Anti-Piracy...

you know, if games came with interesting collectable dongles it would be quite a nice incentive to buy a game. but the is always dongle emulators.

 

Hardware bundles and compelling online play. Thats what counts.

And also, extras with the games. I brought The Witcher - Enhanced Edition (its like 14 gb of data, if i downloaded)
It has 2 Audio cds with the game, a nice map, behind the scenes, bonus content, game patches + fixes, a decent manual, a story guide (real good) and a game guide. And it all comes in a really nice box

Google that shit, it was like 60 bucks here and it certainly worked for me

 

just the online campaign mode, and it was taken down at lest a year after after Line of contact (the on-line version of the game, original was off-line only) was released. other modes (deathmatch, etc) still work fine (apparently, I never played it that much on-line).

 

i agree with one of the eariler posts re online content/multiplayer elements - the fear of getting banned seems to put off plenty of would be 360 hackers. the potential for your anti-virus program get blacklisted from updates (or even turning on) kinda renders it usless

out of interest is it even possible to hack a game of world of warcraft? (don't play it myself, but it would save some people a fortune)

 

The game that has the best anti-piracy protection...

Duke Nukem Forever

Console that has the best anti-piracy protection...

The Phantom

End of thread...

 

The best piracy protection is making it free/open source so it doesn't need to be pirated at all!

 

The PS3's. I'm not waiting for a 50GB download XD.
So: make the games stupidly big?

 

Similar existed back then. I had a SNES with a Super Magicom, which basically dumped carts out to floppy disk. To play a game you simply loaded the disk into the internal ram on the copier and it played like a cartridge (similar in many ways to DS flascarts now). The Megadrive had the Super Magidrive and IIRC the N64 had the VDoctor and Z64 (which dumped to Zip disks I think).

The best *current* anti-piracy system has to be the PS3 for now simply because it isn't cracked yet and it's prohibitively expensive. If I had to pick an all-time copy protection I'd go with Flashback by Delphine Software on the Amiga... That was a total whore to crack back in the day. US Gold used to re-release games on a budget label called Kixx and they didn't want to spend the extra on reproducing the code-wheel for the game. They hadn't been supplied with the source code by Delphine so the only option was to get it LEGALLY cracked (we did a lot of this on the Kixx label, that and fixing cache issues on the later Amigas)... After two weeks of poking around in the code I still couldn't bypass the entire protection (although I had cracked it) and eventually had to give in and USG released it with some stupid reference sheet in the manual I think. So it might not be the best protection ever but it was my nemesis for a couple of weeks so that gets my vote ;-)

 

The arguably best anti-piracy measure is creating games that are worth buying. Blizzard followed this with great effect, but are faltering now.

 

Best way is to make an online-only game or a game where the single player is pretty pointless. Then add CD-keys to the mix, and voila.

Worked wonders for Blizzard, I tell you.

 

make a console/hand held game system that all games released for it are legally free that way it's not piracy.
not the best way for devs to make $$$ but the best piracy protection.