the original game does not (due to DRM servers being offline etc).

I question the utility of the metric used on this article: "Time it took for the first cracked versions to appear". A much more relevant indicator would be "Sales figures vs the previous game with less DRM".

If the sales figures where higher on the second game than on the first, a case could be made that the DRM used worked in transforming otherwise pirated copies into purchases. The effort spent on DRM would have been worth it (or not, if the increased sales didn't cover 2% programmer time, which is what was devoted to DRM efforts).

If the sales were more or less equal, then we could conclude that the DRM didn't affect the sales significantly; everyone who wanted to purchase the game, and could, did so. The effort spent on DRM would have been better spent somewhere else.

If the sales were less, then we might infer that early piracy actually helped increasing the sales of the game (through visibility). I doubt this was the case, but apparently it has happened with some games.

I'd love to see an article from the crackers in question, Paradox, that talks about how they bypassed the protection. I am aware this is from 2001, and it seems Paradox have been pretty much inactive since the hyped Windows Vista crack.

So basically they were late by 13 years as checksum and delayed reaction to tampering was already used in FTL's dungeon master.

Even better, there is a very detailed post about it: http://dmweb.free.fr/?q=node/210

What's missing from the article is what would have been if they put all that focus on excelling in the actual game design and technology. Looking at metacritic etc, Spyro is not in the top10 games of all time, perhaps because they didn't focus on getting the best product to the users?